Well, the 2006/2007 season is over. After a few weeks of recuperation, the 2007/2008 season will begin and my main mission will be the training of at least a half dozen reliable command leaders. I don’t blame my lead dogs for what happened at the Iditarod, but the fact that I did not have reliable command leaders did significantly contribute to our experience on the way up to Rainy Pass, and my decision to scratch. So, what happened at the Iditarod? This:
I started the race with a 12 day schedule and the philosophy that I just needed to make it from one checkpoint to the next, and do that by running fast and resting long. Well, by the time I reached Finger Lake I was already 6 hours ahead of my schedule, and I gained another ½ hour between there and Rainy Pass, mainly by sticking with my plan – running fast and resting long; except that we were running FASTER, and resting as planned. And, despite my fast run times I was on the drag mat slowing my team down for the ENTIRE RACE!!! When I got to Rainy Pass I was having a tremendous amount of fun and running what I felt was the best race I or my dogs had ever run. My dogs weren’t any more tired at Rainy Pass than before we started the race, they were all standing up to eat every single meal, they were all well hydrated, and none of them ever needed to be coaxed off the straw to leave a checkpoint. My team was truly ready to travel at that point, and flawless other than the two dogs I dropped at Finger Lake due to minor injuries from running through some areas of horribly soft trail between Skwenta and Finger Lake.
But, at Rainy Pass my luck changed. Upon checking in we were told by race officials that there were 90 mph winds on the next section of trail and that the trail markers were all blown away. Admittedly, I got scared; and this is where I first ignored my plans, my schedule, and my race philosophy. We were scheduled to rest for 6 hours which would have meant leaving at about midnight Monday night. But even the veteran mushers in the musher cabin were “hanging tight” and didn’t want to head into that weather. So I stayed until morning at which point I tried to leave with a group of 3 other mushers at about 7 a.m. but ended up missing that train by about 10 minutes; and 10 minutes was no different than 10 hours in that weather. After a mile or so of traveling through a tranquil valley at the west end of Puntilla Lake (which is the Rainy Pass checkpoint) the trail climbed up a ridge on the way to Rainy Pass itself, and like a switch turning on we were suddenly in winds that were, by my estimation, in the neighborhood of 60 mph. The trail alternated from hard, fast and obvious, to soft, deep, and gone. And then after a few miles my dogs disappeared; I could no longer see them; any of them. Despite being able to see all the mountain tops around me, the visibility at ground level was no greater than the length of my sled. I “crossed my fingers” but remained calm and confident because my dogs had done great on some windblown trail during training in Healy, Alaska, and because I had yet to give my leaders a single command to that point in the race – they were “magically” finding the trail the whole way. In fact, I thought I would do more harm than good if I tried to help by giving commands.
My confidence, though, was quickly shaken when I suddenly found myself stopped. All I can figure is that the trail curved in one of those areas where it was drifted in with snow and “gone”, and the dogs didn’t curve with it; they ran straight. I ran up to the front of the team and all 14 of my dogs were in a ball and we were in the middle of some willows on the tundra, clearly not on the trail. But I didn’t know how long or far we had been off the trail, or which way we had run off it. I made the split second decision to turn the team around before our own tracks were blown in so we could run back to where we lost the trail and then continue on toward Rohn, the next checkpoint.
We started running back, but our tracks were already gone in the time it took to turn the team around; and now we were on open tundra with no trail – no hard packed snow – and I couldn't stop. I let them go for a while hoping my leaders would eventually retrace our steps in some fashion and get back to the trail at some point. But that didn’t happen and I soon came to the realization that we were running off the wrong side of the ridge we were on, heading more north when we needed to go more south. It was at this point, while we were still moving, but in the wrong direction, that my mission for the day became clear – get off that ridge before dark and try to make it back to the Rainy Pass checkpoint. I grabbed a snow hook, started dragging it, intentionally tipped my sled over on the snow hook, and rode the side of the sled until the hook and sled caught on something and we stopped. I tried getting my leaders to “gee” us back toward that tranquil valley we had climbed out of at the west end of Puntilla Lake, because I assumed if we could just get into that valley we would be safe from the wind and could just head east and eventually run into the checkpoint, whether we got there by the trail or some other route. But my leaders wouldn’t do it – they wouldn’t ‘gee’ because there was no trail to ‘gee’ onto and this also meant turning up wind; and this is where my failure to train reliable command leaders came back to bite me because now I had to get off my sled to lead my leaders by hand in an area where the sled wasn’t reliably “anchored”.
Sure enough, by the time I walked up to the leaders to manually lead them up wind, they would “pop” the hook and take off down wind. I would jump on the sled, which was still on its side, and ride it until the snow hook and sled caught something else. I walked up to the leaders to lead them up wind again, and…….same thing. Three or four times this happened, causing the dogs to get frustrated, frantic, and start chewing themselves free. So, now my focus changed from heading south – up wind – to getting my dogs back on cable necklines because I was worried I was going to start losing dogs. I took my mittens off, got my cable necklines out of my sled, and started the conversion.
But the time it took to do this gave the team enough time to get even more frustrated that we weren’t moving, and get tired of that relentless and powerful wind that was hammering us, and lie down. By the time I was ready to go again they were all buried in the snow and had no interest in getting up to go. I couldn’t get them to get up on their own or get them to head back into the wind even by leading them myself. So, now I needed a new plan; the team wasn’t going to move.
What I decided to do in an effort to get off that ridge and out of the wind as quickly as possible was unhook all the dogs from the gangline – because now they were all laying down and buried in the snow and weren’t going anywhere – push my sled in the direction I wanted to go the length of my gangline, string out the gangline with a leaderhook, and then walk one dog at a time up to the new location. Then I'd let them all lie down again, unhook them all again, and do it all over. I kept leapfrogging the whole team and my sled like this, by hand and one-by-one, for about four hours and eventually, miraculously (at least I thought it was miraculous at the time), found the trail. But since this all required “undoing” and “doing” snaps, and leading dogs by their collars, it was all done with my mittens off.
After finding the trail I let the dogs lie down and rest for a short time while I got something to eat, tied up some makeshift tuglines since the dogs had chewed them all and I only had 8 spares with me, and tried to warm up my hands. Then I broke the caked snow and ice balls off the dogs, hooked them back up to the tuglines, and we were ready to go; and when we did, the dogs started heading back up wind toward Rohn. Momentarily I was happy because they were willing to run into the wind again; and with what I know now, I probably should have let them go. But we had spent a total of 5 hours in that intensely cold and dehydrating environment -- somewhere around 30 below zero with 60 or so mph winds -- so I really didn’t want to run them another 5 hours to Rohn, and through the Dalzell Gorge to boot, so I “hawed” them back toward Rainy Pass checkpoint with the intent of taking my mandatory 24 hour rest, resting and checking all the dogs, making sure they were still well hydrated, and waiting for the weather to clear up a little before trying to get over Rainy Pass again.
Well, the weather never did clear up; it actually got worse and started snowing. And when I realized I had frostbitten all 8 of my fingers during that 4 hours with my mittens off, and was having trouble even feeding my dogs let alone doing things like putting booties on, I decided there's no way I could continue for 800 more miles. Continuing would mean risking the safety of both me and my dogs. So, after spending my 24 hour rest doing nothing more than feeding my dogs, trying unsuccessfully to sleep, and trying to decide whether to scratch or not, I did.
Was there any solace in the fact that so many people scratched at Rainy Pass that the checkpoint ran out of scratch forms? Not really. The hard work and sacrifice over the course of the entire year by me, my dogs, and everyone who supported me during the season and at the start of the race, was all for only 200 miles. It was an intensely depressing time, and the depression was amplified by the fact that I was stranded at Rainy Pass for 3 more days due to the weather. And then it was amplified yet again when I finally did leave and flew directly over the entire trail all the way back to Anchorage. Seeing what we did accomplish made me even more sad that we didn’t accomplish it all; we didn’t achieve our goal; we didn’t get to Nome. And what I believe I was, and still am, most sad and depressed about is that my dogs didn’t get the opportunity to realize what they worked so hard for all year, and what they were clearly ready, willing, prepared, and eager to do – to travel over 1,000 miles of some of the most rugged terrain on earth. My dogs were ready; my dogs wanted to do it.
Despite the disappointment and depression of scratching, for 200 miles we had a great time. For 200 miles I did nothing more than try to slow a team down that was intensely interested in running that trail; but not just running that trail, RACING that trail. For 200 miles I realized, maybe for the first time, that I didn’t have a dog team merely capable of going from Anchorage to Nome; I had a dog team that could RACE from Anchorage to Nome, and do it competitively. Additionally, despite only running 200 miles of the race, I learned a whole lot that I couldn’t have learned any other way, no matter how many mushers I talk with, no matter how many articles I read, no matter how much advice I get; and this will all be invaluable toward our next attempt – most likely Iditarod 2009.
Stay tuned.
