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

Anyway, they proposed to come over at the end of August next year or perhaps the year after to start work, and I said I’d try to find a musher who might be able to work with them when the time was right. They also said they could probably get sponsors in Sweden and come up with maybe $5,000 each, which would nicely cover the extra expenses necessary for entry fees, dog food, and gear for the qualifying races and the Iditarod itself. I said that would be a big help, since walking in the door with 5,000-buck checks pinned to their shirts would certainly make a few more mushers amenable to working with them for the season.

They need a ride to Anchorage today, and since the weather is going to be lousy anyway I call in to Hudson’s and take a day off. We pile into the van and head down the highway. On the way I decide this will be a good time to stop at Iditarod Headquarters and sign up for the 1996 race. My income tax refund should eventually cover most of it and I’ll shuffle some bills until it gets here. Besides, if I don’t get my money on the table now, I’ll just find some equally frivolous way to spend it. And once I’m signed up I’ll be a bit more motivated to keep up my training schedule.

Joanne Potts, the race director and a longtime acquaintance, is glad to see me; she wasn’t sure I really meant to try it again this year. As I fill out the paperwork she says I’m number 52, which is a lot of people for this early in the year. She thinks it might be one of the biggest races yet if sign-ups continue at the current rate; this is fine with me — the more the merrier, since it means I’ll have some company at the back of the pack. If I’m running with somebody I won’t be as prone to scratch if my thinking processes get muddled, which I’m sure they will somewhere out on the trail.

As I drop Nicolas and Johan off at a hostel in Anchorage to wait for their plane, we agree to stay in touch. Now that I’m on the Internet, we decide to use it as our main communications link. I almost wish they could stay and try to run next year, but they’ve got a lot of work to do in Sweden (including assembling a video of their adventures for Swedish television) before they can head back this way.

After a stop at Sam’s Club for another 500 pounds of dog food, I hit the highway in high spirits. Getting my entry fee in was my major financial (and psychological) hurdle, and I think meeting the young Swedes and sharing a bit of their enthusiasm was good therapy. I’m finally back on track, and this time I’m going at it in a considerably more systematic and methodical manner than last year. I’ll have to scrape to get everything else together, but now I’m sure I’ll manage. At least I feel like I almost know what I’m doing this time around.

Ie been running the dogs the past couple of weeks with my old beat-up three-wheeler, the same one I vowed last year never to use again for anything except perhaps a suicide attempt. The four-wheeler I borrowed from Bert last year isn’t available yet, so out of sheer necessity I’ve been hooking nine dogs up to the tricycle from hell and going up to 10 miles on trails that would challenge Arnold Schwartzenegger and his personal HumVee.

True to form, I’ve been up close and personal with the shrubbery at least once or twice on every run, thanks to the fact the three-wheeler has about the same stability as a case of 50-year-old dynamite. The dogs have been fully aware of this, of course, and have positively delighted in whipping me around corners and through ruts whenever they’ve had the chance.

Yesterday I finally picked up the four-wheeler, making the 100-mile odyssey into town in Old Blue, the $700 dog truck Ron and I acquired a couple of weeks ago. Considering Old Blue needs some front-end work (actually, a lot of front-end work), and taking into account I also picked up a ton of lumber and dog food, the drive home was more like a drunken sailor wobbling back to the ship on Saturday night.

Tonight, as I hook up 12 dogs for the first run on the four-wheeler, it’s raining. This has been the normal state of affairs this fall. We’ve broken all of the rainfall records for Southcentral Alaska, and I think it’s rained here on 20 of the last 21 days, sometimes quite heavily. Most people are taking it philosophically, reckoning this is payback for the extraordinary summers and falls we’ve had for the past two years. I firmly believe there’s no such thing as normal weather in Alaska — only extremes some anonymous statistician massages to derive a meaningless average.

This fall, most dogs in this part of Alaska have probably been wondering whether they’re training for the Iditarod or an English Channel swim. I’m debating whether I should start breeding for dogs with webbed feet. Running down the narrow tracks with their overhanging branches laden with moisture is like breaking trail in a rain forest. It’s great for the dogs because it keeps them cool, but I’ve been thinking about investing in a diver’s dry suit.

In addition, some sections of the trail are so muddy there’s no way to stop anything with wheels — with or without brakes — if the dogs don’t want to cooperate. On a previous run with the three-wheeler, they dragged it fully 50 yards through the goo after they flipped it and tossed me into a mud puddle the size of Lake Erie. The snow is going to be positively welcome this year, and the sooner the better.

Mud or no, the dogs are getting back into shape quickly. I can already tell the difference, especially on the cooler nights when they aren’t as oppressed by the unseasonable warmth. It’s clear they are happy to be out on the trail again after being canine couch potatoes all summer. With the exception of a couple of the old veterans like Rocky and Socks, who probably wouldn’t get excited if they were turned loose in a dog food factory, they are all frantically eager to run.

I’m methodically working to train 24 of them, and to identify the ones that won’t make it for one reason or another. Already I’ve decided old Slipper, who is 11 years old, won’t start. She is, as always, more than willing to run and is still a wonderful leader, but it’s time for her to retire. She can help train puppies and go on local runs as long as she can pack her harness, but there’s no point in subjecting her to the rigors of the Iditarod or even a serious mid-distance race at her age, especially with the new rules which will automatically disqualify a musher if a dog dies. Besides, her night-blindness seems to be slowly getting worse, and I’m worried she might hurt herself on the long runs in the dark that comprise so much of any distance race in the winter.

In a way, it’s a little sad to see the inevitable end of such an illustrious career, but she’s more than earned her pension. She’ll join Chewy and Josephine and a couple of other not-quite-varsity dogs. They’ll still get to run often enough (and Josephine will probably have several more litters of exceptional pups), but they’re just not Iditarod material. In any case, I’m not going to get rid of them unless someone wants a pet: after all, they’re family now, and they’ll always have a home here.

I haven’t gone two waking hours since March without turning over in my mind what I should and shouldn’t have done on the trail to Rainy Pass. I’ve run every mile countless times and examined everything from more angles than Dostoyevsky. All of the introspectives come down to the same conclusion: I should have kept going. Whatever trials and tribulations I’d have encountered would have been trivial compared to what I’ve put myself through since then.