Mike Dillingham - Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers - The Adventures of Balto, Back of the Pack, Honor Bound, Rivers

My headlight is just a nuisance on this trail so I turn it off. When I do I gasp in awe. Here in the middle of the flat, five-mile-wide expanse of the lagoon, the clear moonless sky arches overhead in an incandescent blaze of stars. The evening star hovers in the west — over Nome — with a brilliance unmatched even by the powerfully focused beacon ahead.

And in the east, the entire sky is dominated by a northern lights display the likes of which I have never seen. I can see a huge section of the circumpolar arc of the aurora, its curvature clearly visible. It resembles nothing so much as a line of summer thunderstorms in eastern Oklahoma, continuously illuminated from within by lightning which rips through the cloud tops and dances behind the veils of rain. I can even follow individual swirls in the auroral arc as they spin along the shimmering curtains, touching off glowing cascades of green, red, and even purple as they pass from horizon to horizon.

The celestial panorama is almost too much to absorb. I rig out the sled seat and simply sit and watch as the team pulls silently on, the only sound the swish of the runners over the packed snow. For two hours my magic carpet glides serenely across the lagoon. Every half hour or so I flash my headlamp back at Lisa, who is holding steady a mile behind, and then return to my musing.

This is beyond perfect, the most extraordinary run I have ever experienced. It is a most sublime reward, and is an especially exquisite counterpoint to the bleak despair of watching Yankee disappear over the barrier dune not 72 hours ago. Everything has come full circle; the world is in harmony, at least from my perspective, and I see no reason it should not remain so until we pull under the arch in Nome tomorrow evening.

I’m almost disappointed when I must break the spell and maneuver Socks into the White Mountain checkpoint. It’s a bit past midnight and we’ve been 10 hours since leaving Elim. This is bog-slow for a mere 46 miles, but we spent at least a couple of hours waiting for Andy and another two or more at Golovin. We have nothing to be ashamed of, especially since our main goal now is just to finish in good order tomorrow; the exact time is no longer of consequence.

We have to take a mandatory eight-hour layover here, which means we can leave around 10 in the morning on the 77-mile jaunt into Nome. We break out the cookers for our last run-through of the now-automatic checkpoint routine. We have become so proficient over the past two weeks that the dogs are fed and asleep on their straw within 45 minutes.

The author pauses while working on his team at the White Mountain checkpoint, 77 miles from Nome. Mushers must take at least an 8-hour layover here, although many would as soon push on to Nome.

The checkpoint is in the municipal building just up the hill. We hang our outer gear in the boiler room to dry and then toss our sleeping bags in the back of the library. The building also houses the local National Guard armory and I notice a large-scale military map of the Norton Sound area on the wall. This is the first accurate chart I’ve seen since the race started and I try to trace our course from Unalakleet to Shaktoolik and on to here.

Despite my best efforts I simply cannot pinpoint where we were for many stretches. I eventually fall asleep wondering where we crossed the Blueberry Hills, all the while realizing I will probably never know exactly, short of physically doing it all over again. Perhaps this is as it should be, always leaving enough uncertainty to preserve the mystery of the trail.

March 18—The Iditarod: White Mountain to Safety (55 miles) Safety to Nome (22 miles)

We’re up and running within an hour after our layover expires. Before we leave we get a great piece of news: Andy is moving again. He left Elim about 8:30 after almost 24 hours there. Knowing how fast he can move once he gets rolling, I expect he’ll be in here within six hours and then on into Nome sometime tomorrow morning. But the big thing is he’s on the trail; he hasn’t tossed in his cards. He’s still going to chase his ghost. We back-of-the-packers will prevail after all.

By the time they reach the bleak expanse of the Bering Sea coast, teams can be down to barely half of their starting strength. In 1994, eighteen- year-old Aaron Burmeister, here making the long climb to Topkok after leaving White Mountain, had only seven dogs all the way from Kaltag to Nome. (Five dogs is the minimum number to finish.) Aaron was a top Junior Iditarod competitor.

As Lisa and I move steadily toward Topkok in the bright morning sunlight, the only possible disruption to the positive energy flow is an ominous swirl of cirrus clouds slowly moving up from the southwest. This is the harbinger of the storm Bert warned us about.

If it’s moving as fast as some of these monsters have been known to do, it could be close enough to Nome to trigger the Solomon blowhole just this side of Safety by the time we get there in four or five hours. And I’m worried about Andy; his margin will be much thinner than ours and he runs a real risk of getting caught in the same kind of tempest which robbed him of his dream last year.

We push on with all due haste, devouring the series of 300-foot ridges leading to the final push up Topkok. My superdogs don’t even break stride on the steep hills and by three in the afternoon we’re making the final assault on Topkok. We stop at the summit to admire the view out to Cape Nome. I am also scanning for any sign of a ground blizzard between us and Safety; even though winds are light up here, a 50-knot gale could easily be lashing the trail ahead.

From an abandoned A-frame shelter cabin at the east foot of Topkok Head to the windswept summit is only a few miles, but they can be some of the most difficult and dangerous on the entire race when storms roaring in from the Aleutians strike the exposed promontory.

Seeing nothing but clear sailing, we push on. We reach the shelter cabin at the west foot of Topkok by four o’clock and stop to feed the dogs. From here to Safety is a 25-mile run along the beach, with the last 12 along an unplowed state highway, part of a local network of roads radiating from Nome. As we head across the now-quiet Solomon blowhole, I remember what a fearful toll this natural wind tunnel has exacted from mushers over the years, and especially from tail-enders like us.

In 1992 I was waiting in Nome to meet Bob Ernisse, a friend who was running with a group near the back of the pack. I had just flown over them on my way back to Nome after closing down the checkpoint at Unalakleet. Bob’s group was trapped by a hurricane-force ground blizzard in the exact area we’re now traversing. He almost died of hypothermia before fellow driver Bob Hickel, son of the former and then-current governor, found him and kept him from sinking further. I finally met Ernisse after he had been evacuated to the hospital in Nome; it had been a very close thing and he looked worse than a survivor of Stalingrad.

In 1994 I watched tail-ender Beth Baker make the climb up Topkok from my plane. She was heading into a ferocious but highly localized blizzard with winds of 80 miles an hour I had personally clocked with the Global Positioning System in my airplane. She was being escorted by a snowmachiner but later got lost when her leader took the team onto the sea ice in a complete whiteout. She was within a few hundred yards of open water when she got stopped. A massive search failed to find her until the next morning. She had to scratch after spending most of the night on the ice in wind chills of minus 130 and badly freezing her hands.