He managed to get a glove over his right hand. The fingers on his left hand were “frozen stiff like pieces of ice,” as Thomann put it later, in a hospital-bed interview with Medred.
Thrusting the frozen hand under his parka, the musher had raced for the village like Napoleon’s army fleeing. “You panic for a minute. But once they are frozen, it is not a problem,” he told the reporter. “They do not hurt anymore.”
Thanks to an abundance of foolish climbers, mushers, and victims of unlucky outdoors accidents, Anchorage doctors possess great expertise in treating frostbite. Thomann didn’t lose any digits. And rather than bow out of the sport, he developed new defenses to protect that damaged hand from further injury.
Out on the Quest Trail, one 40-below night, I quietly watched, prompted by usual reporter’s curiosity, to see whether Thomann would skimp on dog care owing to his injury. I was surprised to find the musher working barehanded as he tended those paws with a diligence I’ve never seen surpassed. The trick was a small can of flaming Sterno, which he set down in the snow between his knees. Thomann worked a few seconds, then warmed the bad hand over the flickering blue fire, as he patiently nursed each of his furry friends.
Terhune smiled, something he didn’t do often. I clutched at my sides, hoping to prove him wrong. No such luck. Changing out of my warmer clothes, I had carelessly rested the mitts on my handlebar or sled bag. Trailing us, he found them by the side of the trail.
“I figured you might want them back,” Jon said, slinging the mitts over to me.
We both knew that the loss of those mitts could have proved disastrous in bad weather.
We continued through the hills for about 20 miles before the trail dropped into a frozen marsh. Looking down from the last ridge, the view reminded me of standing on top of a ski hill. The trail formed a winding white path through trees. Puffs of snow marked the progress of half a dozen mushers already descending. I was a little nervous as I launched my team over the edge, but the snow was deep, giving me fine control, and the ride was a joy.
I don’t know if a frigid breeze suddenly picked up, or if it was there all along, waiting for me. But I hadn’t gone 50 feet out into the marsh ice when the cold bit hard. Jamming the snow hook into a patch of crusty snow, I tore open my sled bag and grabbed the snow suit. With awkward, herky-jerky steps, I slipped my legs inside, thrust my arms into the chilly sleeves, and flipped the cowl over my head. Back to the wind, gasping, I leaned on the sled with my hands tucked under my armpits and collected my wits.
“That was close,” I whispered.
I don’t know how cold it was. It wasn’t very windy, but the slight breeze sliced through living flesh like a laser. Perhaps it felt worse on the marsh because of the shocking transition from the warm hills. It was time for the arsenal anyway — that was definite.
Warming up a bit, I broke some fat sausages and threw each dog a piece. I had to keep them happy. Then I dug out my big parka and put it on over the suit for the first time since early in the Yukon trek. And I put hand warmers in the mitts. This was very likely the place where Thomann froze his hand. It was easy to see how it might happen, descending out of the warm hills.
My parka hood proved invaluable as we crossed the marsh. Zipped all the way to the ruff with the string drawn tight, the hood formed a narrow tube extending about ten inches in front of my face. Vision was a little limited, peering through the soft-ball-sized gap in the fur, but I was amazingly warm inside.
The marsh was riddled with parallel snowmachine tracks, some were hard-packed and fast; others made for slow going. Johnson, I, and several other mushers traveling close together took different trails, and our dog teams soon fanned out across the icy flats. It felt as if we were an assault party of Arctic nomads, swooping down from the hills.
A narrow strip of ramshackle houses puffing smoke from oddly jutting pipes — that was Shaktoolik. The village had a harsh look to it. Not surprising for a community locked in snow drifts bordering Norton Sound, an immense frozen gulf, 125 miles long and 70 miles across. By the time we arrived, Wednesday, March 20, the annual excitement of the Iditarod had faded for the village’s 160 residents. The local volunteers were burned out, and the streets were littered with windblown race trash.
I found the others camped outside the Shaktoolik armory building in the shelter provided by a line of rough drifts. Our supplies were stored at another house, several hundred yards away. I trudged over and dragged my sacks back to the team. It me took several trips, and I felt drained and dizzy by the time I finished.
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, but we all knew that the calm was deceptive. Directly ahead lay one of the most infamous sections of the entire Iditarod Traiclass="underline" the oft-stormy passage across sea ice to Koyuk.
In 1982 Nayokpuk and his Shishmaref dogs — conditioned in the polar-bear country surrounding his remote coastal village, 20 miles shy of the Arctic Circle — met their match on the trail that lay ahead. The bold Eskimo had attempted a solo breakout during a storm that had penned front-runners in Shaktoolik. No one else dared to follow him.
“It’d be like trying to go fishing in a ten-foot skiff in forty-foot seas,” commented Dean Osmar, a fisherman destined to win the race two years later.
The Shishmaref Cannonball shot 22 miles out onto the exposed sea ice before the storm proved too intense for even his leaders. Humbled, with his dogs locked in tight balls, the musher spent a long, sleepless night shivering in his sled bag. In the morning, Herbie Nayokpuk turned his team around and returned to Shaktoolik.
“I’ve been out many years in the cold,” Nayokpuk told a reporter. “But that was the coldest night I ever spent.”
Swenson had won the 1982 race, with Butcher trailing 3.5 miles behind. It was the pair’s first one-two finish and foreshadowed the rivalry that dominated the sport in the next decade. Nayokpuk spent a day regrouping and then mushed into Nome in twelfth place, slipping from Iditarod’s top ten for the first time.
Three years later, in 1985, Libby Riddles clinched her victory in a similar situation. Arriving in Shaktoolik on a stormy afternoon, a few hours ahead of Barve and Swenson, Riddles fed her team and then agonized over whether to set out along the 58-mile trail to Koyuk. She was packing, yet struggling with her decision, when Barve mushed into the checkpoint. The blocky printer couldn’t believe the woman was even considering going out.
“If it’s anything like what I just came through, it’s impossible,” Lavon declared.
“That set me,” Riddles later wrote. “Impossible? This was the whole point of all the work and energy I’d put into the last five years.” Infuriated by Barve’s macho certainty, Libby climbed on the runners of her sled and pulled the snow hook.
“Okay, gang,” she said. “Let’s go.”
It was zero out, but the wind chill amounted to 56 degrees below as Riddles mushed out of Shaktoolik that afternoon. She didn’t get as far as Nayokpuk. She hadn’t passed Lonely Hill, hadn’t yet reached the beginning of the 30-mile run across the sea ice, when the storm halted her team for the night. Though morning brought no relief, Riddles stayed on course, struggling through another day of storms before she mushed into Koyuk after 24 hours on the trail. The other mushers weren’t far behind, but Riddles rode her hard-won advantage to Nome, finishing 2 hours 45 minutes ahead of Dewey Halverson.
Everyone in our group knew Libby’s story. And nobody, least of all me, wanted to duplicate her heroics. Riddles had been reaching for the crown, $50,000, and lasting glory as the first woman ever to win the Iditarod. Our motivations were far less grand. We had, at best, a belt buckle and a finisher’s patch waiting if we made it. There were other, less tangible, rewards — such as the right to raise a beer with Hobo Jim and sing, “I did, I did, I did the Iditarod Trail.” We also faced, perhaps, a lifetime of regret if we flamed out in the remaining miles.