She yawned, leisurely stretching and sunning her tight white belly.
A thin skin of snow clung to the rocks at the top of the pass. Watching Rainy and Harley scrambled over them, I braced for a wild drop. But the slope was gentle, and I could see my whole team cresting the ridge. It was too cloudy to see much of the valley beyond. Dalzell Gorge was saving her secrets.
It was a grand morning on the Iditarod Trail. A hundred yards from the pass, I stopped the team, throwing my sled on its side for an anchor. Pulling out the pocket camera I wore around my neck, I shot pictures of Ace descending the mountain.
The gorge was nothing like the icy roller coaster I was warned to expect. The storm had dumped over two feet of new snow. Rainy was swimming in powder deeper than she was tall. Harley’s head wasn’t covered, but he was swimming just the same. Repeatedly he looked back at me, eyes crying out for a rescue. Tough going. The team kept bunching up, tangling every few feet, and breaking through the soft crust into concealed pools of water.
“Those dogs do like to tangle,” said Ace, chuckling as he watched from behind.
Struggling though the deep soup, I thought back to something Mowry had told me on our final test run. We were crossing an open field. Tiny six-inch drifts were on the march, riding the rising wind.
“This is probably worse than anything you’ll see the whole way to Nome,” the Coach shouted. He gestured at jets of snow raking sideweays across the back of his legs. “Compared to this trail, Iditarod is a highway.” In two trips up the Iditarod Trail and one Quest, representing over 3,000 miles of long-distance mushing, Mowry liked to brag that he had never even unpacked his snowshoes. I shook my head as I reached for mine.
I broke trail for an hour or two, gaining perhaps half a mile as I wallowed in powder and sweat. Progress was steady, albeit at a snail’s pace. It was sweet finally hearing the whine of engines echoing from the ridge. It was Medred and Lavrakas. The journalists were traveling to Rohn by snowmachine. Like cavalry to the rescue, they flew past Ace and me, leaving a new trail in their wake.
Two teams, driven by Mark Williams and Tom Cooley, came loping down the gorge behind the snowmachines. My dogs were in snow-plow mode, and a traffic jam developed. Waving Ace and the others by, I stopped my dogs for a snack break.
Our subsequent run through the gorge was exquisite. The new trail provided footing for the dogs yet remained soft as a cushion. Team and sled glided through thickening trees, skirting pools of open water. I was enjoying life when I spied Medred and Lavrakas up ahead, suspiciously perched on a rock. Rounding a curve I confronted the photo opportunity: a narrow icy bridge over an open creek.
There was no dodging this. As my sled skidded sideways on the ice, I flipped it on one runner and steered it by the open water, trotting alongside like a pro.
“You’re the first one to make it,” Medred called out, sounding surprised.
Lee came through an hour later. His sled whipped into the creek, becoming wedged under the bridge. Lavrakas got a shot of Lee grimacing as he stood in the frigid water.
Could have been me. Would have been me if I hadn’t spotted the media stake out.
Covering the race for the Frontiersman, I hadn’t dared visit Rohn. Access to the remote checkpoint, near the junction of the Tatina and South Fork Kuskokwim Rivers, was mostly limited to charter flights, which I couldn’t afford on our budget. If the weather closed in, a person could get trapped for days waiting for a flight out. And that just wouldn’t do at all, because Rohn didn’t even have a phone from which to feed stories back to the office.
In the gold-rush days, miners traveling the Iditarod Trail found a roadhouse waiting in Rohn. Now the only structure standing was a small 1930s-era cabin, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. It was reserved for race officials and veterinarians. There was a wall tent, equipped with a stove, where mushers could sleep; that was it for services. Rohn’s drawing card was solitude. Off in the spruce forest, away from most reporters and the excitement present in most villages, sled dogs got more rest.
Perhaps a dozen teams were camped at Rohn when I checked in at the cabin at 3:20 P.M. on Wednesday. I immediately declared my 24-hour layover. Over the next few hours, Lee, Daily, Alan Garth, Bill Peele, and, shortly after 8 P.M., Sepp Herrman, mushed into camp. No one remained on the trail behind us.
The mushers tending dog teams bedded in the sheltering spruce here represented Iditarod’s broad spectrum. We had experienced dog drivers such as Ace, Daily, and Herrman — three men who had shared their lives with sled dogs. And we had mushing adventurers like Peele, a 55-year-old pharmaceutical company employee from North Carolina, and Garth, a social worker from England. They were each driving dog teams leased from Old Joe’s huge kennel 90 days or less before the race.
Fetching water from the river with the help of a rickety camp ladder, I served my dogs three hearty meals during our leisurely stay in Rohn. I amassed a huge pile of surplus booties from the camp refuse heap. The checkers also allowed me and the other stragglers to dry personal gear over the cabin’s wood-stove.
On the advice of veterinarian Bob Sept, I gave each dog a foot massage, rubbing ointment into every paw. After 275 miles on the trail, three of my dogs had troublesome cuts or splits in their pads. My sore-footed trio — Screech, Cyrus, and the White Rat — had possessed iron paws during training. Therein lay the cause. They weren’t used to wearing booties and, Cyrus especially, kept pulling them off.
I was really worried about Cyrus. The young dog had stopped pulling on the final miles up to the checkpoint, and he seemed listless, quiet even. It was possible I might have to drop Rattles’s poor puppy.
“Could sore paws alone account for such a personality change?”
You bet, said the vet, who gave me a small vial of ointment for the cuts. I dabbed the goo on those sore paws every few hours, placing booties on afterward to keep the dogs from licking their toes clean.
A time adjustment was factored into each musher’s 24-hour layover. Since I had mushed the first dog team out of Anchorage, my mandatory stop was extended by 2 hours, 43 minutes, which boosted my layover to almost 27 hours. That accounted for the rude surprise I found waiting Thursday morning on the checker’s time sheet. Though I had beat five teams into Rohn, they were all scheduled out ahead of me.
By noon, everyone was scrambling to go, including the checkpoint staff. The musher’s tent disappeared before I took a planned nap. Flames danced over roaring trash barrels as vets and checkers burned everything nonessential. The crackling fires and smoke gave the scene an apocalyptic edge. I was anxious to get moving.
Lee and Garth were the last out before me. As I helped guide Lee’s dogs to the trail, I kidded Barry that he had better push his dogs for all they were worth, because we would be coming at him like a steamroller. He laughed. We both knew my dogs were faster. And I didn’t plan to carry that damn Red Lantern any farther than I absolutely had to.
I was required to stay until 6:03 P.M. It was closer to 6:30 by the time I pulled out of the camp. The checkpoint staff turned out in force and cheered my departure. The last sled in Iditarod’s 70-team field was again on its way.
I had Chad in single lead. He and the other dogs were supercharged by their 27-hour rest. Maybe 200 yards from camp, a bump threw the sled sideways in the air. I landed flat on my chest and got the wind knocked out of me. The team dragged the overturned sled and me about 75 yards, spewing a trail of cassette tapes, brownies, batteries, and juice containers from the rear sled-bag pocket. I finally stopped the dogs in an icy section, which offered little for the snow hook to bite into. I looked longingly at the snacks and tapes scattered behind me. Those cassettes represented tunes carefully selected for the coming run through the Burn. A Miles Davis tape, which I had been saving, lay in the center of the trail, perhaps 7 feet back.