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

Mileposts are virtually unknown on the Iditarod, but the people of Kaltag are kind enough to provide a marker on the seemingly endless, featureless run along the Yukon River.

The x-ray is inconclusive; nothing is obviously broken, but that doesn’t rule out a hairline fracture, which still seems the most likely diagnosis. The doc says to keep taking the anti-inflammatory pills and check the hand at subsequent checkpoints. He sends out a fax advising vets down the trail to examine my hand the same way they would check one of my dogs’ feet. I wonder if they might decide to drop me from the team if it starts to look too bad.

March 12. 1996—The Iditarod: Galena to Nulato (52 miles); Nulato to Kaltag (42 miles)

By the time we’ve gotten the x-ray done and I’m back at the checkpoint, we’ve killed four hours and it’s well past midnight. I grab some food and then try to get some sleep. No luck — same as last night in Ruby. The best I can do is nap sitting up, even though I really, really need some serious shut-eye.

By four a.m. I decide I’ve spent too much time here trying to chase sleep that’s not going to come. I groggily bootie up, hook up, and head out. Again, I’m not the last one out but certainly will be bringing up the rear at Nulato, 50 miles away. The lights of Galena take forever to slide from view even though the dogs are actually doing fairly well in the predawn cold. And it is finally cold, maybe 20 below, enough to help keep me alert. I have to stop to pull on some more layers of insulation but it feels good to be back in temperatures resembling what we’ve trained in all winter.

We motor on down the river as the day slowly fills the sky behind us. We pass all the landmarks I remember from two decades of flying: Pilot Mountain, Bishop Rock, the village of Koyukuk. Andy and his greyhounds pass me at Koyukuk — once again putting me in the race caboose since Lisa left ahead of both of us — but we’re still making reasonable time. Almost before I realize it we’re running past a long riverside ridge which leads to Nulato, another Athabaskan village on the west bank of the river.

The village was already ancient when the Russians founded a trading post here in 1838. In 1851 Athabaskans from up river raided the town and massacred 53 people, mostly local Natives but also the Russian manager and an English naval lieutenant who was looking for information on a lost polar explorer (and who may have unwittingly precipitated the attack). Today Nulato is one of the larger villages on the river with more than 300 people, but the local economy is still largely based on subsistence.

The trail makes a last grand swing across the Yukon to Nulato and we clamber up the bank to the checkpoint. I’m the last one in, of course, but my timing is back on track and I can let the dogs rest a few hours during the heat of the afternoon. I don’t intend to spend very long here; Kaltag is less than 40 miles away, after which we make the big jump out to the coast at Unalakleet. Besides, the weather forecast is for snow to move up from the Aleutians overnight, and I’m not big on getting caught out on the river in it.

While I’m feeding the dogs, Lisa decides to move out for Kaltag. She arrived here a couple of hours ahead of me on the run over from Galena and, like me, wants to keep moving. I wave to her as the checker leads her team to the outbound trail and her dogs start down the steep bank to the river below. She gets about 100 yards out onto the white expanse when her dogs decide to quit.

I watch as she tries to motivate them to go again, but they will have nothing to do with the forbidding void of the Yukon. After 10 minutes of cajoling she throws up her arms in resignation and simply drops anchor in place. She marches back up the hill to the checkpoint, muttering she’ll wait the dogs out no matter how long it takes. I know she’s intensely frustrated and a little worried: this is what happened to her on the 1994 race. By the time she reached Koyuk, less than 200 miles from Nome, the dogs just wouldn’t go at all and she had to scratch.

The Koyukon Athabaskan village of Kaltag on its high bank marks the end of the 150-mile journey down (or up) the mighty Yukon.

After my dogs are squared away I head into the checkpoint and offer Lisa some reassurance. If nothing else, her dogs will certainly follow Socks when I leave; she’s far from stuck. But she says in no uncertain terms her team will leave under its own power, or else; I understand exactly what she means and appreciate her determination. She wants to conquer this problem on her own, just as I did back at Rainy Pass.

While our teams rest outside — mine in the dog lot and hers on the river — we munch on brownies as we watch the live satellite telecast of Jeff King’s triumphant procession down Front Street and under the arch in Nome. He simply walked away from Martin Buser and the rest of the field after Kaltag. He didn’t set a record, but he’s only a couple of hours slower than Doug Swingley’s nine-day cannonball run of last year.

I reflect on the vast gulf between the professionals like Jeff and the back-of-the-packers like me. Their teams routinely cruise at 12 or 14

miles an hour and they have their checkpoint routines down to precise sciences. Unlike my lovable but eclectic collection of veteran hand-me-downs and untried youngsters, their dogs are all reasonably alike in breeding and running habits and form coherent teams.

They don’t have the disruptions and irregularities which plague me in trying to mold a unit from a menagerie ranging from 35-pound Maybelline to 75-pound Yankee. The thought occurs to me that with their well-oiled pulling machines they might actually be having fun out here, or at least more than I am.

Finally we get ready to leave. Socks dutifully lines out the team on the outbound trail, where I hold everyone while Lisa strides purposefully down the river bank to her recalcitrant crew. She doesn’t even need to get them up: they’re ready to go and move off smartly as soon as she steps on the runners. I’m happy for her and hope this has been her turning point.

Andy has his team ready to go behind mine and we all leave Nulato together. Five miles down river, Andy and I keep straight at a fork in the trail while Lisa heads left on an unmarked track. The teams run almost parallel, we up against the right bank and Lisa out in mid-river. These big-river trails always rejoin at some point and we think nothing of it as we cruise quietly on for a couple of miles.

Then Andy brakes to a sudden stop and Socks almost plows into him. Our trail is swamped with major overflow, a situation which has obviously developed very recently. We search for a way around it and finally spy a tenuous trail to the left; this morass has surprised at least one other team before us. I gingerly urge Socks onto the bypass, which is little more than a single sled track through uncompacted waist-deep snow. But it gets us around the overflow after several hundred yards and probably 20 minutes of lost time.

Once back on the trail we rejoin the branch on which Lisa has been running, although she is by now at least a couple of miles ahead. Andy and I have no idea why Lisa took the left hand fork and missed the overflow, especially since we were on the main, marked trail. Feminine intuition, we finally surmise, or else her leader has a better nose than ours.

A few miles later Andy passes me and moves off into the gathering dusk. Soon it begins to snow, part of the storm which is apparently moving faster than expected. So far no one on the race has had any weather problems to speak of, but it seems we might get caught.