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

In some places we squeeze between giant spruce sentinels and the caved-in ice of the creek, while in others rock walls brush my shoulders. Fortunately the trail is in excellent shape. If anything, it’s too good and the dogs want to go too fast. As we veer through the darkness I feel even better about disconnecting four of my horses.

Quickly I develop a rhythm for swinging around the tight curves and lining up the sled for the right-angled swerves across the ice bridges. I ride the brake almost continuously and learn to play it like a well-tuned piano. After awhile I seem to merge with the sled, intuitively leaning and braking and accelerating. I’m thankful for the flexibility of the Willis sled, which gives me a welcome extra measure of control and confidence.

It’s a nonstop exercise in sled handling which doesn’t allow a second’s lapse in attention. I don’t have time to cast more than a glance up at the huge cliffs which in places crowd the creek through gaps no more than 30 or 40 feet wide. I see enough, though, to form the subconscious opinion this place might be a surpassingly beautiful getaway in the summer, if there were any way to get here.

I know the Gorge is only a couple of miles long, but it seems like all night before we debouch suddenly onto the frozen moonlit expanse of the Tatina River. Rohn is only five miles away over a speedway trail down the river ice. I stop the sled and stand there for a full five minutes shaking with relief. Nothing in my training or any of the mid-distance races I’ve run could have prepared me for what I’ve just been through. It’s simply something I had to experience for myself.

The five-mile run down the Tatina River from the Dalzell Gorge to Rohn Roadhouse is one of the most beautiful of the race.

The Gorge has actually been very benevolent, but still I feel as if I’ve skirted disaster by the narrowest of margins. Without question it’s been the most precise and professional — and ultimately satisfying — job of sled driving I’ve ever done, and as I calm down I start to feel moderately pleased with myself and the team.

Socks in particular has been rock-steady up front all the way through, never going too fast but always keeping up enough speed to give me steering way. Self-congratulations aside, I’m not in any mood to go back and try it again. Right now all I want to do is get on into Rohn and take a well-deserved rest.

We arrive at Rohn half an hour later in high spirits. As we pull down the tree-lined runway to the checkpoint I remember the last time I was here, in 1994 with my big Cessna. In six trips I flew in 45 bales of straw for the race, using wheels to land on the icy, sloping 1,200-foot-long runway because there wasn’t quite enough snow to use skis. Every landing was an adventure of its own, although not quite on a par with what I’ve just come through.

Teams must run alongside the narrow, snow-covered ski runway at Rohn before pulling into the checkpoint. Winds often make this runway treacherous for Iditarod Air Force pilots.

Quickly we stop in front of the old trapper’s cabin nestled deep in the spruce forest which has served as the checkpoint since the first Iditarod. I find to my pleasure the checker is my friend Jasper Bond, whom I flew from one end of the race to the other in 1992 on his first visit to Alaska. A self-employed potter from Minnesota who unabashedly describes himself as a mushing groupie, he seems to have found his ultimate calling in the Iditarod.

He’s rapidly become a checker, a responsibility normally reserved for veteran Iditarod mushers. Moreover, he’s become one of the best in the business; his checkpoints are well organized and as musher-friendly as often-austere conditions permit, just what tired drivers need after something like Rainy Pass and the Dalzell.

Once I get the dogs fed and bedded down among the sheltering spruce trees I head over to the crowded cabin to dry out and catch a nap. The first thing I find out over a bowl of steaming soup is that the trail’s apparently random excursion back above the Gorge was to bypass a bull moose which stomped through Sven Engholm’s team earlier in the day, injuring three dogs. Barely five hours before I went through, the same monster roadblocked several other mushers for an hour until a passing snowmachiner put in the bypass.

After the harrowing trip through the Alaska Range, the Rohn checkpoint is a most welcome sight. Checker Jasper Bond has been the gracious host at the vintage trapper’s cabin for the past few races.

For all anyone knows, Bullwinkle is still there, obstinately defending his little piece of paradise. We must have blissfully zipped right around him in the dark. It’s just as well I didn’t know about him; I had my hands full with the sled and I doubt I’d have done anything with my old.44 magnum except spook the dogs.

As usual I spend too much time visiting with Jasper despite his repeated urging to get some rest. In addition to catching up on the last year or two, I know he and his crew have some good stories to tell about their two-week stint setting up the checkpoint here and guarding mushers’ food bags from the valley’s wolf population. At least two wolf packs roam this area and they long ago deduced this time of year means food at Rohn.

They’ll get all they can eat when Jasper’s bunch pulls out in a couple of days and leaves hundreds of pounds of leftover dog food for them. If nothing else, Iditarod means a respite for the local prey animals because the predators are stuffed on lamb, beef, chicken, and kibbles.

Nestled in the forest under the jagged peaks of the Alaska Range, the old cabin at Rohn is used by the Iditarod for a few weeks during late February and early March. This is easily one of the most picturesque locations on the

I guess it’s just the presence of a friendly face here in the middle of this incredibly beautiful nowhere, but I feel right at home and wish I could stay here for a couple of days. Eventually I stretch out on the plank floor underneath the table while my heavy gear dries out over the well-stoked wood stove. It’s a most pleasant rest, made all the better by the good company and spectacular surroundings. For the first time on the race, I drift off to sleep with carefully guarded optimism: I might actually make it to Nome this year.

March 6, 1996—The Iditarod: Rohn to Nikolai (94 miles)

I oversleep at Rohn and don’t hit the road until late morning. This will be the second longest stretch between checkpoints and I estimate it will take my slow freight train at least 12 hours to work across the Farewell Burn to Nikolai.

I’d hoped to be moving at dawn to have the cool of the morning for the 30-mile run down the South Fork of the Kuskokwim to Farewell Lakes and then up onto the Burn itself. It promises to be another hot day and I’d have preferred to shut down out in the Burn for awhile to spare the dogs another unwelcome day on the beach.

The old trapper’s cabin at Rohn is a relic of the early days of the century when the Iditarod Trail was still in daily use during the winter. Now maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, the cabin has served as a checkpoint for every Iditarod.