“I wouldn’t do the dogs any good with a broken leg,” I told myself, but the words sounded false.
“Denali” is an Athabaskan word meaning “great one,” or “high one.” Local Indians gave the peak towering over the Interior that honored title long before 1896, when prospector William Dickey stuck the name McKinley on North America’s tallest mountain. The traditional name is preferred by most Alaskans over Dickey’s tribute to an Ohio politician who never set foot in Alaska. Indeed, just about every musher has a big dog named Denali, and I was no different.
Wide-shouldered with peaked ears, weighing about 45 pounds, my Denali was muscled like a canine bodybuilder. The young male, a month shy of three years old, should have been coming into his prime on the Iditarod Trail. He and his litter-mate, Screech, shared a striking physical resemblance. But that was all they had in common. Whereas she was a hard-working sweetheart, he was surly and constantly growled at the other males. And he wasn’t keen on putting those rippling muscles to work. His tug line drooped whenever I looked away.
Maybe the others were fed up with Denali’s laziness. Mushers talk about veteran dogs nipping young slackers in the ass. Perhaps the young male made a move for dominance within the team and was rebuffed. I heard a quick growl, then the other dogs turned on Denali as a group, fangs bared, and began tearing into him from every side. I’ve seen big males square off, but the curl in tiny Cricket’s lips as she sunk her teeth into Denali’s left haunch was more menacing. There was no mistaking her intent, or that of the other assailants. It was a pack judgment.
I jumped into the fray as Harley circled back to get in on the action. Throwing myself over Denali as a shield, I elbowed and kicked his attackers away. Then I unclipped the victim from the team and tied him behind the sled.
Blood oozed from bites on his nose and ears, but Denali didn’t appear seriously harmed. I was debating what to do with him when I saw Raven nervously watching from the woods nearby. The sight gave me a chill. Lose a dog and I’d be out of the race. At home, I wouldn’t have worried, since our escapees never strayed far. But I couldn’t take anything for granted with a spooked dog in strange surroundings.
“Here Raven. C’mon little princess,” I said, gently coaxing her. The tone of my voice was all she needed. She dashed over with her tail between her legs, trembling, shaken by the violence.
“That’s OK Raven,” I said, stroking my delicate black beauty. “Everything’s all right.”
I placed Denali in wheel, where I could keep him under closer watch. If there were lingering animosities, they were soon forgotten. The dogs, including Denali, perked up their ears and leaped to their feet at the familiar rustling sound of the snack bag.
The trail to Rainy Pass rolled and snaked through a forest of thin alders. When they set trail earlier in the winter, Iditarod volunteers had trimmed these fast-growing trees. Unfortunately, the snow pack dropped during a warm spell that followed, subjecting dog teams to a gauntlet of jagged sticks and stumps projecting eight inches or more from ground level.
Plowing through mile after mile of the battering sticks, I kept wondering if we were on the right trail. But the markers were unmistakable. My sled was taking a beating. Sticks kept snagging the chains connecting a piece of snowmachine track between my runners, which I used as an extra brake. Sometimes the impediments stopped the team, throwing me against the handlebar — but only for an instant, until the stick, or whatever it was, gave way under pressure, launching my sled forward as if from a slingshot. On one sharp dip, I tasted utter disaster as a stump snagged my sled bow. Under pressure from the dogs, my sled bent in what seemed to be an impossibly tight arc. I braced myself, dreading the “crack” of runners snapping. Thankfully, the bow clamps burst first. My sled popped loose, sporting a busted nose, but sliding.
I almost never drink hard liquor, but I had left Knik packing two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. It was Jack Studer’s idea. The larger quart-sized bottle of whiskey was strictly for trading purposes. Out in the villages, a bottle can buy you a freshly laid snowmachine trail, said Studer, who understood better than anyone the misery of plodding to Nome on snowshoes.
I was also carrying a pint of Jack for personal use. Studer advised me to take a quick belt as I approached each checkpoint. He said it would soothe my transition from the serenity of the trail to the madhouse atmosphere of checkpoints.
The seal on that pint of Jack remained unbroken through Eagle River, Wasilla, Knik, Skwentna, and Finger Lake. But I was ready for a sip as I neared Rainy Pass late Tuesday morning. The bottle felt light as I pulled it out. Hardly a drop remained inside. At first I was baffled, but then I noticed a tiny hole in the cap, where the booze had leaked out. A broken bottle I could understand — but what were the odds of this happening?
Groping inside the sled bag to see if there were any other surprises, I pulled out a handful of plastic splinters: the remains of my spare headlamp reflector. That was no biggie. Though headlamp bulbs burned out fairly often, I had never, over the entire course of training, cracked a headlamp reflector. Those things were as tough as steel.
Parking on a gentle snow-covered slope below Rainy Pass Lodge, I felt bruised and disoriented. Like a mugging victim, assaulted in a beautiful park. My hips and knees were sore from being dragged God knows how many times. Raising my right arm was extremely painful. It humbled me to think that Redington was mushing this trail in his seventies.
And what about Colonel Vaughan? He was already 70 years old in 1975, the first time he attempted Redington’s Great Race. He didn’t make it to Nome that year. Or the year after, when he took a wrong turn in the Alaska Range and spent four days lost before being rescued. Friends and race officials tried to discourage the colonel from attempting the Iditarod again. Vaughan didn’t listen. He returned for the 1978 race, and that time he made it to Nome. Over the next 11 years, the colonel ran the Iditarod eight more times, notching his fourth official finish in the 1990 race at the ever-ready age of 84.
The first time I met him, Vaughan was stretched out on the ice at a checkpoint, crawling from dog to dog, inspecting each paw, rubbing in ointment and placing on booties. He used the belly-down approach to compensate for his bad knees. The colonel wasn’t about to let a slight physical disability force him into retirement. Not Norman Vaughan, the only U.S. airman to earn battlefield honors by dog team, by retrieving a top secret instrument from a downed plane in Greenland during World War II. Sixty years after dropping out of Harvard to handle dogs on Admiral Robert Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole, Vaughan was Alaska’s ageless adventurer.
Contemplating my bruised thirty-five-year-old body, I knew the colonel was tougher than I’d ever be.
I was strongly inclined to take my 24-hour layover at Rainy Pass, a scenic horse ranch overlooking a lake high in the Alaska Range. But the lodge was closed to mushers this year, and the checker wasn’t encouraging.
“This really isn’t a good place to stay,” he said. “There are no facilities. Not even a tent. Yesterday it snowed and rained on the mushers.”
It was day 4 of the race. I’d slept a total of about six hours since leaving Anchorage, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I badly needed a nap. Climbing a mountain pass in this foggy state sounded crazy. Yet I couldn’t rest. There was talk of a storm on its way. I didn’t want to get caught on the wrong side of the range. Rainy Pass might stay blocked for days, and my race would be over right here.