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

I get the checkpoint routine done within an hour and let the dogs rest; they look particularly contented in the warm midday sun. The back-of-the-pack crowd is all here or due to arrive shortly; other drivers have stretched out on their sleds in the warmth or even sprawled in the straw next to their dogs.

We’re all planning to leave around mid-afternoon for the 32-mile run over Rainy Pass to Rohn. Sketchy reports from up ahead indicate the infamous Dalzell Gorge is actually in reasonably good shape this year and no one seems to have had any real trouble. I’m looking forward to the run, even though I’ll have to do the Gorge itself after dark.

Before I rest, I stop into the lodge for a proper lunch; I did this last year after I’d scratched, but I think the food tastes a lot better this time around. As I eat I catch up on the race scuttlebutt: as everyone feared, Rick Swenson has been withdrawn from the race. In fact, he’s here at Rainy Pass and the ski-equipped Beaver to pick up his dogs and sled is already enroute.

When I meander down to my team Rick is standing nearby. I go over and offer my condolences and we talk for a few minutes. I assure him we’re all behind him and hope this can be worked out somehow. He’s understandably depressed and says he won’t be back next year. He’s already posted a sign in the lodge advertising his team for sale.

He says he doubts many of the other Big Names will return next year if the rule stands. He argues that not many people will invest up to $50,000 to build a world-class team which might be tossed out of the Iditarod on what amounts to an random act of chance. There are other races, he points out, and if the Iditarod doesn’t get its act straight it will be eclipsed sooner rather than later.

I sympathize with him. I left the race here last year myself, but for decidedly less controversial reasons. As someone has said, he is now a bonafide martyr to the cause, for all the good that does him at the moment. I go back to my team hoping he’ll reconsider and return next year. He has become a central symbol of the Iditarod, a role model for hundreds of mushers like me who will likely never even place in the top 20, much less win the race five times. I lie down for a nap with some misgivings about the future of the Iditarod if it can’t heal the grievous rift it has opened with Rick and all of us who support him.

After a most refreshing doze in the sun we’re all up and getting ready by three or so. On one side is Linda Joy, a 42-year-old grandmother who runs the dog tours at a bed and breakfast just down the road from me at Montana Creek. She’s been carefully planning and preparing to run the race for three years and seems to be enjoying things so far — with the exception of a close encounter of the worst kind with a tree back around Happy River. The right side of her face looks like she lost a fight with a berserk cement mixer, complete with a black eye the size of a dessert plate. Nonetheless, she’s cheerful and doesn’t wince too much when we hang her new nickname on her: Dances With Trees.

On the other side is Lisa Moore from Fairbanks, who lived many years in Nome and went to school there. She scratched in Koyuk in 1994 and, like me, has a demon of her own to exorcise. She was the last-place musher struggling down the Yukon whom I watched at Galena that year as the northern lights danced over the Brooks Range. Her mother ran the Iditarod in 1980. When Lisa finishes (she emphatically points out it’s ‘when,’ not ‘if’) they’ll be the first mother and daughter to have raced.

Andy Sterns from Fairbanks is also running back with us. He scratched literally at the gates of Nome last year when a terrific storm pinned him down. Race Marshal Bobby Lee drove out to find Andy after Max Hall, who was traveling just ahead of him, barely made it into town. By the time Bobby found Andy, two of his dogs were becoming hypothermic and Andy didn’t see any way to save them except by putting them into Bobby’s truck, which meant scratching.

Three teams work their way up onto the windswept tundra after leaving the Rainy Pass checkpoint on Puntilla Lake. The summit of Rainy Pass itself is 20 miles ahead and almost 2,000 feet higher.

Andy’s was by far the closest scratch to the finish line, barely three miles from Front Street. He has a crackerjack team this year and can afford to wait in the checkpoints and make fast dashes up the trail. His team is several miles an hour faster than mine, and he could probably run in the top 20 if he pushed the issue. He, too, is chasing a ghost, except he’ll have to wait 1,000 miles to finally put his to rest.

So far we’re not traveling together, but we seem to keep running into each other at checkpoints and are generally keeping to similar schedules. I’m out before most of the others at 4:30; they’ll probably pass my slowpokes before we reach the summit of Rainy Pass, a 20-mile, 1,500-foot climb, all on a windswept trail well above timberline.

As Socks leads us out of the checkpoint and onto the outbound trail, I quietly put a stake through the heart of my last demon. Last year I watched these same trail markers being pulled up as my hasty decision to scratch began its corrosive yearlong attack on my resolve and self-confidence. I silently thank Socks for getting me past my own failings in a more than symbolic way.

Now we’re on fresh ground and I can run the race for its own sake. The trail will be far from easy, and I’m sure I’ll have low points I can’t even imagine, but I’m running on my terms now, and those terms are very simple: don’t quit, no matter what. I know now I’ve got a solid team; we may not go fast, but we go, and I’ve promised myself I’ll stand on the runners forever if that’s what it takes to get to Nome.

This commitment has become very real to me; I remind myself of it whenever I start to feel we’re going too slowly, or whenever a faster team passes me. I’m continually fighting a mental battle to make sure I’m not the team’s limiting factor. I’m finally starting to have complete faith in my team, the team I’ve trained all winter and which I’m becoming more and more certain will get me to Nome.

The first part of our climb into what is for me a truly new world is a gradual pull up the eastern approaches of two-mile-wide Ptarmigan Pass. It is substantially lower than Rainy but makes a great 70-mile loop to the south before reaching Rohn. Rainy Pass is actually a subsidiary but more direct pass cutting across the loop of Ptarmigan. The race has been run through Ptarmigan once or twice in the past when the Dalzell Gorge was too dangerous.

This year, in fact, the annual Iron Dog snowmachine race from Big Lake to Nome and back (two weeks before the Iditarod) used Ptarmigan on the way out. The motor mushers ran into overflow on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River bad enough to completely engulf a couple of their machines. The surviving teams returned from Nome via Rainy Pass but had an extremely difficult time powering up through the Gorge. However, they broke a good trail for the Iditarod in the process, and our trailbreakers have apparently improved it even more.

Within a mile after leaving Puntilla we are crawling steadily upward across the bleak, interminable rolling tundra. Because the wind has swept away most traces of the trail, as it always does up here, the track is permanently marked every few hundred yards with crude six-foot-high wooden tripods. Anything less substantial would never withstand the ever-present wind, and would not be visible when the gale whips up ground blizzards thick enough to obscure the team in front of the sled even while leaving perfect visibility at eye level.