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

A hunting lodge on Puntilla Lake serves as the Rainy Pass checkpoint. This is the last checkpoint before mushers push on to Rainy Pass itself and down into Dalzell Gorge.

One of the sweeps begins to trot with the leaders and they seem to respond. After a couple of tries and 100 yards my new assistant is completely winded but the team is moving. The other sweep pulls ahead of the team and Slipper and Bea accelerate off the lake and up the trail behind his snowmachine. He maintains position ahead of me for maybe a mile and when I am sure the dogs are moving on their own I wave him on. Unfortunately, I’m almost positive his actions constitute mechanized assistance, or at least pacing, and I’m reasonably certain his help will cement my disqualification if I don’t scratch when I reach Rainy Pass.

Nevertheless, it’s a grand ride and the team is once more running like the finely tuned machine I trained over the past nine months. But it’s all bittersweet because I don’t see any way I can go on after Rainy Pass. In the bright sunshine we sweep onto Puntilla Lake and roll into the checkpoint. The checkers and the vets are waiting for me and give me a warm welcome.

But there are three Iditarod Air Force airplanes on the lake waiting to go with their engines warm, and everyone is obviously ready to close down the checkpoint and move on. This only reinforces my belief I’ve been declared surplus and without giving the matter any further thought I tell the checker I want to scratch.

The vet immediately gives my dogs a thorough examination and tells me I should drop three of them: Weasel has broken a tooth and has very sore feet, Yankee’s eye looks a mess although it really isn’t serious, and Rocky’s nose has stopped bleeding but he still looks like an old boxer who’s gone too many rounds with the new champ. If I also drop the four most troublesome females— Slipper, Bea, Blues, and Rosie — I’ll be down to 10 dogs at best, even if I’m not disqualified and I can talk the vet into letting me keep Yankee or Rocky.

When the checker brings me the official scratch form a little later, I sign it quickly, wanting to get this depressing business behind me. I’ve met the checker on previous races and we talk for a minute before he moves on to load the planes. He says he would have liked to see me go on, and I tell him I thought I would have been disqualified. He doubts that would have been the case, but thinks my decision may turn out to be a good one anyway because the wind is coming up in the pass and it could be a nasty turn in the mountains tonight.

We part and the planes are quickly loaded — Yankee and Weasel get free rides back to town since they were dropped before I officially scratched — and the checkpoint staff disappears toward their new posts on up the trail. I bed down the remaining dogs and trudge into the lodge to make a call on the radiophone to charter a plane to pick up me and the dogs and the sled. I also call Bert, but he’s not back from work yet and I have to tell Kim I’ve scratched because of six dogs in heat. (This is the official reason given to the media as well; I’m sure I’ll hear about my doggie bordello for months to come from people I don’t even know.)

I grab a sandwich in the lodge and guzzle about a gallon of Tang while I try to put everything into perspective. In the fullness of time — actually only a few hours — I come to realize I may have made a serious mistake in scratching. Now that I’ve come to my senses, I can see things from a broader perspective. True, I would have had to drop at least five and possibly seven key dogs, and I would have been hard pressed to keep up the necessary pace with the remaining ones. Indeed, I would in all likelihood have been forced to withdraw at McGrath for being more than 72 hours behind the leaders (who are blazing a record-shattering pace on the near-perfect trail).

But I might have regained the use of my male leaders, which would have given me at least a couple of good dogs up front. I could probably have made it over Rainy Pass and tested myself on the Dalzell Gorge and the Farewell Burn. I might even have discovered less really is more, without the unending disruptions of the previous days. After all, plenty of mushers have completed the race from this far back with fewer dogs than I would have had.

Now I’ll never know, at least not until next year, and that’s rapidly becoming one of the hardest pills I’ve ever had to swallow. I wish I could roll back the clock a few hours and reconsider my hasty decision. But what’s done is done, and I’ve made myself a very thorny bed to lie in for the next 12 months. About the only thing I know for certain is I absolutely, positively have to go again next year.

The Iditarod Air Force hauls everything from dog food to passengers along the trail. This skiplane holds 600 pounds of dog food for an isolated checkpoint.

I spend the night tossing and turning in the recently vacated checker’s cabin, alternately imagining myself out on the trail to Rohn and points west and trying to figure out how I can do it next year and what I’ll do differently. After one of the worst nights I can remember, I’m up at dawn and out with the dogs. The wind that whipped up three-foot drifts overnight has abated and the temperature is still warm, in the twenties. I am tempted almost beyond resistance to hook up and head for the outbound trail, prominently marked a few yards from my sled.

Even as I look wistfully toward the ramparts of Rainy Pass, only 10 miles distant, the lodge manager rumbles by on his snowmachine picking up the lath trail markers. As I watch him dismantling the trail itself, I realize it is all now really, finally over. I try to busy myself breaking down the sled and getting my gear ready for pickup, but every few minutes I catch myself gazing westward and wondering if I’ve done the right thing.

Early in the afternoon the plane I’ve chartered arrives and we load the dogs and some of my gear. The sled and the rest of the equipment will have to wait a few days. As we head back to civilization we roughly parallel the trail, which I now see in a completely new light.

Long Lake glitters like cut crystal in the sunlight, looking just as cold as the endless night we spent in its icy embrace. The hill up from Happy River and the site of the broken gangline look even worse from the air. At the foot of the hill, though, are several teams waiting to ascend it — Joe Redington’s “tour to Nome” with half a dozen paying customers-cum-mushers. Last year rumor has it he charged $15,000 a head for what amounted to a mushing dude ranch with all the trimmings, running a few days behind the race all the way to Nome. He sold out the trip, and did the same this year. They seem to be having a slow time of it up the hill, and I can understand why. I wish them well as we speed eastward overhead.

I’d forgotten how marvelously a plane can compress the trail. In a few minutes we pass Finger Lake; the checkpoint shows no sign of activity now. My impromptu campsite near Shell Lake hoves into view shortly. I really was a lot farther along toward Finger Lake than I believed — much more than halfway — but it might as well have been a hundred miles as long as the dogs wouldn’t go. The trail still looks good; I hope it’s as inviting next year.

Overhead Skwentna I can see life has returned to normal at Joe Delia’s. Most of the straw has been cleaned up from the river and even the mountain of Idita-trash has been airlifted out by the Iditarod Air Force. My first night’s unwilling stopping place on the Yentna River is just around the bend from the checkpoint; again, even if I’d known how close I was, I couldn’t have done anything about it.