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

On down the Yentna we soar, speeding over miles of river I’ve flown hundreds of times in my own plane. Now I know it intimately in a way few people can. It will never be the same for me now that I’ve run it with dogs. In fact, I don’t think I can ever fly anywhere any more without unconsciously wondering how it would be on the ground with a smoothly running team. All too quickly we glide to a stop at Kashwitna Lake on the Parks Highway. Boyd Gochanour, an old friend who runs the air service, meets me and listens to my tale in the office over coffee. Again, I’ve been here many, many times, but everything seems different now. Boyd ran dogs many years ago and understands; the sympathy is more than welcome.

Within a few days I’m trying to get back to civilian life but it’s not easy. I’ve got a lot of things to think about and it’s tough to put everything back together.

Among other things, I busy myself getting on the substitute teaching roster and working on my full-time teaching application for next fall. In talking to other teachers, I do make the happy discovery that most principals in the Mat-Su School District (the home of the Iditarod, after all) are more than willing to let their teachers run the Iditarod, although it involves a week or two of unpaid leave.

I make a quick stop in Anchorage to thank the kids and teachers at Mount Spurr for their support. Before I’m three steps inside the front door, the principal collars me to offer his condolences, but he also says everyone was proud of me for even making it to the starting line. I don’t know what to say; apparently what has been a calamitous disappointment for me has been seen quite differently by others.

Then my former host teacher walks in and adds the touch that brings me back to the world of the living. He says the day after I scratched at Rainy Pass, the kids ran frantically into the classroom carrying the sports section of the Daily News , in which my scratch was listed along with the reason. They couldn’t wait to tell him how “Mr. Bowers’ dogs overheated and had puppies!” Leave it to the kids to put it all back in perspective.

I also get a real boost when Hudson Air Service in Talkeetna hires me on for the season as a regular pilot. Cliff Hudson is one of the most respected of the old-time bush pilots, having helped pioneer the thriving Mt. McKinley aviation business almost 50 years ago. Cliff’s son, Jay, the chief pilot, tells me I’ll be flying climbers to the glaciers within a month, as well as taking tourists from all over the world on sight-seeing flights around The Mountain.

Working as a “Denali Flyer” is something else I’ve always wanted to do, almost as much as running the Iditarod, and flying for Cliff is the best of all possible worlds. Even better, Cliff also agrees to lease my idle and increasingly unaffordable Cessna 206, which I’d been trying to sell. It seems things are actually working out for me; maybe my travails weren’t in vain.

To prove to myself I really mean to go again next year, I call John Allison, a well regarded local musher who hasn’t run the Iditarod but who has an excellent line of dogs, and tell him I’m interested in two lead dogs he tried back in February to get me to take on the race. Since Bert has said he might want to run the race next year, I can’t count on using his dogs, which means I have to try to put together a new team. John and I meet that evening and close the deal and I take the dogs home with me. Buck and Black Ace are older dogs, eight years old, but Buck in particular is a proven leader, and I’m never again going to be without a trustworthy dog up front who will start the team under any conditions.

Any outside observer would probably still think I’m not of sound mind, throwing money and hope at next year’s race when the front runners in this year’s trek aren’t even to the coast. But this is important to me, a sign of commitment I have to make. Besides, now I have another month of decent snow to solidify my new core team, an advantage I wish I’d had last year.

Despite my determination to do the race right in 1996, I still have to live with this year’s ongoing coverage. The race roars to a shockingly fast finish. Montana musher Doug Swingley wins all the marbles (and $52,500 plus a new Dodge truck) in an astounding 9 days and 2 hours. While I was dejectedly camped on Long Lake he was rocketing out of Iditarod, more than 300 miles ahead of me, with nobody even close to him. Even Martin Buser can’t catch him; Martin knocks several hours off his own record-smashing 1994 run but it’s only good enough for a distant second.

Of course, I never planned to run anywhere near the big boys (and girls). Every day I check the newspaper to see how far my friends and fellow rookies — the ones I should still be running with — have progressed. On Saturday I find out Barrie has been forced to scratch at Iditarod. Two of her leaders were hurt going across the Farewell Burn, and her last decent front-end dog pulled a shoulder on the trail between Ophir and Iditarod. Without leaders, she can’t get her team started, and once started can’t maintain headway for more than an hour or two. By the time she finally limps into Iditarod, she’s completely burned out. I can sympathize, because that’s exactly the same position I was in, only for a different reason.

A few days later, Diana Moroney, who gave me my first four dogs, is running for a solid top-20 finish when her sled rams a tree in the Blueberry Hills north of Unalakleet. She barely limps into Shaktoolik with painful injuries. She’s hurt badly enough to have to scratch.

My friend and fellow rookie Wayne Curtis plods on with his Siberi-ans, slow but sure and holding in the forties; he finishes in just under 15 days in 41st place. I hope his final leg into Nome from Safety was as memorable as our last few miles into Meier’s Lake under the northern lights and the full moon in the Copper Basin two months ago.

Rookie Max Hall, a Briton whom I got to know reasonably well before the race, makes it to Nome after braving a horrendous series of storms that bedevil him almost all the way from Unalakleet. He arrives on Front Street chilled to the bone and looking like the abominable snowman, but is cheerful and polite and very, very British to the end. The newspapers hail him as a reincarnation of the gallant explorers and adventurers who built the Empire.

Andy Sterns, a rookie with whom I ran the qualifying races, is running barely an hour behind Max on the last 22-mile leg in from Safety when another terrific storm explodes. Max makes it through, but Andy gets pinned down in a raging ground blizzard with zero visibility. He decides he has no choice but to scratch in order to get help for his dogs. He’s barely three miles from the finish line. He’s the only person to ever scratch so close to Nome, and my disappointment can’t be anything compared to his.

Ben Jacobson is at the back of the pack but determinedly pushes on. He links up with Larry Williams, who has been sponsored by zillionaire heiress Marylou Whitney in a true-to-life Iditarod Cinderella story. They both get caught in the vicious Norton Sound storms after they leave Koyuk and are forced to hole up in a shelter cabin between there and Elim until the tempests abate. Larry makes it in a day ahead of Ben, who eventually pulls into the chute and under the burled arch after 17 days on the trail. Ben earns the Red Lantern, which he didn’t really want but which he is more than proud to receive.

Tim Triumph’s best leader, Victory, pulls a shoulder in the Farewell Burn and Tim has to carry her almost 80 miles in the sled. He pushes on with Cooper, a ragtag leader who is a refugee from a trapline work team. Tim is dead last all the way to the coast. He finally makes it into Unalakleet, but it’s more than five days after Swingley sweeps through and the race officials withdraw him. Tim refuses to quit and forges on, being hailed as the “phantom musher.” Cooper turns out to be one of the best storm leaders ever to run the race, dragging the team through whiteouts so bad Tim can barely see his wheel dogs. Tim actually reaches Nome ahead of Ben Jacobson and Larry Williams, whom he helps through the blizzards around Elim.