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

Finally we’re ready to go. The checkers tell me half a dozen teams have scratched already, and I should watch out for two teams still straggling up the trail from Willow. We roll out of the checkpoint and back out onto the trail in good order. Old Socks is leading; he’s not my fastest leader but he’s utterly dependable, especially on questionable trails like the one we’re on. Besides, I don’t want an express-train leader bounding through this stuff, where I have almost no time to react even under the best conditions.

We make good time for an hour or so down the powerline trail, which is just as bad as I remember it coming in. We pass one of the lost teams limping dazed back the way we came; the driver says his sled is busted and his dogs are beat and all he wants to do is get into Sheep Creek and scratch. I feel thankful my team is basically in one piece and resolve to keep it that way for the remaining 200 miles.

We work our way south as the predawn light slowly brightens, exposing a cold, frost-covered landscape — and the grim trail. As we go up a low hill I know has a sharp drop on the far side, Socks takes a wrong turn, following what looks like a recent trail. I know it’s not the correct path, but I assume it will quickly loop back to the main trail like these little spurs always do. Two seconds too late I realize the side trail isn’t going to rejoin the main one in time.

Even as I’m getting ready to stop the team and bring them around, the sled comes to a wrenching halt in the middle of a thicket of willow shrubs that have grown up where the original forest was cleared from the powerline right-of-way years ago. I almost pitch over the handlebar and into the team, which is in complete disarray with dogs everywhere. Necklines have snapped, tuglines have come loose, and the gangline is wrapped around every dog and tree in sight.

The one- and two-inch-thick trunks of the willows look as if they’ve grown up through the team and the sled, so completely are we tangled. I have never seen anything so snarled. And if I ever get everything back in order, the way ahead is down a 50-foot slope strewn with fallen logs. The main trail is at the bottom of the hill, but there’s no way I’m going to get there from here.

At least nobody is hurt and everything seems to be more or less intact. The problem will be one of somehow extricating team and sled from this boreal jungle. With a sigh I walk up and sit down next to Socks and ponder the situation. The sun is slowly coming up over the Talkeetna Mountains to the southeast and we watch a beautiful sunrise even as I work out a salvage plan.

By the time the pink and blue of dawn have given way to the orange and yellow of the sun as it rises above the jagged ridges, I am well on my way to sorting things out. I have to use my saw and ax to do a bit of unauthorized logging, but eventually I get enough working room to lead the team back up the hill, and then to manhandle the sled around to face the way we came.

After lining out the dogs, replacing the broken snaps and lines, and reconnecting everything, we’re off again — directly back up the trail for a few hundred yards until I can find an open area to bring the team around. It’s taken the better part of an hour, but we’re underway in the proper direction again, none the worse for wear. As we bounce on down the narrow, brush-choked trail, I’m too busy fighting the sled to even think about getting mad or frustrated. It’s just been part of the game, yet another problem to be solved in what has been — and promises to continue to be — a long string of problems.

We eventually make it back to the better trails and then under the Little Willow Creek bridge and onto the ditch line along the highway. It’s mid-morning on a Sunday but there’s still plenty of traffic. In particular, I notice at least half a dozen dog trucks headed north over a space of half an hour, probably on their way for a day of training runs on the relatively good trails in the upper Susitna Valley (or maybe heading up to Sheep Creek to pick up teams which have scratched from this race).

In western Alaska, only the larger rivers have significant greenbelts of trees.

I wave at them and every driver gives me a thumbs up or a flash of the lights in encouragement. I guess word of the tough trail on the Klondike is spreading; it’s starting to look like anyone who finishes will have uncontested bragging rights for awhile, and other mushers certainly appreciate this.

Crossing Willow Creek as I continue down the highway, I notice there’s a team lined out behind the Pioneer Lodge, apparently one of the ones that scratched. I’m getting thirsty and we’ll be heading out onto the river in a few more miles, so I stop, tie off the dogs to a tree in the parking lot, and clump into the bar (which is open — this is Alaska, after all). There are a few people having breakfast and they look at me like I’ve just landed from Mars.

Then I realize I probably look a sight, bundled up like some kind of polar mummy with icicles hanging from my beard, moustache, and eyebrows. I flash them a winning smile, hastily get a big glass of water, avail myself of the facilities, and head back out to the team, which has welcomed the 15-minute rest. Then we’re off down the highway, waving at Sunday-morning travelers and generally having not too bad a time, all things considered.

After threading across Long, Crystal, and Vera Lakes, we debouch onto the swamps stretching to the Susitna River five miles away. The race route jumps from one trail to another and I’m glad I’m doing this part during daylight, because I’d surely have missed at least a couple of the turns. Most of the junctions are marked mainly with fluorescent surveyor’s tape, which is fine for daytime but almost invisible at night. There are a few reflective Klondike 300 markers for night use, but not nearly enough. I can only guess how many of the teams ahead of me got lost going through here before dawn this morning.

Finally the trail re-enters the tree line hugging the 100-foot bluff overlooking the mile-wide river bottoms. We meander for a couple of miles on a well-defined but unmarked trail and I start to wonder if we’re on the right track. I flag down an oncoming snowmachiner and ask him if this is the proper trail; he says it is, and the hill down to the river is just ahead — and I should be careful to take a left at the bottom.

In short order we plunge down a steep hill onto a frozen slough. The dogs want to go right, which I know heads back upstream, but I straighten them out quickly and we roll out onto the open expanse of the river. From here on we are supposed to follow the main snowmachine trail down the Ohio-sized Susitna to its junction with the equally broad Yentna, then up the Yentna to Yentna Station and ultimately Skwentna before turning around and retracing our steps back to Willow and then Big Lake.

In the middle of its broad cliff-lined flood plain, the Susitna’s central channel has frozen up in a 100-yard-wide jumble of ice blocks, some standing several feet high. The trail is a highway packed down by thousands of snowmachines over the past couple of months. There are no roads west of the Susitna and most residents of the area use the frozen rivers for routine transportation as casually as automobile drivers use the freeways.

Where the trail runs along the sandbars and smoother sloughs it is as much as 100 feet wide, with as many interlaced branches as the river under its blanket of snow and ice. Occasionally everything narrows into a yard-wide path snaking bumpily across the wasteland of the main channel to better terrain on the far bank. There is only a thin covering of snow on the ice, maybe a few inches, and where it has been packed it’s barely an inch.