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

Big Lake, Alaska

Back of the Pack is a fabulously written account of the Iditarod experience and the long and difficult path of just getting to the race starting line, and of the incredible amount of work and determination it takes. Don has put in words what many of us have experienced over the years but always kept to ourselves.

As you join Don in his Iditarod epic, you will gain a new respect for the land and the dogs. You’ll meet Socks, Pullman, Buck, and Maybelline as they are getting themselves and their owner ready for the world’s longest sled dog race, Alaska’s Iditarod — a challenge of body, mind and soul. Don and his team encounter numerous obstacles on their long way to the burled arch finish line in Nome. Their account will enlighten, educate, and amuse you, as you become one with their motley crew.

Back of the Pack is great adventure on the way to Nome. Travel up the trail and join Don and his huskies as they are chasing their dream of reaching the finish line. Back of the Pack is a must read for all travelers of any mode.

To those who are unfamiliar with it, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is probably one of the more exotic sporting events in the world. In reality, though, it is much more than a race — it is the culmination and commemoration of a lifestyle that is unique to the North Country, and whose roots extend more than a thousand years back into the prehistory of Alaska.

On the one hand, modern mushers on the 1,150-mile run from Anchorage to Nome travel in the footsteps of the freight and mail mushers of the early part of this century. In another and deeper sense, they are carrying on the tradition of Alaska’s earliest inhabitants, who perfected the use of dog teams more than a millennium ago. Indeed, the race is a remarkable journey into the past, passing through legendary frontier gold-rush mining districts as well as some of the very Native villages where mushing was born.

When I decided to run the 1995 Iditarod as a rookie musher, after many years of flying for the race as a volunteer pilot, I resolved to keep a journal of what I thought would be an interesting adventure on a par with my flying exploits. However, this account rapidly became much more than I expected as I found that becoming a musher was far, far more than learning to stand on the runners of a sled, and was a world apart from seeing the race from the air.

I learned that to drive dogs in anything more than a recreational mode is to adopt a lifestyle centered around the dogs themselves. I also discovered this way of life is addictive beyond imagination — there is virtually no escaping once hooked. The dogs become a second family, and the affection and devotion given to them is easily equal to that given to any human family.

This alternative lifestyle has a payoff which few people outside it fully appreciate. Unlike a house pet or even a hunting dog, a team of sled dogs is a finely tuned machine that is a passport to — and a permanent link with — another world. A dog team in Alaska in winter is the ultimate instrument of discovery. Nothing can compare to a run along wilderness trails under a full moon and the shimmering aurora behind a ghostly silent, smoothly pulling team — actually a team of friends — that you’ve trained yourself.

To run the Iditarod is the ultimate goal of almost every dog musher. It is a daunting test for both team and driver, but it is also the most profoundly rewarding journey imaginable. No one who has ever run the race will ever forget a moment of it, nor the incredible range of emotions and experiences it represents.

I regret that mere words cannot adequately convey the intensity and spirit of the Iditarod and everything leading up to it. This journal is at best an imperfect log of a two-year voyage of discovery. I hope it will paint at least a partial picture of what it is like to prepare for and run the Last Great Race on Earth.

Note: A background of the Iditarod — both the trail and the race — and a brief introduction to dog mushing can be found in the Appendix.

I’m standing on Front Street in Nome under the burled arch at the end of the Iditarod Trail. It’s early Sunday evening. The cold sun is just setting over the Bering Sea to the west. Wind is gusting from the north and snow is whipping from every cross street. At the far eastern end of the street, where the road from Safety Roadhouse and Cape Nome turns off the beach, I can see a police car with its red and blue lights flashing, escorting a solitary musher and his team back into civilization after the long, lonely journey from Anchorage.

The musher is Ron Aldrich, whom I’ve known for 20 years and who is my next-door neighbor at Montana Creek, 100 highway miles north of Anchorage. In addition to being one of my oldest friends in Alaska, he is also one of the group of dedicated mushers who helped rescue dog mushing from its snowmobile-induced near-extinction in the 1960s and 1970s. He ran the first Iditarod in 1973, and the initial Yukon Quest almost a decade later. He’s always had good teams, placing in the top 10 in the late 1970s, but he was never a real contender.

This is Ron’s first Iditarod in 15 years; it is his seventh trip to Nome. Remarkably, next month Ron will celebrate his 69th birthday. He ran the inaugural Iditarod when he was 46—my age — after a full career in the Air Force that began as a B-17 pilot in World War II and included a number of years in Alaska in the late 1940s. Ron retired to Alaska in the early 1960s and ran a commercial dog team, hauling freight in the Susitna Valley. He still lives in a cabin with no electricity and no running water — and swears he prefers it that way.

His reasons for running the race this year are several. One is that Dorothy (or Dottie, as we all knew her), his wife of almost 50 years, passed away a year or so ago after a long illness. Ron probably won’t admit it, but preparing for and running the race have been a helpful focus to get him through a difficult time.

Just as important, Ron is a serious dog musher. In Alaska this carries a special connotation, denoting a kind of addict, someone who is always planning for next winter, always dreaming of trails yet to explore and races yet to be run. Mushers may outwardly resemble ordinary human beings, but there is something not far beneath the surface making them different. They know another way of life, an alternate existence at cross-purposes with modern civilization, which they can never completely shake. They may break away from the dogs for months or even years, but they almost always come back in one way or another. Once infected with the mushing virus, there is no cure — there is only the trail.

Musher Ron Aldrich and his team work their way up the chute to the finish line in the 1994 Iditarod after two weeks on the trail.

I became aware of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1975, soon after I arrived in Alaska from a tour in Southeast Asia. In fact, I pulled into my new assignment, a C-130 Hercules pilot at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, just before the third Iditarod got underway. The race wasn’t much known outside Alaska then, but when I met Ron not long afterward, my interest was piqued. A couple of years later Ron loaned me three dogs for my cheechako (beginner’s) race at the Montana Creek track. I finished second and couldn’t believe it.