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

While all this has been going on, my team has been getting excited and is about to yank the hook. I make the fastest 50-foot dash on record back to my sled and swing onto it just as everyone rockets off toward Skwentna. The missing musher is about a mile up the trail; he looks like he’s been walking for several miles already and isn’t in the happiest of moods. He cheers up significantly when I stop to assure him his team is in good shape and not too far ahead. I know how he feels — I’ve already been through this back at Cow Lake. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing your team, especially when you know they’re likely to go 30 miles down the river without you.

We pull into Skwentna a little before noon; I’ve already decided to keep the stop here as brief as possible so I can get back to Yentna Station. I much prefer to spend the night there to prepare for the final leg back to Big Lake, which will involve the worst sections of trail on the race, and for which I definitely want my wits about me.

In my haste to get food ready for the dogs I make the water too hot for their soup; I pour it into the dry dog food anyway, but they won’t touch it. Normally I could cool it off with snow, but there isn’t any handy that’s clean enough to use. Finally I give up and throw them some frozen beef chunks. By the time we leave I’ve wasted more than two hours. I should have just checked in, tossed them some meat, and then checked out. I’m still learning.

We’ve been here so long Lucky has a bad case of checkpoint-itis and won’t start the team. It’s my fault, and I can’t blame him; I know he’s probably tired from working in lead for two days and would love to stay here for awhile. I put Pullman up front and we move off under our own power. Once we’re away from the checkpoint things settle quickly into the normal trail routine. I’m mad at myself for letting the team down, but I’m glad to see Pullman leading so enthusiastically; she hasn’t been up front for a month because she’s been in heat. I have to remind myself one reason for running this race is to check out the leaders under realistic trail conditions, and so far it’s worked out well in that respect.

About halfway down river to Yentna Station, as we come out of a back slough, Pullman takes a turn I don’t remember; she’s chosen what appears to be the main trail, but something doesn’t feel just right. I let the team go on across the river, and am relieved to see trail markers resembling Klondike 300 stakes. But after another couple of miles I realize we’re lost: we’re heading back up river and I’m not at all sure where we should be.

I turn the team around and we backtrack. At every side trail we stop and I check for other sled tracks, but none is the trail I’m after. After half an hour of cautious probing in the fading late-afternoon light, we’re finally back to the last place where I was positive we were on the right trail. I turn everyone around again, and it becomes obvious what has happened. Coming up river, we turned into the back slough on one side of a big pile of driftwood; on the other side was another, bigger trail which looped back up the river to several lodges on the north bank.

We never saw it on the way up. Not only that, the stakes on the false trail (probably put there by snowmachiners well before the race) looked enough like Klondike markers to fool anyone. Now I know how Ramey Smyth and a lot of others got lost here. One bonafide Klondike marker at the fork would have saved everyone a lot of hassle. I’m just glad I had a bit of daylight left; at night I’m not sure what I’d have done.

As the team senses the shadows deepening, we accelerate to our normal nighttime cruising speed of 10 miles an hour. There’s no way to get lost from here on in because the river has only one channel between well-defined banks. As we roll smoothly along, I gaze to the southwest: the glowing first-quarter crescent moon is about to set, with the brilliant evening star close behind it. To the southeast, Orion is rising with his unmistakable belt of glittering diamonds and red Betelgeuse marking his shoulder. In the northern sky, the Big Dipper is beginning its stately swing around Polaris, and the aurora is already glowing a faint green on the far northeast horizon.

It’s another moment out of time and space. I truly can’t imagine any place I’d rather be than gliding down the Yentna behind my dogs on this perfect evening, with a warm lodge a few miles ahead, in a race I now am confident we’ll finish in good order.

In an hour or so the lights of Yentna Station hove into view like a lighthouse welcoming a sailor into harbor from the darkened sea. As we pull up to the checkpoint, I notice there aren’t any checkers to meet us. Another driver, Shawn Sidelinger, is just bedding his team down — the runaway team I stopped earlier in the day — and he says the checkers and vets took the last plane out a few hours earlier. We’re on our own; the winner, John Schandelmeier, crossed the finish line at Big Lake at nine this morning and all the trail help has headed home, leaving the lodge owner to cover everything.

As I get my team settled down Shawn tells me he only pulled in half an hour ahead of me. I know he left Skwentna at least three hours before I did, so I’m curious what happened. He says he was lost on the river for several hours after making a wrong turn; it took him seven and a half hours to cover the 35 miles back from Skwentna. I ask him which wrong turn; as I expected, it was the one I missed, and we both get a good chuckle at falling into the same trap in broad daylight.

We decide to run together on in to Big Lake because we’re not sure how well the trail will be marked; maybe two heads will be better than one. We also decide not to leave until a couple of hours before dawn next morning; we’ll use the predawn darkness to make good time on the river, but we want to hit the snowless overland stretch on the far side after sunup.

After we get the dogs fed and they’re all sleeping soundly, we head up to the lodge for a sandwich. That’s one nice aspect of longer races: the checkpoints invariably offer something in the way of food and lodging, even it’s just a bowl of campfire soup and a place to toss a sleeping bag. More than that, they’re places to relax for awhile and catch up on what’s been happening along the trail.

Even among the leaders on a high-pressure race like the Iditarod, there’s a sense of camaraderie not found in many other sporting events. Everyone is on the trail together for days on end, and what affects one affects all. To be sure, the front-runners will play mind-games with each other as the race closes in on the finish, but everyone knows it’s all too easy to get caught in a storm or wreck a sled, and the underlying sense of cooperation against the elements is always there.

As we’re sitting in the lodge munching a quick burger, the television is on (powered by a chugging generator outside the window) and I catch the end of the 10 o’clock news on Channel Two from Anchorage. The blow-dried sportscaster casually says, “Well, another dog race is over. John Schandelmeier survived the 30-below cold to beat John Barron by 18 minutes to win the Klondike 300…” and that’s basically it for his coverage of the Klondike.

Nothing about the cold, no mention of the abysmal trail, no word of the dozen drivers who have scratched or been injured — just a perfunctory 10-second blurb tossed off while trying to suppress a yawn. Then he moves on for a several-minute interview with Doug Swingley (last year’s Iditarod winner) down in Minnesota running the Beargrease.

Maybe I’m too close to the subject or perhaps I’m just too tired, but I’m very disappointed by the brevity of the coverage of the only 300-mile race to be run so far this season in Alaska and by the cavalier assumption the race is “over” just because the winner has crossed the finish line. I’m tempted to get on the lodge’s radiophone and call Channel Two to ask them what I should do now that the race is over and I — and half the mushers remaining in the race — are still out here on the trail.