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

I think the major lesson I’ve learned is very simple, and goes well beyond anything I did or didn’t do after the start of the Iditarod. It’s something very basic, something I thought I’d certainly absorbed by the time I graduated from high school. In the words of every coach I’ve ever had, I didn’t want to finish the race badly enough. I didn’t take it seriously enough and I didn’t sacrifice enough. And I paid the price in the end.

Finishing the Iditarod, much less eventually doing well, is a matter of desire and determination, and must extend to every facet of training and even life itself. To read my journal from last year, one would think I understood this, but it took a baptism of fire (or ice) to finally bring it home.

This summer has seen what can best be characterized as a stiffening of my resolve. I’ve been able to step back and take a more or less objective look at just what I’ll need to do to improve my chances to finish. It’s clear my preparation last year was riddled with too many inconsistencies and waverings of purpose. Despite the occasional flashes of insight, I was a basically a dilettante.

One of my biggest problems was my consuming involvement in student teaching in Anchorage during the week; I never really built the continuity with the dogs I needed. I missed too many subtle signs from them I should have noticed: stopping on hills, missing commands, becoming unfocused at critical times.

And I definitely didn’t work hard enough to bond with my leaders. I truly didn’t appreciate the value of a good leader until suddenly I didn’t have any when it counted the most. I made a big mistake by using Pullman in lead almost exclusively for the qualifying races and even for training because she was a little faster than Socks. Running back in the team, Socks drifted away and seemed to lose interest — and I missed the signals.

This year I’ve gone out of my way to make sure Socks and I are best buddies and he gets his fair share of time in front. He could have kept me on the straight and narrow on the way to Rainy Pass and beyond if I’d only realized how good he was — and is.

I’ve managed to get pretty close to Buck as well; I consider this an accomplishment of sorts, since he was terribly timid when I first got him, and coaxing him out of his shell took months. This is important, because Buck is my secret weapon this year. Like Socks, he’s a mature, mellow ‘power-steering’ leader and is big enough to drag the whole team if he has to; unlike Socks, he sets a good pace. I wish I’d had him during the Iditarod, and in fact I could have: John Allison offered him to me in January but I figured Pullman would be all the leader I’d need. I’ll not make that mistake again.

Of course, I won’t have any females in heat. I now realize I let the “heat wave” distract me when I should have dropped the offenders and kept moving. It wasn’t an insurmountable problem. Steve Adkins has told me how he somehow made it to Nome with most of his team in heat, putting up with all manner of mayhem in every village. Plenty of other mushers have encountered even worse events of this nature and still made it through in good order. In any case, I’ll be using more big males this time, and the females will all be “on the pill.”

The biggest single change has resulted from the dogs being at my place instead of over at Ron’s. Now I know there is no substitute for staying close to the dogs in a physical and emotional sense. I am forced to pay attention to them whenever I’m home, and I’ve learned worlds about all of them I simply missed when they were out of sight and often out of mind.

There’s no such thing as a part-time dog musher. The commitment must be total, both physically and mentally, and the dogs must become a part of daily life. Continuity must be maintained, or critical trends and important nuances will be missed. Only now am I starting to understand what the really serious mushers have gone through to get where they are — and I appreciate their accomplishment even more.

Enough autumn, already! Mother Nature has been dealing from the bottom of the deck to Southcentral Alaska this fall. If winter doesn’t get here soon, we may be running the Iditarod on four-wheelers, or maybe in boats.

First came weeks of rain, then a few tantalizingly brisk mornings in early October, spreading a crust of ice over enough lakes to scare everyone into taking their airplanes off floats a couple of weeks early. Finally the snow started to fall late on the 10th, dumping six inches around Willow and an inch or two here at Montana Creek. The adult dogs were beside themselves with eagerness, remembering snow meant sleds, which in turn meant lots of interesting runs.

Then came the sucker punch: the temperature slithered back up to hover right at freezing, followed by days of cold rain. It’s difficult to imagine a worse situation for training dogs. Enough rain-soaked snow remained on the still-frozen ground to make trails impassable, too slick for four-wheelers and too thin for sleds. And the dogs were thoroughly miserable to boot, shivering in their houses and under their trees in the bone-chilling drizzle.

My running log began to look like it was written in disappearing ink, with week-long gaps. I had no choice but to continue with the four-wheeler whenever I could catch a break in the hideous weather, even though I had virtually no control in many places where a thin layer of mud and lake-sized puddles had formed over the waterproof frozen ground. About all I accomplished was to keep the dogs from completely losing the conditioning I’d so painstakingly put on them in August and September.

By the end of October the rain stopped and we actually had another grudging few inches of snow. The first weekend of November surprised everyone (especially the harried weather prognosticators) by being forecast to be nearly perfect for dog driving, with bright sun, no wind, and temperatures in the teens.

On Thursday night before the weekend, Bert called and casually mentioned daughter Kim would be bringing up six Russian exchange students and their sponsors on Saturday morning for sled rides, maybe 15 people or so. And by the way, he said, Channel Two News from Anchorage would probably be coming along to tape the whole thing.

After I recovered from the shock, I frantically ransacked my untouched-since-March storage shed to find the snow hooks, quick releases, and miscellaneous pieces of rigging necessary to fit out the sleds. I finally got everything together about four o’clock this morning and caught a few hours of sleep.

Now it’s show time. Kim arrives about noon with her girlfriends and the exchange students, along with their sponsors and chaperones plus several of their teachers from Anchorage. Mercifully, the television crews can’t make it, which is a major relief: the last thing I need is a close-up of my dog lot and typically cluttered premises splashed all over the six-o’clock news.

The unfortunate thing about such publicity is dog lots can be messy places, especially after the weather we’ve had the past couple of months— and mine is no exception. My dogs all have shelter from the elements and plenty of chain to move around, and they’re as healthy as horses. However, some people think dog lots should look like living rooms, which is a difficult mind-set to combat, especially when the cyclopean eye of the idiot box magnifies the smallest detail and takes everything out of context. Somebody, somewhere, would see something he or she didn’t like and I’d be weeks trying to set things right.

The potential for bad press is compounded because there have been several notorious cases of neglected and abused dogs in Southcentral Alaska over the past couple of years — none of which involved serious mushers — and dog lots have become a hot-button issue. Worse, the borough Animal Control code is apparently copied from some urban Lower 48 set of ordinances and makes no official distinction between a well-cared-for dog team and a sweatshop puppy factory. Every dog is assumed to be a potentially rabid pit bull and every kennel owner is guilty of neglect until proven otherwise. Most mushers loathe any involvement with Animal Control officers because, like any good bureaucrats, the critter cops can always find some “t” not crossed or “i” not dotted.