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

Around the outcropping I see yet another disaster looming. The ice field ends in about 50 yards and the trail resumes over a bed of jagged grapefruit-sized rocks with absolutely no snow cover. The dogs are just reaching better footing and are starting to accelerate. If I can’t get the sled upright or the dogs stopped before the end of the ice, the rocks will probably rip every stanchion out of the still-undamaged left side.

The runway at Rohn is in the foreground and valley of the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River stretches away to the west toward the Farewell Burn.

I frantically scream at Socks to stop, which he does, reluctantly, barely 10 feet from the beginning of the rock garden. Face down on the ice, I hold on to the now-stopped sled and gather my wits. When I look up, I see the Daily Newspersons snapping away. I must have presented quite a sight coming up the ravine, hanging on for dear life and shouting for the team to cease and desist.

With as much dignity as I can muster I politely ask if there is any more of this. I can’t stand another photo session like this one. Trying not to grin, Medred admits this is the end of the bad stretch. I hope he’s right. Bernie Willis builds good sleds, but nothing short of the battleship New Jersey can take more pounding like this without disintegrating.

The news crew stays behind to gather up their gear and I press ahead. There are some bad spots, and the buffalo chutes are nothing but bare tundra and ice in places, but we don’t encounter anything more of the magnitude of the Post River icefall. Rather, as we work our way up behind Egypt Mountain on our way to Farewell Lakes and the Burn, our main adversaries become the glaring sun and increasing heat.

I’d hoped to rest during the afternoon, but we’re behind schedule and I need to keep the dogs going, even if slowly. I make frequent short stops and give them snacks of frozen fish and meat; this seems to keep them from melting down and we chug inexorably on across the Farewell Lakes and up toward the Burn.

About the only distractions are great piles of buffalo droppings in some of the open meadows which the dogs simply must investigate before we can proceed. We don’t see any of the shaggy beasts, but I know they’re all around us, probably demonstrating their superior intelligence by sheltering from the sun among the trees.

At one point we pass a group of long-abandoned log cabins which obviously date back to the early part of the century. This must be the old Pioneer Roadhouse I’ve heard about. It was one of the stops on the original Iditarod trail, just like the old roadhouses at Skwentna and Rohn. I give the dogs a brief rest while I look quickly around. One of the caved-in cabins would have been the old dog barn, another the bunkhouse where exhausted mushers rested or waited out storms.

This must have been a bustling place back in the trail’s heyday, from about 1910 through the 1920s. From November through March, teams would have been arriving every day carrying supplies and mail to isolated mining camps with names like Ophir, Flat, Iditarod, Poorman, Long, Council, Solomon, and of course, Nome. Some of the returning sleds would have been carrying out the season’s cleanup of gold; one series of teams in 1916 brought more than a ton and a half of the precious metal back to tidewater at Knik.

It’s a strange feeling to know I’m really following in the footsteps of the old mail and freight drivers who were Alaska’s unsung heroes. Probably only a handful of people outside of Iditarod mushers have seen these cabins since the wilderness and hard winters began to reclaim them more than three quarters of a century ago. I get the dogs up and moving with a renewed sense of perspective; we’re only the latest in a long and honored procession of teams to struggle over this trail.

By now the warmth is at its peak but the dogs seem willing to keep going. Unlike some of the high-powered teams, I’m not worried about overheating because we just don’t go fast enough for the dogs to work that hard, and I make lots of short stops just in case. This seems to be the way I’ll run the rest of the race: keep chugging on while everybody else is resting. It’s the only way I can compensate for having what is apparently one of the slowest teams in the field.

By mid-afternoon we start up an endless series of rolling hills to the Farewell Burn. As we crest one last ridge we’re suddenly swallowed up in the Burn itself. The biggest forest fire in Alaska history roared through here in the summer of 1978, burning more than a million acres. The smoke was so thick it darkened skies in Anchorage enough to cause street lights to turn on in some parts of town.

The trail across the Burn to Nikolai can drift in within hours when winds come up. Sometimes the trail is all but obliterated and the driver and dogs must fight their way through on instinct and luck.

I was flying C-130s at Elmendorf at the time and we were pressed into service to fly fuel and supplies out to the fire fighting crews. We made a number of trips to McGrath and the old Federal Aviation Administration strip at Farewell Station, about 10 miles south of Farewell Lakes.

At the time I never dreamed I’d be running dogs through this blighted expanse of charred snags. From the trail it is so all-encompassing it leaves no room in the mind for even a memory of living forests. The only words to describe it are bleak and desolate, on an apocalyptic scale. Even though the fire was almost two decades ago, there is little second growth, at least in this part of the affected area.

Still, from flying over this part of the Burn I know it is a veritable Serengeti with hundreds of moose, caribou, buffalo and even Dall sheep sharing the frozen range. They take advantage of the usually light snow cover in this area to forage on the abundant grass which took the place of the forest. Roaming between the open areas of the Burn and the lush tree line of the Farewell Lakes, they mingle in numbers I’ve not seen elsewhere in Alaska. The thriving population of grazing animals also supports several wolf packs, which I’ve seen in the past from the air. We see none of the residents, although their tracks are everywhere.

The dogs trot unconcernedly on, gazing around at their surroundings and apparently enjoying the trip through a new environment. With no standing trees, our visibility at the crest of every ridge is excellent. However, the Burn is so vast the only vistas are of devastation and of the clean white line of the trail piercing the jumbled wasteland. Atop one ridge I can see at least 20 miles of the trail, arrowing toward the distant hills forming the western horizon beyond the Kuskokwim River.

In a way the Burn has a stark beauty of its own, representing a kind of renewal-in-progress. Fires are part of the natural cycle of regeneration; a century from now this will be a healthy mix of forest and rangeland. It’s difficult for humans to grasp the time scale on which this grand plan plays out, but here and there I can see the signs of new growth which prove Nature is proceeding at her normal pace despite our worries.

The trail is in excellent shape and as the afternoon heat wanes we pick up a bit of speed. I pass two other mushers who left Rohn before me and who have been resting their teams during the day. I come on Lisa Moore in a sheltered hollow and we decide to run together into Nikolai. Our teams are well matched and we run almost nose-to-tail, making good time as we whittle away the 40 miles remaining to Nikolai.