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

The sled eventually comes to rest upside-down, wedged against a clump of willow shrubs at the base of the hill. It has almost completely swapped ends and its path is marked by a string of uprooted dogs still attached to the gangline. I’m only slightly banged up and the dogs don’t seem to be in any trouble, so I set about straightening everything out. Twenty minutes later we’re ready to go, this time with my foot planted firmly on the brake.

Half a mile further the trail plunges unexpectedly down a 50-foot ravine, with a sharp right turn before the bottom. My brake is totally ineffective and the dogs flip the sled almost instantly. Once again I’m yelling “Whoa!” at the top of what’s left of my voice while bouncing behind the supine sled. To make matters worse, Socks misses the turn and goes on to the floor of the ravine, following a trail blazed by an equally unfortunate driver just ahead of me.

As I right the sled at the bottom and assess the situation, the loud silence is rent by a cry just ahead of me: “Whoa! Whoa!” And then from behind: “For crying out loud, WHOA!” A couple of minutes later comes an answering shout from back up the hill: “Whoa! STOP, DAMMIT!”

Indeed, as I work to get the team unsnarled and back on the trail, I notice we Finger Lake exiles all seem to have hit this stretch of misery about the same time. Judging from the periodic cries echoing through the moonlit darkness, we’re all having about the same luck negotiating the impossible trail. It seems the trademark cry-in-the-night of the tail-enders at Happy River this year is a plaintive “Whoa! (Insert expletive here)!”

Knowing others are out here sharing this wholesome outdoor adventure doesn’t make the trail any easier, but it does relieve some of the tension. A few minutes later I catch up to a couple of my cohorts who have been encountering about the same fortunes as I have. We take a break in the moonlight and commiserate about the horrific trail and shake our heads at the insanity of it all. We ask ourselves if we’re having fun yet and decide to hold our decision until about July.

We stagger on in a loose convoy to the Happy River steps. This year they’re narrow, icy ramps glued to the side of a near-perpendicular slope. Jack Niggemyer said it took several days to build them from scratch and they should be almost as good as last year. This somehow isn’t as comforting as it should be to those of us staring at them up close and personal on this fine moon-washed morning, especially after 50 or so teams before us — and who knows how many snowmachines — have pounded them into near-rubble.

There is one change this year, however. The steps are announced by a special sign the Iditarod has made up: a reflective black-and-yellow diamond-shaped hazard sign like you’d see on a highway, with a logo of a dog team and the warning “Watch Your Ass!” I’ve heard about the sign, but I still have to laugh out loud; I suppose gallows humor in a situation like this is better than no humor at all.

As I see the team ahead of me go over the lip and down the first step, I lean on the brake to bring my guys to a complete halt and wait for a couple of minutes. When I don’t hear anything resembling splintering wood, cries of agony, or Anglo-Saxon invective, I assume the way is clear one way or another and gently urge Socks over the brink.

Socks, of course, considers this all great fun and needs no urging. It’s all I can do to keep the brake jammed into the rut worn by previous teams, and this only restrains the team to a fast trot down the steep ramp. At the bottom the trail levels out and switchbacks sharply to the right. I lose my balance in the turn and spill the sled; this provides me with a scary look down a 50-foot cliff lurking just off the trail, but I get everything upright in time for the next downhill pitch.

We ease down the second step with no problem. The last ramp down to the floor of the gorge is the narrowest, with a 30-foot sheer drop on the left. It cannot be more than two feet wide and is plainly the worse for wear; I ride the brake and tell the dogs “Easy, easy!” as gently as I can. I also find myself involuntarily leaning as far as I can into the comforting cliff on my right.

About 10 feet from the bottom the sled starts to slip off the left side. I lean hard to the right and balance up on the right runner until we hit level ground. Then we’re down one last short drop and out onto the open river. I shout in triumph: we’ve come down the infamous Happy River hill in the middle of the night without a catastrophe.

The driver ahead of me, Ralph Ray, has stopped; we rest for a few minutes and celebrate our small victory with half-thawed packets of juice. Shortly another team comes shooting off the bottom of the hill. I congratulate the driver as he goes by, but he just shakes his head and makes a nervous comment about the steps not being as bad as he’d expected. Considering he probably expected to be wrapped around a tree somewhere back up the slope, I have to interpret “not as bad as expected” in a relative way.

Anyway, we’re still in one piece. Although I know the trail isn’t much nicer from here on to the Rainy Pass checkpoint, we’re just that many miles closer to Nome. I remind myself I couldn’t scratch here if I wanted to: no mortal could go back up the trail we’ve just come down. And there’s no way to airlift the team and sled out of here, so I have no choice but to go on. I have a feeling I’ll be using this rationale often as I push on toward Nome.

After a decent interval we forge on up the long steep hill climbing out of the river valley back onto the plateau. At the top of the hill we pass the kink in the trail where my gangline snapped last year and almost cost me a dog; Yankee, the canine in question, doesn’t seem to notice as we power quickly by.

Eventually Ralph stops and I pull ahead. We cross Long Lake, scene of my final debacle last year; its profile is forever ingrained in my mind. I am able to pinpoint the exact place I spent the longest, most depressing night of my life.

This year we cruise purposefully on in the moonlight as dawn streaks the sky behind us. I strike an especially evil creature from last year’s bestiary, one which destroyed my very will to go on. I feel like St. George on his horse doing his thing with the dragons, except my trusty steed has four paws and a big wet tongue and is named Socks.

Past Long Lake the trail goes through a number of particularly bad stretches, usually involving (but not limited to) side hills on steep slopes, glaciered patches with no footing, abrupt descents terminated by right-angled turns, and of course the customary menagerie of stumps, sticks, stones, clods, ruts, and various other impedimenta.

But we work our way through it and finally pull onto the disused, snow-covered runway at Rainy Pass Lodge at mid-morning. I am acutely aware of the last time I was here: I was about to terminate my first Iditarod for what eventually turned out to be no real reason at all. We roll down onto the ice of Puntilla Lake and into the checkpoint. A couple of the people waiting at the checkpoint were here last year; they understand what this means to me and I am grateful for their congratulations. I assure them I’m in this one for the duration, and mean every word.

“Watch Your Ass!” shouts one of the race’s special warning signs advising of hazardous trail ahead. These signs always get mushers’ immediate and undivided attention.

Nome is still 1,000 miles away, but I’ve effectively exorcised my biggest demon and I feel upbeat. I don’t know what Socks and the team think about all of this, but I’d like to think they’re ready to tackle the outbound trail later this afternoon. Of course, I think they’ll be a little more ready after I get some food into them and let them have a quality siesta.