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

I don’t have much choice but to press on as best I can and have everything looked at in Ruby, if and when I get there. Just to be safe I open my medicine kit and take a couple of amoxycillin pills normally intended for the dogs; at least I can try to ward off any infection. I know everything will start to hurt sooner or later but I don’t want to take any of the heavy-duty emergency painkillers I’ve brought along for fear of impairing my judgment, already at a low ebb because of fatigue and lack of sleep.

Bootying the dogs takes twice as long as normal and I can’t pull the Velcro tabs as tight as I’d like, and I have to work the snaps on the tug-lines with my left hand, but we’re ready to go in half an hour. I can still hold on to the handlebar with my left hand and a couple of fingers on my right, so I give Socks the okay and we move off up the road.

Immediately we begin to climb, but the dogs are rested and pull steadily. After an hour we creep around an uphill bend and see a mirage floating at the side of the road: the long-lost hospitality tent. It was really here all the time, just eight or nine miles farther than any of us imagined.

As we get closer I can see it’s the real thing, an old 12-man Army tent, the kind with the pointy top and the inevitable stovepipe poking out. As we pull up a man and woman come out and wave; they’re the first non-mushers I’ve seen for 24 hours. I set the snow hook and go inside the tent.

It is indeed the haven I’d hoped it would be, except I don’t really need it after spending most of the day camped out back down the road. However, the hosts — one from a communications company in Anchorage and one from Sam’s Club — insist I have something to eat and rest for at least a little while. This is an offer I can’t refuse; I decide on a couple of bacon cheeseburgers.

While the hostess fires up the grill, I go back out to the sled and toss the dogs some dry food and frozen beef: if I’m going to eat, so should they. In another of the small coincidences I’m getting used to on the race, the kibbles the dogs are happily gobbling are one of Sam’s house brands, albeit their top of the line. To my knowledge I’m the only musher using it on the race. It’s been a big hit with the dogs out here on the trail and I haven’t had even a hint of the diarrhea plaguing other mushers.

Then I’m back inside relaxing and asking questions. Apparently the tent is 12 miles past the Sulatna bridge because a mining airstrip just up the ridge is the only place the Beaver on skis could land with the equipment and supplies. Most mushers have stopped here over the past several days, some for extended periods, and everyone has pronounced it a Really Good Deal.

When the host says he’s a med-tech in Anchorage, I remember to pull the thick mitten off my right hand so he can look at it. I’m shocked at the extent of the swelling and so is he. Half the hand looks like it’s on its way to becoming hamburger. He says it’s broken and I’m not in a position to argue.

Then he says they have something which might help: Sam’s is giving away sample packets of naproxen, a new anti-inflammatory drug supposedly better than ibuprofen, and they’ve got a good supply. It won’t make me drowsy or silly so I decide it might be worth a shot. He grabs a handful and I pop several on the spot and stuff the others in my pocket. I chase the pills with the best burger I’ve had in a century.

After an hour I have to get moving; Ruby is only 38 miles away, but at the breakneck speed my team is traveling I could be staring at an all-nighter. Back on the road — literally — I notice we have the luxury of mileposts marking the distance to Ruby and the end of this little exercise in madness. As expected, the road climbs repeatedly over ridges and dips down into valleys. What I didn’t expect was for all the culverts and bridges to turn into nightmares of overflow which make the road to Ophir look like a pregame warm-up.

As an example, not far past the tent the road makes a sweeping horseshoe curve set into the side of the mountain; at least 100 yards of the roadway are encased in ice up to five feet thick sloping down toward the inside of the bend. I have to stop the team to try to scope a way through the mess. There’s no way to stay on the road itself, and the infield is a morass of ugly brown snow and willows. I urge Pullman onto a narrow band of snow in what would be the downhill ditch; it’s laced with water-slicked ice patches but she gets us through and I manage to keep from spilling the sled.

The road has one of these winter wonderlands every mile or two, some much worse than others. On a couple of them both the dogs and I get our feet wet despite our best intentions. I can’t wait to try this after dark, which will be in an hour or two. I give up all hope of making decent time; this may turn into a tougher test than Happy River.

The village of Ruby perches on the south bank of the mile-wide Yukon. It was a major boom town in 1911.

Just at dusk we pull into the semi-ghost town of Long, center of a major gold rush in 1911. It’s strictly a summer place now, and many of the dozens of old buildings and cottages have evidently been kept in repair over the years. But the relatively good shape of the place, combined with the eerie snow-covered stillness, gives the entire town a strange post-apocalyptic feeling, as if it has been abruptly abandoned and suspended in time. As I glide silently through the streets on what is obviously a modern road complete with highway signs, I wonder where all the people have gone. I feel like the only human left on earth after some global cataclysm.

As night gathers around the hills the road becomes increasingly spooky, with half-concealed old cabins and buildings and mining works scattered along its unplowed route. My acute lack of sleep, aggravated by the increasing pain in my hands despite the naproxen, isn’t helping matters and I’m starting to hallucinate. At least once I stop the team and try to pull them onto the shoulder to let an imaginary truck by. Another time I find myself carrying on a conversation with someone walking alongside the sled; the dogs slow and stop, wondering what strange commands I’m giving them.

As we work up onto a pass well above timberline (for some reason I remember this on a map as The Hub Hill) the northern lights launch themselves across the sky in ever-intensifying waves of writhing incandescence. Staring at them as the dogs float ahead of me I know I am losing my grip on reality but there is absolutely nothing I can do.

My sleep-starved mind goes into a sort of free fall, a truly strange but somehow not frightening state in which images and ideas and words and sounds all float together in a primordial mental stew. Hurtling from this free-association zone come combinations which could never have been formed without a breakdown of normal mental barriers. Some are bizarre, some are beautiful, some are surprisingly logical, some are simply improbable. They all sail past my helpless consciousness as I try to grab even one or two to hold on to.

Through all of this I have intervals of lucidity, apparently frequently enough to ensure the team continues to run smoothly on the road. And the hallucinations continue to pop in and out of focus as well, aided by the powerful stimulus of the undulating aurora overhead. At one point I go for several miles down the road wondering why I haven’t gone under what is unquestionably an illuminated overpass ahead; finally I realize it is the arch of the northern lights.

I am jarred back to full awareness about 15 miles from Ruby. We’ve just come down a long grade and the road is crossing a valley, but it has completely vanished under overflow for as far as my headlight can probe. It is as if a cascade of ice has oozed from the nearby hillside and engulfed everything in its path. There are no trail markers and no road signs. I try to guess where the right-of-way goes by following the fall line of the ice where the freezing water has flowed over the shoulder and created an icy wall as much as three or four feet high.