DAY 4

Mackey, Gebhardt smell the gold

Leaders close in on ghost town where $3,000 awaits

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 7, 2007
Last Modified: March 14, 2007 at 06:39 PM

NIKOLAI -- On a lonely stretch of trail that crosses through Beaver Mountain Pass and drops down across Windy Creek, the dog teams of Lance Mackey and Paul Gebhardt were dueling it out for Iditarod gold Wednesday night.

Ahead of them waited $3,000 in shiny, yellow metal the communications company GCI awards to the first musher to reach the ghost town of Iditarod, halfway point for the southern route of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Leaving Ophir, an old mining camp named for the source of King Solomon’s gold, Mackey had a lead of several hours over Gephardt, but the Kasilof musher had shown himself to be behind a slightly faster team.

Whether Gephardt’s dogs could close the gap on the reigning champion of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race remained to be seen. Three years running, Mackey has won that demanding, 1,000-mile march from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory to Fairbanks.

But he has yet to challenge for an Iditarod victory. The 36-year-old musher has proven his mettle with top-10 finishes the last two years - seventh in 2005, 10 in 2006 - but he has never come close to challenging the winners in the stretch run along the Bering Sea coast to Nome.

Gebhardt, on the other hand, has come tantalizingly close. The Kasilof home builder was second in the 1,100-mile competition in 2000 and fifth in 2001 before selling his dogs to take a year off, thinking maybe he could cure himself of the Iditarod bug.

He couldn’t. He started building a new team that has only gotten better year by year - 23rd in 2003, 19th in 2004, ninth in 2005, and third last year when Gebhardt experimented with new Iditarod tactics.

As Doug Swingley from Lincoln, Mont., was counting the gold at the halfway point of Cripple on the northern route of the Iditarod in 2006 and settling in for his one, mandatory 24-hour rest, Gebhardt trotted his dogs on through and kept going for Ruby on the Yukon River.

He didn’t stop there. He marched on another 52 miles to Galena before finally resting. A number of teams caught him there, but Gebhardt’s dogs bounced back after the rest, and over the last 393 miles he reeled in everyone but Swingley and champion Jeff King.

Gebhardt hasn’t said what his plan is this year, but there has been speculation he will again launch a drive to the Yukon before stopping, possibly pulling Mackey and others along.

On the trail along with those two Wednesday night were 2004 Iditarod champ Mitch Seavey from Sterling, 2005 runnerup Ed Iten from Kotzebue, 2006 12th-place finisher Cim Smyth from Big Lake and young Tollef Monson from Kotzebue.

Early race leader Martin Buser from Big Lake was waiting out his 24 back in Ophir with fellow four-time champ Jeff King from Denali Park, and Zack Steer, the owner of the Sheep Mountain Lodge along the Glenn Highway east of Palmer.

Steer was the big surprise in that group that led before stopping to take their 24-hour rest. A past winner of the Copper Basin 300 Sled Dog Race, the 33-year-old musher’s best Iditarod finish was 14th in 2000.

A far bigger surprise among the early leaders, however, is Monson. A transplanted Minnesotan who trains with Iditarod veteran John Baker, the 27-year-old is supposed to be running Baker’s puppy team in this race.

To find him several checkpoints in front of Baker, who was back in McGrath, is unexpected. Though officially ranked 32nd in the race on Wednesday night, Baker’s position was misleading given that he was about to come off his 24-hour rest and start passing other teams that would be shutting down for theirs.

At McGrath, Baker noted that he had some dogs showing muscle stiffness in their hindquarters due to the pounding on rock-hard trail. He expected the dogs to improve with rest.

“They’ll get better,’’ he said. “It’s in the rear end for some reason. Must be the trail. I don’t know. “It was bare ground, so there was some rough trail.’’ Happy to have the barren Farewell Burn and wind-blasted Rainy Pass behind, Baker was hoping to surge as the Iditarod heads toward the Yukon River.

“They haven’t taken their break yet, so we’ll all be together whenever they stop for their 24 hour,’’ Baker said of the leaders. “We’ll be running together. I’m still feeling good.”

Smyth, who stopped to rest and tend his dog for seven hours in McGrath, wasn’t quite as upbeat. He broke a runner off his sled only seven or eight miles after leaving the Rohn checkpoint and he said the next 70 miles across the Farewell Burn Nikolai were a nightmare.

“It was a long trip on one runner, let me tell ya,” he said. “Just balanced on my right leg. I had to run all the time to get my sled around on the (gravel) bars.

“On the flats, the sled tries to turn to the right if you’re on the right runner. (So I) had to run on those gravely hills. I was so tired.

“The dogs didn’t mind, but they did mind the (frozen) tussocks. I hurt one (dog) coming through, pulled his shoulder. Only in a handful of places could Smyth ride his one good runner, and then only for minute or two. His fatigue showed afterwards, though it probably helped to be - at 29 - a generation younger than the likes of Buser, King and Gebhardt, who loaned Smyth a new sled with real runners in Nikolai.

“It... beats you all over the place,” he said. “ You can’t stay on the sled. It’s terrible.’’ Having cared for his dogs in McGrath, Symth took a few minutes to wolf down scrambled eggs, pancakes and bacon in a cabin reserved for mushers. He never took off his cold-weather gear. He forgot to turn off the headlamp he had used to light the trail at night, even though it was light in the cabin by 9 a.m.

And he didn’t linger. He finished his breakfast fast and asked: “How much do I owe you?” “You’re a musher, right?” said the woman who was both cook and waitress. “Yep,” Smyth said. “You’re free to go,” she said. An hour later, he was back on the trail. By midday, he was 50 miles to the north, heading out of Ophir on the long chase to Iditarod.

Daily News reporter Kevin Klott contributed to this story from Nikolai and McGrath.

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