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

I’ve heard the trail has been especially hard on some of the front-runners and they’ve had to drop more dogs than expected at both Cripple and Ruby. DeeDee Jonrowe supposedly had to carry a dog in the basket for 100 miles; this can’t have helped her chances for a top finish. This convinces me to keep my dogs well under control, since I’m hoping to keep as many as I can all the way to Nome.

I urge the team out onto the trail with no small amount of trepidation. As we leave the comforting security of the checkpoint behind I wonder what shape we’ll be in when we finally reach Ruby, which for the moment seems impossibly far away. For the first 15 miles the trail is deceptively good. We make excellent time in the cool morning air and I begin to think this has all been much overrated.

Then we start to hit the overflow. Every sidehill and stream crossing offers its own little version of misery. The dogs can tiptoe around the edges of some of them, although the sled still plunges through the middle like a water ride at Disney World. In other places the team resembles Miss Budweiser leaving a rooster tail of spray as 50-odd paws splash through the slush.

Even where the overflow is frozen it is often fractured into shards of ice like a department store window after a street riot. The dogs somehow pick their way through the debris with the aplomb of fakirs crossing beds of hot coals. I stop the team after the worst mine fields, expecting to see shredded booties and blood on the ice, but instead am constantly amazed at what Will Barron calls the dogs’ “craftiness” in avoiding injury. I finally yield to the dogs’ better judgment and let them do their own thing. They’ll get us through if I just trust them and keep them headed down the right trail.

We pound on through the morning and into the afternoon. The few drivers who trailed me out of Ophir pass me; one of them says Rich Bosela scratched at Takotna, which means I have officially become the last racer on the trail. I’ve finally drifted all the way to the back of the pack.

About noon I notice what I first take to be a team on the trail ahead of us. As we draw slowly closer I see it’s someone pedaling a trail bike with ATV-sized tires. I think I might be hallucinating but a sharp slap from an overhanging spruce branch convinces me I’m fully awake.

I haven’t the faintest idea what the intrepid cyclist is doing out here in the middle of God’s own nowhere, although he wouldn’t be the first adventurer to try the Iditarod via something other than dog sled or snowmachine. Flying for the race I’ve seen cross-country skiers and even hikers on showshoes trailing the dogs, but a bicycle this far out in the wilderness is something new.

This only seems to fit the increasingly weird atmosphere which seems to permeate this stretch of trail. The worst part is the biker is actually going as fast as my dogs much of the time. He finally stops; I try to make conversation with our improbable fellow traveler but discover he’s apparently from some Germanic-speaking country and doesn’t seem to understand English. My attempts at fractured Spanish and Russian don’t get anywhere either so we end up waving at each other in primitive sign language. Finally I figure out he wants to follow me. The dogs don’t know what to make of this apparition and I have to lead them around it. I swing back onto the runners with a wave and we push off down the trail at what I consider a good pace. I turn to look back and see he’s easily keeping up with us, maybe 50 yards behind. I suppose Martin or Doug or DeeDee might be able to outrun this contraption, but my pack mules insist on walking to Nome and I resign myself to having company all the way to Cripple.

Past Ophir, on both the northern and southern route, the trail traverses a huge expanse of rolling hills and forested river valleys before reaching the Yukon. The terrain includes vast stretches of taiga such as this. (Taiga is Russian for “land of little sticks.”)

Shortly after I take the lead in this convoy we reach a well-marked turn off of the main trail. After 100 yards on this detour we break out of a tree line onto the Innoko River bottoms. Dead ahead is the infamous temporary bridge, and it looks even worse than the checker described it.

It is actually no more than several spruce logs laid across the open part of the river, anchored on what’s left of the ice attached to either bank. Spruce boughs have been laid on top of the logs and then covered with snow to form a semblance of a walkway. By now, of course, there’s not much snow left and the whole affair more resembles an elongated brush pile than a major engineering work. The approach is across river ice awash in six inches of flowing water, as is the 50 feet from the bridge to the far bank.

I’ve got Pullman up front and after a moment’s hesitation she charges through the overflow and onto the span. She’s over it and into the equally bad stuff on the other side before the sled is actually on the logs. I have my hands full trying to keep the sled lined up on the bridge, which seems to get narrower as I get closer. The water off either edge is deeper than I care to contemplate; all I want is for Pullman to keep going to the opposite shore and get the sled back onto terra firma.

Suddenly Pullman decides to look for a better way around the far-side overflow, but when she leaves the trail she breaks through the ice up to her collar. She flounders in the freezing water while I yell for her to go on. The sled is stalled in the middle of the bridge and I have no room to step around it to help her out of the water without taking a plunge myself. Luckily she clambers onto thicker ice in a few seconds and makes a beeline for the far shore, followed by the rest of the team and finally the sled and me.

I stop everyone on the far side and straighten out a few minor tangles. Pullman has been nearly fully immersed but the sun is warm and the temperature is almost above freezing; I decide the best medicine is to push on and let her dry out in the open air. Besides, she’s shaken herself nearly dry and obviously wants to go on.

As we pull off toward Cripple, now only a few miles distant, I glance back and see the continental cyclist sitting on the far shore pondering his options. He’s watched the whole frantic episode and I’d give a penny for his thoughts about dog mushing right now.

Once across the river the great god of overflow calls a truce for several miles, apparently having had enough fun with us for the time being. We’re slowed down to a crawl because of the heat and the bright sun and it’s another two hours before I finally see a banner emblazoned “Cripple” stretched across the trail on the far side of a 100-yard patch of inch-deep water. With a sigh I urge Pullman across the moat into the dubious refuge of the ephemeral Cripple checkpoint.

We splash under the banner to the applause of the checkers and the vet, all of whom I know. It’s three p.m. and I’m the last musher into the checkpoint. One of the checkers says he won a bet by the mere fact of my making it this far, which reassures me no end.

Half a dozen teams are still here waiting out the afternoon heat and I join them. There’s no water for our cookers, but the snow is so heavy and crusted because of the recent thaw it easily yields plenty of liquid. The dogs gratefully accept the moist food and curl up in the snow for a rest in the sun. They don’t realize it but they’ve lessened their load for the next stretch by 15 pounds or so.

I chat with the checkers and the other mushers, who of course are all dues-paying members of the unofficial tail-enders club. Everyone has had similar experiences with the overflow and the ice. No one is looking forward to the next 125 miles to Ruby, which promises to take 24 hours or more. We’ve gotten a not-exactly-reassuring message back from one of the teams to go through earlier: it says simply the trail is hazardous and in bad shape until we get to Sulatna Crossing, 75 miles farther on where the trail picks up another old mining road for the last 50 miles into Ruby.