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

The rest of the way to Nome was mostly through screaming wind and drifted trails, with rarely a sight of a trail marker. The Solomon blowhole was roaring full throttle when I got to it, as a sort of a final insult from the Trail God. However, Cutter turned out to be a worthy successor to Socks, plowing through drifts and finding markers every bit as well as the Old Master. Maybelline did her usual bulletproof job, and Iditapups Squeaky and Clyde matured into solid Iditarod leaders.

By the time we got to Nome, all of us back of the packers and our dogs were more than ready for a rest. In spite of the sometimes unimaginable conditions I still ran my fastest race, finishing in 44th place in barely thirteen and a half days.

Old Iron Dog ran in wheel without a complaint every step of the way, pulling hard and even barking to go faster on the way up Front Street. In his own way, he was every bit Socks’ equal. However, he was just too old to take the long way to Nome again and I decided to give him and seven other older dogs, including Pullman and Lucky and Bear and Ben and Maggie and May, to a friend in Fairbanks as a ready-to-go recreational team. At last report they are enjoying all the fun runs they want and are receiving more attention and affection than any fifty dogs. (And I still get to visit them whenever I want.) As happy as I am for them, it was hard to see them go, along with other older dogs I’ve given to friends over the past year. But it was the only fair thing to do. They still want to run and I’ve got to move on and bring in new dogs. I’ve got plenty of youngsters who deserve their chance, including four two-year-olds from Socks and Josephine, and three of Squeaky’s grandkids (which makes them Socks’ great-grandpups). And most recently, I finally got three fine pups from Maybelline, born last summer. Little Screamer, Taffy, and Earless may well get a chance to run to Nome with their mother in a couple of years.

I signed up for the 2000 Iditarod, but received an offer to go on the Serum Run with Colonel Norman Vaughan and a dozen other mushers instead. It’s only 700 miles to Nome by the 1925 relay-team route, and the longest daily run is only 60 miles. Every night is spent in a village or cabin and there’s plenty of time to meet people and look around. It’s a chance to travel across Alaska by dog team in the grand old manner — and is a lot less expensive than the Iditarod. Besides, who could pass up the opportunity to go on an 18-day mushing adventure with a living legend?

I may or may not be able to put everything together for the Serum Run, but I do plan to be back in the 2001 Iditarod — and with a well trained, competitive team. I’ve finally got some good dogs and enough young ones coming up to keep the team sharp for the next five or six years. Now the team’s limiting factor is me. There’s no question the back of the pack is fun, but I want to see if I can move up a bit and maybe even break the top 20. And after that, well, there’s always the Yukon Quest….

Gold rushes were a major part of Alaska history beginning in the 1880s. Strikes near Juneau in 1880, Klondike in 1896, Nome in 1898, and Fairbanks in 1902 helped define Alaska’s very nature and directly resulted in the founding of three of the state’s largest cities (Fairbanks, Juneau, and Nome).

These bonanzas were only the best known of more than 30 serious gold rushes in Alaska from 1880 to 1914. In fact, the last full-scale, old-fashioned, frontier-style gold rush in the United States roared into life in 1909 at Iditarod, 275 air miles west of the future site of Anchorage and almost halfway to Nome. By the next year, Iditarod eclipsed Nome and Fairbanks to briefly become the largest city in Alaska with 10,000 inhabitants. It boasted several banks and hotels, electric power, telephones, and even a newspaper, all supplied by regular stern-wheeler service up the Innoko and Iditarod Rivers, tributaries of the Yukon.

Many gold districts in Alaska could be served by steamboats plying the many rivers lacing the Alaska interior. Nome, on the coast, had regular oceangoing steamship service. However, there was virtually no way to travel to any of these places when freeze-up stopped river and ocean traffic from October to May. By 1910, the need for year-round mail and freight service to miners in western Alaska led the Federal government to survey and construct a 900-mile winter trail from Seward to Nome for use by dog sled teams.

The original Iditarod Trail started at Seward, or more properly, about 50 miles north at the end of the under-construction Alaska Central Railroad, which later became the Alaska Railroad. From the end of track, the trail wound along Turnagain Arm through what is now Girdwood, over Crow Pass, and down the uninhabited Eagle River Valley to Knik Arm and the tiny trading post of Knik, largest settlement on Upper Cook Inlet until the railroad town of Anchorage was founded in 1915. The Iditarod Trail never actually passed through Anchorage, since the beginning of the trail was moved to Knik when Alaska Railroad reached the area.

From Knik, the trail arrowed west through the wooded valleys of the Susitna and Yentna Rivers and climbed tortuously over Rainy Pass through the massive Alaska Range. West of the Range, the trail drifted across the vast Kuskokwim Valley to the hills west of McGrath and the town of Takotna, supply point for the Innoko River mining district and its chief settlement of Ophir, another classic boom town already ebbing from its glory days of 1907.

From Takotna, the trail rolled southwest through the ridge-and-valley country of the Kuskokwim Mountains to the bustling towns of Flat and Iditarod. Swinging northwest from Iditarod, the trail pushed across the trackless swampy wilderness of the lower Innoko River valley to the mile-wide, frozen expanse of the Yukon River and the Koyukon Athabaskan village of Kaltag. At Kaltag, the trail angled back southwest along the 90-mile Kaltag Portage, known for centuries to Eskimos and Indians as a shortcut through the low coastal mountains to Norton Sound and the Bering Sea. The western end of the portage was anchored by the ancient Yup’ik Eskimo village of Unalakleet, whose name means “place where the east wind blows.”

From Unalakleet, the trail swept north and then west around the rugged shore of the Seward Peninsula, passing old Inupiat villages with names like Shaktoolik, Elim, and Golovin. Fifty miles before Nome, the trail dropped down onto the beaches which had caused the rush to Nome a decade before. After almost 1,000 miles, the Iditarod Trail opened onto Front Street in Nome, the site of northern North America’s most notorious saloon row, whose proprietors at one time included such notables as Wyatt Earp.

Travelers on the Iditarod ranged from individuals with light sleds and a handful of dogs to freight drivers with a score of strong huskies pulling as many as three sleds laden with a ton or more of everything from gold dust to passengers. All of these mushers followed in the ancient tradition of Alaska Natives, who mastered the fine art of using dogs for winter transportation many centuries ago.

When Russians and eventually Americans arrived in the North Country, they quickly discovered dog teams were the only way to reliably move across long distances in Alaska when rivers were frozen. Dogs have always been ideally suited for winter travel for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that pound for pound, the sled dog is the most powerful draft animal on earth.

In fact, the old freight mushers calculated their cargos based on 150 pounds per dog, or well over a ton for a team of 16 or 20. As a matter of interest, single dogs have pulled more than half a ton in the canine equivalent of a tractor pull. As late as the 1960s, Yup’ik Eskimos of Nelson Island moved much of their town — including entire houses — to a new site two dozen miles away with 100-dog teams.