Brian O'Donoghue: My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

Cresting Topkok, the trail crossed a short flat plateau. I stopped the team and studied the valley below. The view was surprisingly clear. I could trace the trail, winding through bushes and shrubs to a shelter on the valley floor. It looked dark and deserted. Way, way off in the distance, I saw a string of moving lights.

“Gotcha!” I said. Releasing the brake, I sent my dogs charging downward.

I’d come straight through from White Mountain. The dogs were due for a break, so I paused to check out the shelter cabin. Leaving the crew gnawing on chunks of whitefish, I headed inside. The cabin interior was hot. Coals were still glowing in the stove. Obviously, the others had spent a fair amount of time at the cabin.

I found some crackers and munched on them as I read the graffiti on the walls of the cabin. Recently refurbished, the shelter cabin beneath Topkok was in the best shape of any I’d seen on the trail. Most of the graffiti must have been left by mushers in this year’s race. I saw comments from quite a few people I recognized, including Swenson, who was already gloating about win number five.

I scrawled a ditty about slipping from first to worst. “Let historians ponder that,” I muttered, signing and dating it. Then I headed back outside and roused the dogs. It wasn’t over yet.

Terhune kept Daisy on the march. He watched over his shoulder for headlamps, but none appeared. He traveled as much as possible with his own headlamp off. No reason to give those bastards a target to shoot at. Finally, Terhune saw a red-neon bar sign. Safety. He’d made it. Goddamn.

Terhune snacked his dogs and then studied the exit trail. Inside the bar he grabbed a plate of food and took a seat at a window overlooking the incoming trail. He wanted to give his dogs as much rest as possible. Exactly how long that might be, Jon didn’t know. It depended on what he saw through the window.

Herrman had mushed into Nome early that morning, finishing in fifty-first place. Plettner had pulled across the finish line at 6 A.M. It galled him, but nothing Terhune could do would ever change that. But he could still stick it to those guys behind him. Thirty minutes passed, then 45.

“Good,” the musher said, studying his watch. His dogs were getting a decent break. His stay was approaching an hour, when Terhune spied a distant bobbing light. He dashed for the bar door.

“Daisy!” the musher called the lead dog’s name as he rushed toward the team. He grabbed several dogs and jerked them to their feet. Jumping on the runners, he reached for his snow hook. The finish line was 20 miles away. The others might be faster, but he had the jump.

Mushing away with his own headlamp switched off, Terhune watched over his shoulder. The single light had swelled to a moving cluster. Near the bar, the lights stopped. He had expected that. They had to stop to sign in. OK. OK. What would they do now? The lights remained stationary, and he slowly pulled away. Jon Terhune smiled. The fools were letting him get away.

“I can’t believe Terhune is going to beat us,” Mark Williams repeated. “He had the slowest dogs in the race.”

Sitting at the bar, Daily shrugged. He wasn’t impressed with Terhune. Daily’s dogs would arrive in Nome in better shape. He was sure of that. And he wasn’t impressed with Gunnar Johnson’s deceitful little maneuver. The way he had snuck off, deserting everybody here at Safety, minutes after pretending he agreed with Cooley’s plan to wait for O’Donoghue and mush into Nome together. It rubbed Daily the wrong way.

What was the rush? Next year he would come back and really race.

Daily ceremoniously bought himself a beer, the first he’d had in 21 days. He bought Cooley one, too.

The veterinarian was embarrassed. “Can I borrow money for a burger, Tom?” he whispered, confessing that he was flat broke.

If it wasn’t the worst night of my life, it was close. Taking that short break at the cabin had been a major mistake. It had destroyed the team’s rhythm. Leaving the cabin, Rainy and Harley slowed to a crawl. It was a repeat of the Golovin turnaround.

I was in trouble myself. Couldn’t keep my eyes open. Looking for a caffeine jolt, I started dipping my fingers in the baggy of instant coffee and licking the powder off my fingertips. The secret weapon was a dud. All I got from chewing that lousy powder was cramps.

The mist returned, and world closed in around me. The whiteness just went on and on. At one point, I saw a light coming up from behind. It looked like a musher’s headlamp, but it couldn’t be; the light was coming too fast. Yet it was a dog team, closing so fast that my dogs seemed to be standing still.

“It’s got to be Plettner,” I decided by process of elimination. No one else had that kind of speed. The musher waved as the team caught and passed us. It was a man. That didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t figure it out, and then I realized the team and the sled looked all wrong. It wasn’t an Iditarod musher. The sled was empty. It must have been some local speed demon.

The trail joined an unplowed road. Misery incarnate. Clocking the accompanying mile markers, I calculated that the team had slowed to under three miles an hour. No wonder it felt like we were crawling tonight. Rainy kept stopping to stare at … nothing.

Tonight my space cadet was in total orbit. Her pauses hobbled us. Watching the lesbian blast off for the third time in a mile, I stopped the team and switched Chad into lead with Harley. The team’s pace improved. But it felt like we were just plowing faster into the void. A light snow caused spots to dance in the beam of my headlamp. I had a terrible time holding on. The road was so smooth. So endless.

With absolutely no warning, I drew alongside another parked Iditarod team. I didn’t recognize the sled, but it was fully packed. The musher was nowhere to be seen. Dusted with snow and curled in tight balls, the musher’s dogs were sleeping in front of the sled in a straight line.

Dazed, wondering who I’d caught, I stomped my snow hook into the ground. When I looked up, the other team was gone. A line of driftwood rested in its place.

I didn’t need my headlamp anymore. The slow-falling snowflakes taunted me, jittering unpredictably, straining my eyes in the blue predawn light. It was approaching eight A.M. We’d been mushing down the lousy road for what seemed like days. The coffee baggie was half gone, and I was feeling queasy.

At last, a light gleamed in the distance. A red and white bar light. A checkpoint called Safety. “Let’s go home!” I whispered. Chad raised his head. Ears shot up along the line. The dogs shifted gears, recharged with purpose.

I clung to the hope that others might be having similar problems. Surely I’d catch a few other teams lingering in Safety. I knew Terhune wouldn’t wait. But Cooley had talked about it. And the Mormiles couldn’t be too far ahead, could they?

All I found waiting was a tattered Iditarod banner, flapping in the wind. And a beer Daily had bought me on his way out the door.

“How long ago did the last team leave?” I asked the weary checker, hope flickering an instant longer.

“No more than twenty minutes,” he said.

Calculations raced through my mind. It was 20 miles to Nome. Except for Cooley’s dogs, the teams ahead weren’t anything special. They’d be lucky to do six miles an hour. That gave me …

“They rested here two, maybe three hours,” the checker added.

Hope died. Dead last. I was going to finish dead last.

A musher was sighted on the outskirts of Nome. The news was broadcast on KNOM radio at 9 A.M. Sunday, March 24, day 22 of Iditarod 1991. The banners and other decorations that greeted Swenson were no longer present, long since torn down or damaged in the numerous storms of the last 10 days. But the Burl Arch marking the Iditarod’s finish line remained standing downtown. That was all that mattered.