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

And this promises to be a serious race indeed. The decision has already been made to hold it regardless of conditions. Teams have been limited to 12 dogs instead of the normal 16 because even the veterans don’t think they could control a big team on the thin trails. And the trail itself has been drastically rerouted — indeed, it changed almost daily up until a few days before the race.

John Barron, who won the race last year and is on the Board of Directors, warned me the trail might not be so good in places; coming from him, that means it’ll be a near-disaster for drivers like me. We’re also worried about the cold: it’s been 20 to 40 below from Big Lake to Talkeetna for the past several weeks, and everybody is a little gun-shy about staging a repeat of the aborted Copper Basin race.

Saturday — The Klondike 300: Big Lake to Sheep Creek (80 miles)

As usual, I’ve been up all night getting everything ready after returning from the mushers’ meeting. I doubt I’ll ever get a good night’s sleep within a week of a race. This time, everything is complicated by the minor inconvenience of my dog truck having a cracked engine block; I’ve borrowed a friend’s pickup and lashed my dog boxes to the back. After a restful two hours’ sleep, I load up my 12 A-string dogs and bounce 50 miles down the road to Big Lake.

When I pull onto the lake and park the truck it’s 30 below zero. If we’re lucky it might warm up to 20 below for an hour or two this afternoon. Some of my friends who helped me last year are waiting to act as handlers. Nobody’s moving very fast, and — also as usual — I’m starting to have second thoughts about this whole affair.

I check my watch and discover we’re behind schedule. The 26 teams are leaving two at a time; I get to go head-to-head with Martin Buser. This is about like matching the Budweiser Clydesdales against a team of Triple Crown thoroughbreds — we might give them a run for a little ways, but the natural order of things will reassert itself pretty quickly after that.

As my start time draws perilously near, we are frantically hooking up the dogs and bootying them. The sled is packed — sort of — and I just hope I’ve got everything in it I’ll need. I’m still trying to get my parka on as we get into the starting gate. I don’t even hear the countdown and look up from fiddling with my parka zipper to see Martin’s team exploding out of the chute. The starter yells at me to go and everybody backs away from my team, leaving me holding on to the handlebar with one hand and the infernally stubborn zipper with the other. I don’t get fully assembled until we’re half a mile down the trail, which fortunately runs along the level ice of Big Lake for the first couple of miles.

While I’m putting myself together, my fresh-out-of-the-box team pulls up to Martin’s heels; I must step on the drag to hold them back so they won’t overrun him. I don’t want to pass him because he’ll just return the favor in a few hundred yards and we’ll run the risk of a high speed tangle. Suddenly he slows and pulls over to the ice road paralleling the trail, where a pickup-load of people seem to want a picture, which he obliges. In the meantime, we zoom past. I’ve actually passed Martin Buser, even though I know it will be short-lived. Sure enough, he catches me a mile later and shoots by. However, I’m not being passed by too many other teams, and my guys are hanging in there better than I’d hoped. Maybe this will work out okay after all.

After we leave the smooth ice of Big Lake, the trails steadily deteriorate. By the time we reach Little Cow Lake, about 25 miles out, things are looking really grim. As we lurch up off the tiny lake onto the 300-yard portage to Cow Lake, there isn’t a trail to speak of — just bare roots and dirt and stumps. I wouldn’t drive a four-wheeler over it on a bet, but nobody tells this to the dogs, who merrily bound through the nightmare as if it were just another fun run.

As we crest the small hill the trail turns sharply to the right and downhill around a big birch with an exposed root. The sled catches the root, tips over, and suddenly I’m dragging behind it, attached only by the tie-off rope looped around my left mitten. I try to hang on, but the rope pulls the thick mitten right off my hand and the team roars on down the hill onto the lake. I jump up and shout at a musher 100 yards ahead to stop the team. (The rules of the trail call for any musher to always try to stop a runaway team.) He tries and misses, but then I notice two cross-country skiers on the lake who have deployed themselves like a special forces ambush team to catch my free-wheeling dogs. As I watch, they neatly corral the leaders and bring everything to a smooth stop.

Relieved beyond words, I stomp out to the team. I thank the skiers profusely for saving the team (and my chance to finish the race). Of course, the dogs think it is all a lark and zoom off as soon as I climb back on the runners. They’re still rolling when we get to Red Shirt Lake, whose three-mile length we traverse quickly.

Off the far end of Red Shirt the overland trail picks up again, and this time it is simply beyond words. The track winds up a small inlet creek in the middle of a swamp studded with protruding clumps of dirt and grass, all frozen solid. It looks for all the world like a pinball game with a zillion mushroom bumpers, except I’m the ball and the dogs are playing a mean tune on the flippers. The sled spills several times but I hang on for dear life and finally figure out how to ride it low and loose to minimize the impacts.

But the pinball swamp is nothing compared to the ensuing “trail” through the woods. There aren’t any trees in the right-of-way, but that’s about all that’s missing (besides the snow). It’s a maze of roots, potholes, fallen logs, loose sticks, rocks, and worst of all, stumps and stobs up to eight inches high that can easily rip the bottom out of the sled if I’m not careful. It is simply not a sled trail, or any kind of a trail, for that matter. Now I know why the trailblazers refused to run their snowmachines over it. Any normal human would have a tough time merely walking this morass, much less trying to guide a bouncing, 100-pound sled over it behind a team of overeager dogs.

Fortunately the worst part only lasts a few miles and then we’re on South Rolly Lake, which is part of a race course for sprint mushers. As I pull onto the lake, where our trail shares theirs for a couple of hundred yards, I notice a 16-dog sprint team roaring around the far end of the lake at 20 miles an hour. I wonder if they have any idea of the hideous trail only a stone’s throw from their groomed speedway. I’m tempted to just let my team follow the sprinters and call this whole thing off before I destroy the team, the sled, and me.

Somehow I manage to get my leaders to stay on our trail, which leaves the lake, follows a road, and then drops down a hill to North Rolly Lake. We slightly overshoot the entrance to the down-trail to the lake and I have to stop the team and let everyone maneuver over to the two big boulders marking the gateway. In the process the lead and swing dogs get tangled across the rocks and break a couple of necklines, which I stop and fix before proceeding.

Starting down this hill from a dead stop turns out to be maybe the luckiest thing I do on the whole race. After 10 yards, I see to my horror the slope is impossibly steep, narrow, and winding. I jam on the brake and feverishly unhook my big snowmachine-track drag, which I’ve had up out of the way to keep it from catching on the obstacles in the trails. As soon as the drag hits the icy snow I jump on it with both feet so hard I think I’ve sprained both ankles. I manage to hold the team to a slow lope down the hill and only kiss three or four trees, barely missing a major crash-and-burn at the bottom where the trail makes a sharp left turn onto the lake around a huge birch. As I regain my composure crossing the lake, I can’t imagine why anyone would have chosen such an exercise in madness as part of a major race — it’s positively dangerous.