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

Of course, nothing bothers the dogs, who would probably enjoy hurtling off a sheer cliff face to see how thoroughly they can trash the sled and driver. This is the mode my team is in as we careen down the mountain in the gathering gloom. My feeble headlamp is virtually no help because I can only see the leaders about half the time as the blind turns come faster and faster.

Shortly the inevitable happens as the dogs whip through a nasty triple switchback on a near-vertical drop between towering spruce sentinels. I overcompensate on the first 120-degree turn and both the sled and I depart the trail in grand style on the second, clearing most of the third while still airborne. In about three nanoseconds I find myself wrapped around a tree, face down in the snow, with my boot jammed through the brake framework on the overturned sled. Maybe Martin Buser could have gotten through this maniac luge run unscathed, but I’ve got a long way to go before I approach his sled-driving skills.

I enjoy a snack of snow and spruce bark while I contemplate my shortcomings. The dogs, of course, are barking wildly (or perhaps they’re laughing?) to go on. I take inventory and find the sled is in one piece and I’m only mildly damaged. As I start to disengage my boot from the brake, the dogs take it as a signal to move on and drag me another 20 feet down the hill. I need 10 minutes to finally extract my impossibly large boot from the incredibly small aperture through which it’s been inserted, a process which isn’t abetted by the team’s impatient yanks on the gangline.

The lowly doghouse is the sled dog’s castle. Most are little more than sturdy two-foot-square plywood boxes with holes cut in one side and straw stuffed inside. Anything fancier is wasted effort since the houses suffer many indignities from their occupants, including being chewed to pieces. Sled dogs love to spend an inordinate amount of time on top of their houses, and often prefer to sleep on them rather than in them.

This was a classic “omigod” hill, complete with the belated realization of complete and utter disaster. But this time no harm is done and I have to chalk it up as just part of the game. Back on the trail, we scream down several more yee-hahs and another omigod or two, making it to the bottom of the mountain fully half an hour faster than we went up it. The dogs have enjoyed the downhill breather so much they keep running even after we hit the lowland sections.

As we roar into the dog lot I marvel at their speed and endurance: we’ve gone at least 40 miles — including the long climb and several stops — in a little more than four hours. If they can do this on the Iditarod, we’re not going to have many problems. For now, though, it’s back up the mountain tomorrow with the other 10 dogs. Maybe I’ll wear my old baseball catcher’s shin guards and face mask for that one….

Ron has had to drop out of the race. For a week or more he’s been hinting something might be coming up. Apparently a planned April trip to Minnesota to resolve a family matter must now be made during the race. I know he’s unhappy about not getting to go to Nome again, and it changes things rather substantially for me as well. I’d hoped to run with him until I could get my sea legs and a good feel for the trail. Now he won’t be there and I’ll have to do the best I can. I hope I’ve learned enough to get me through the rough spots.

Anyway, Ron still wants to help me get my stuff accumulated, and says he will sew booties and work with me to get my food drop together, which must be ready to go next week. Ron does say he wants to run in 1997, the 25th anniversary of the race. A number of the mushers who ran the first Iditarod are thinking about doing the ’97 race together, with their own old-timers’ pot of prize money for their race-within-a-race.

The fact Ron will be 70 years old then — and some of the other drivers will be even older — doesn’t faze him a bit. I guess mushing is a lot like golf (and maybe another well-known pastime), in that you can apparently do it no matter how old you are. Joe Redington, Sr., commonly regarded as the father of the Iditarod, actually led the race into Cripple in 1988, when he was 71; Joe finished fifth, a remarkable accomplishment for anyone, much less a septagenarian.

But Ron won’t be going this year, and I feel the race as a whole will be the worse off for it. I know his withdrawal has taken some of the wind out of my sails; I’d always assumed he’d be there with me on the trail, but now I’ll have to revise my plans a bit. Maybe in ’97….

There are days when it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Today is definitely one of them, and then some. In fact, if somebody had a video camera, we could sell the footage to the media.

I’m walking in a perfectly ordinary manner from the dog lot into Ron’s cabin after feeding the dogs when I slip on the ice and do a classic movie pratfall. Unfortunately, I collapse backward like a toppling spruce onto a two-by-four sticking up out of the ice.

It catches me squarely in the upper right side of my back and the pain is beyond almost anything I’ve ever experienced. The only thing I can do is roll around on the ice for 10 minutes in tears while Ron and Barrie look on in disbelief. After a while the pain diminishes sufficiently for me to get up and stagger inside, but I know something has been badly damaged. I can’t believe I’ve put myself in the position of possibly not running the Iditarod because of a fool accident like slipping on the ice.

I decide I can drive my car and tell Ron I intend to head for the emergency room at Elmendorf ASAP. Ron says he’ll accompany me if I need help, but I think I can probably make it, if for no other reason than the pain will keep me awake all the way.

The 100-mile drive to town is memorable, if only because I have to pull over several times to let particularly bad spasms pass. At the emergency room, the doctor looks at the x-rays and says I’ve probably cracked a rib, and I almost certainly have torn some muscles and other good stuff inside my rib cage. He gives me some heavy-duty painkillers and advises me to get home somehow before I start taking them.

I manage to get back to Montana Creek, but I know I’m in trouble. I can barely breathe, and coughing is like getting kicked by a mule. I have to sneeze once and nearly pass out. I realize there’s no way I can run my dogs for at least a couple of weeks; I hope they can keep their edge until Kim starts running them in preparation for the Junior Iditarod.

I’m really worried I won’t be back in working order before the Iditarod itself, not even three weeks away. I know rib injuries and deep tissue damage can take months to heal, and I will have to be very careful not to re-injure myself and set back the healing process over the next week or two. Is somebody up there trying to tell me something? Or maybe I’m just so inept I can’t maintain my own health during a critical period.

Regardless, I’ll still be at the starting line on March 4th, even if I have to carry enough serious painkillers to require an escort from the Drug Enforcement Agency. At least I can take some comfort in knowing I won’t be the first musher to try the race with a busted something or other. I guess the worst part is I can’t blame my disability on something honorable, like a spectacular sled wreck. To have to ’fess up to slipping on the ice like some dumb cheechako is almost as painful as the cracked rib. And of course it hurts worst when I laugh.