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

No other dog teams were in sight as Terhune climbed off the frozen beach and turned his dogs down Front Street. At long last the old paratrooper relaxed. The fifty-third musher into Nome was a satisfied man.

He found Dawn and his two grown daughters waiting near the arch. They were holding a long handmade banner. “Welcome Jon,” it read.

Gunnar Johnson mushed into town 45 minutes later.

The others weren’t far behind. Johnson’s desertion had sparked a general exodus from Safety. To hell with waiting for me. The race was on again. A wild contest developed in the final miles. Charging across the icy drifts outside Nome, Daily thought he had the edge. Bogus, looking inspired, loped like a frisky pup. He dusted the Mormiles and surged ahead of Mark Williams. But Tom Daily’s eight dogs were simply outpowered by the fourteen dogs pulling Urtha Lenthar’s sled.

Lenthar, Daily, and Williams finished within one minute of each other, notching the fifty-fifth, fifty-sixth, and fifty-seventh positions in the record book. Not long afterward, Catherine Mormile won the race that mattered most to her — beating her husband, Don, and the Mowth’s old dogs to the arch by almost 20 minutes. Cooley, our unofficial participant, let the others go ahead and followed Mormile into town, finishing at 10:43 A.M.

Bellies warmed by a hot meaty broth, my dogs slept on the lee side of Safety while the other teams raced for Nome. I lingered at the bar, sipping the beer Daily had bought me, sinking ever deeper into depression as I listened to the live radio coverage. The voice of Nome’s checker, Leo Rasmussen, pierced my funk.

“If Brian O’Donoghue would ever leave Safety,” I heard Leo say on the radio, “maybe we could get this over with.”

I briefly wondered if there was any way to sneak into Nome, hide the dogs, and keep Rasmussen waiting forever. That would show him.

The one thing I had in my power to do was scratch. Let Mormile keep the damn Red Lantern. That was tempting. For the first time in the entire race, I seriously considered scratching.

Pondering the ramifications, I ordered another beer.

Two and a half hours later, I’d run out of reasons not to go. The wind kicked up as I prepared to leave. Drifts had erased every trace of the trail.

“Perfect,” I said, dragging Chad to the closest marker, the first in a line of flapping streamers, which stretched toward a cluster of subdivision homes.

Golden Dog was in a contrary mood. He ignored my commands and repeatedly dragged Harley and the team away from the markers. I wanted to win this last battle of wills, but Chad was equally determined to follow snowmachine tracks leading to nearby homes. Forty-five minutes after leaving Safety, the bar remained in view behind us. The checker came outside and stared. This wasn’t going to work. Demoting Chad, I placed Rainy up with Harley. The lesbian quickly sniffed out the trail, and Safety finally faded behind us.

Wind, fog, mist, and blinding snow — we encountered the whole gamut on the Iditarod’s final 20 miles. The dogs paid no mind. They were too hardened to flinch.

Passing through a cluster of homes near the beach, I saw a couple sitting on chairs next to a marker. It was an older man and woman. They flagged me down.

“We were waiting for you,” the woman said, petting Rainy and Harley. “Could we offer you a cup of coffee or a bite to eat?”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I guess there’s some folks waiting for me.”

I was flattered that strangers would take the time to welcome me. The wind was dying down, and the day appeared brighter.

Rounding a bend, I confronted several dog teams, headed right at us. I realized we must have crossed the trail of another race as three teams passed, head-on, going full bore. I was startled by a face I knew, Iditarod musher Peryll Kyzer. She’d not only finished an impressive eighteenth; she was already running another race.

“Hi, Peryll,” I shouted as she flew past on my left.

“Brian!” she said. “Welcome to Nome.”

A few miles ahead the trail neared a plowed road leading to Nome. I knew the area well. It was the place where I had once had a pair of cameras freeze up while I was shooting Nayokpuk leading another musher through a storm, which subsequently halted the race for days. I had also been waiting here as Butcher charged into view, en route to her third straight victory. And it was at this same spot, 40 hours later, that I had witnessed Redington cap his bold run as Smokin’ Joe.

With the race lost to Susan and the other young hounds, Redington had waited at Safety for Nayokpuk. The two veterans traded stories over coffee, then Old Joe issued a challenge.

“Now we’re going to race,” he said.

The lead switched several times during the furious 22-mile sprint that followed. Redington emerged victorious, crossing the finish line 1 minute, 16 seconds, ahead of Nayokpuk.

“This is fantastic,” Butcher said, greeting the pair under the arch. “This is the best race within the race.”

Iditarod’s 70-year-old founder had failed to take the big prize, but Smokin’ Joe’s style couldn’t be beat. He earned $9,000 for the fifth-place finish, which equaled his all-time best.

In the morning, Nayokpuk awoke with a tingling in his left arm.

“I just hate to think our race had anything to do with it,” said Redington, pacing the floor of the Nome checkpoint as his friend was being flown to a hospital in Anchorage. “But Herbie, he was pushing pretty hard.”

Nayokpuk was hospitalized with a mild stroke. He recovered, but his Iditarod days were over. Thus ended the racing career of the Shishmaref Cannonball.

As for Redington, he never topped that 1988 run.

“In my mind,” Swenson said, years later. “There’s no question Joe would have won that race if he had a trail out of Cripple. It’s a damn shame.”

As I pulled within sight of the road, I heard honking and whistling. People were cheering. The reception awaiting us grew wilder by the mile. A procession of snowmachines fell in on either side of us. Cars and trucks paced the team on the nearby road. People were clapping and waving from every drift.

A man leapt out of the back of a pickup truck. Clambering down a snow berm, he tossed me a can of beer. “This Bud’s for you,” he shouted. “We knew you were going to make it.”

“Never any doubt,” I said.

The dogs responded to the attention like pros. With nary a flinch or misstep, Rainy and Harley kept the team rolling across the frozen beach and through the crowds perched on the hard drifts at the edge of town. I was proud watching the team climbing the last berm onto Front Street. Once on the road, Rainy and Harley eagerly chased a police car, which lead us to the arch, lights flashing all the way.

A crowd of a hundred people, maybe more, was waiting at the finish line. The bodies parted before Rainy and Harley, who led the team right up the middle. Leo Rasmussen stood at the end of the tunnel, a microphone in one hand and a clipboard in the other. The lesbian passed by him and ran straight under the twin burls. Jamming the hook down, I ran up and slapped the overhead arch.

The time was 2:55. My name boomed through the loudspeakers. Rasmussen was saying something about my setting a new record: first musher to ever start first and finish last. Flashes popped. Familiar faces shouted things I couldn’t quite make out. Rasmussen inspected the sled, checking off one sleeping bag, hand axe, and a pair of snowshoes. He collected the packet containing our commemorative mail delivery, via dog team, from Anchorage. Then Leo presented the clipboard. I scrawled my name in the line reserved for the sixtieth musher to Nome. Next to the signature was my team’s total elapsed time on the trail: 22 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, 55 seconds.