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

Still, his finish isn’t official, although many people (especially the media, for whom Tim has become a cause celebre) think he deserves the fabled finisher’s belt buckle as much as many of the mushers who finished before — and after — him. I have to confess a grudging admiration for Tim, despite our sometimes-significant personal differences off the trail. The more I think about it, the more I believe he did what I should have done: press on no matter what the odds and run my own race. Next year, I’ll remember. (Tim’s finish is later officially recognized and he is awarded his belt buckle.)

My interest in my erstwhile peers aside, the pervasive media blitz is too much. I can’t watch the coverage without pangs of remorse mixed with undercurrents of extreme anticipation. Every shot of a team heading out of some isolated checkpoint sends chills through me.

I should have been there, and I will be there next year if it’s the last thing I do. A major part of my life has been left unfinished and must be made complete. I have seen and experienced just enough — and suffered and despaired and exulted just enough — to know that I now have no choice but to keep at it until I succeed.

The trail and the dogs own me, like an insidious drug owns an addict, like blind faith owns a true believer. Part of me is still out there with my team, on the lonely stretches I didn’t get to explore, and I won’t sleep easily until I’ve become whole again.

Life goes on. The race has been over for nearly a month and I’ve been trying to put it behind me, but it keeps forcing its way back into my every waking hour. The best therapy I can devise is just to get as involved as I can in the hectic activity of the upcoming summer. Maybe a steady diet of hard work can get my mind off the events on the way to Rainy Pass.

I’ve been working hard for the past month learning how to fly around — and on — Mount McKinley for Hudson’s. Although I’ve been flying for almost 30 years, this is “pushing the envelope” even for me. Flying for the Iditarod demanded its own special set of skills and knowledge, but working The Mountain is something else altogether. We fly our ski-equipped Cessna right to the limit of their capabilities — and ours — while still leaving enough margin for safety to feel comfortable. It promises to be a long and interesting summer, although it will be a lot of hard work and 12-hour days.

Like driving dogs, being a bush pilot in Alaska in the summer requires a lot of work and patience to get to the payoff. Nonetheless, payoffs there are, and on a scale that (as Teddy Roosevelt once said of a trip in Colorado) bankrupts the English language. The ever-changing views of Denali, the satisfaction of a particularly well-executed landing under tricky conditions, being able to communicate to a visitor from Outside the overriding sense of awe and respect for the North Country felt by any honest Alaskan — these are rewards worth much in their own right, never mind the paychecks.

I’d hoped to be able to continue running the dogs until breakup, but we were hit with a vicious and unseasonable late-March cold snap. The temperature hovered around 20 below or worse for most of the last half of March, and only warmed up to zero so the winds could blow. Normally, most mushers in this area will try to get in late-season running to try out puppies and train leaders, but all the trails were blown in and the conditions weren’t worth the effort to harness up and go anywhere. A lot of people just found someone to feed the dogs for a few weeks and headed for Hawaii.

The horrible conditions continued into April, and then, after one last 25-below morning, warmed up to almost 60 in less than 12 hours and have hardly gone below freezing since. The belated warmth didn’t help the trails, though, since everything melted at an astonishing pace. So, late season mushing has been pretty much a fizzle this year.

Not that I haven’t been busy with the dogs. Even though I haven’t been running them, I’ve been setting up to bring them over to my place from Ron’s, which means starting a kennel operation mainly from scratch. I’ve already decided on a name: White-Knuckle Kennels. This is actually part of a long-running inside joke based on some of my early flying exploits in Alaska, but seems especially apt to describe my mushing career so far.

I brought one of the dogs over early. Josephine, a marvelous three-year-old female I acquired back in November, was bred in early February as the beginning (and, as it turned out, the end) of my “planned parenthood” program. Her bloodlines are impeccable, going all the way back to a particularly notable line of dogs on the Seward Peninsula. Josephine herself is a littermate of longtime Iditarod contender Joe Garnie’s best leaders. The only reason I got Josephine was because Garnie thought she was too small and sold her to another musher, from whom I picked her up.

I didn’t run Josephine in the Iditarod because it’s not a good idea to stress out dogs in the last part of their pregnancy. As a rookie breeder, I was as nervous as a new father and wanted to make sure everything was just right when the day came. I needn’t have worried. Tough dogs from the Bering Sea coast like Josephine have been giving birth and raising pups under abominable conditions for generations, and the best thing I could have done was just leave her alone, which I finally figured out to do.

Her day came — and went. Now, a week later, she looks like a big bouncing basketball with legs, head, and a tail, but she’s as lively and friendly and apparently unconcerned as ever. I worry a bit, but my friends tell me to just stay away and wait. Finally, above the rustling of the wind at one o’clock on this cloudy morning I hear the first pup’s cry. I can’t quite place it, but then I realize my team of the future is at last making its grand entrance. The others follow every hour or so: huge pups, seven of them, four females and three males, all healthy and yelping, all looking remarkably like their mother. I stay up all night but manage to keep my fumbling assistance away from where it isn’t needed. Josephine knows exactly what she’s doing; I’m excess baggage.

For people brought up on farms, I suppose animals giving birth is nothing new. For me as basically a nonfarm type, this is suddenly very personal. Josephine is having pups because I want her to, and I’m directly responsible for her and her offspring. I feel these are my pups as much as they are hers, and I realize they are not only a responsibility but a future as well. These pups are intended to become the heart of my team in a few years, and from that standpoint they represent my ultimate commitment to mushing.

In short, I’m no longer a “walk-on” dog driver who drops in on a ready-made team for a quick run and then returns to the real world with scarcely a glance back. In more ways than one, Josephine’s pups have tied me to mushing more surely than the strongest chains.

Being a successful “Denali Flyer” can be as challenging in its own way as running the Iditarod. Ski landings on the glaciers surrounding North America’s tallest peak can never be taken for granted. Small planes are the only way in or out of the main mountaineering base camp at the 7,200-foot level of the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier. The sheer north face of 14,570-foot Mount Hunter towers barely two miles away.

The puppy parade resumes with the arrival of the Iditapups. One after another, Bea, Blues, and Slipper have their litters the second week in May. Amazingly, none of the other three females in heat on my Iditarod team got pregnant. In a matter of weeks I’ve become a full-fledged dog breeder, even if I didn’t exactly plan it that way.