Trail takes a heavy toll

Getting past wind-swept site of 1977 wildfire is brutal task for many

By KEVIN KLOTT
Anchorage Daily News Daily News staff

Published: March 8, 2007
Last Modified: March 8, 2007 at 06:14 PM

NIKOLAI -- All is quiet in the dog lot along the bank of the South Fork Kuskokwim River on Wednesday afternoon as mushers in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race entertain the locals with dog chores.

After driving 80 wild miles through the nasty, frozen tussocks, bare gravel bars and the dead-tree wreckage of one of Alaska's largest wildfires, the midpack Iditarod mushers are finally getting a rest.

Dallas Seavey from Sterling pours moose stew into a tin bowl for Lunch Box, his 2-year-old wheel dog. The dog squints in the midday sun. The soup steams in the minus 3 air.

Seavey pauses to answer questions for 12-year-old P.J. Runkle.

"Do you want a ride to the school?" Runkle asks.

"Maybe in a little while," Seavey anwers politely.

A ride at this point has to sound good, given the Iditarod has so far been a battle for this musher. Some of the injuries are obvious. Seavey sports a patch of frostbite the size of a dime on his right cheek.

Down at the end of the lot, Clint Warnke of Fairbanks massages ointment on the sore front leg of Cobalt, a team dog who just ran mile after mile of trail with almost no snow. Their noses meet as Warnke tries to explain to a foot-sore Cobalt that things are going to get better.

"You're OK, sweetie," he says. "You're OK."

Cindy Gallea of Seeley Lake, Mont., inspects a sled, battered when she ran over a foot-long stump sticking out of the ice.

"Now my brake has a little curve to it," she says.

A weary Mike Williams from Akiak hauls a galvanized bucket to a nearby water boiler heated by spruce logs. J.P. Nikolai, a local who helps maintain this checkpoint 770 miles from Nome, shoves a log into the bottom of the barrel and stokes the fire.

"Feels like Hawaii," Williams says.

"Pretty cold this morning," says Nikolai, who jokes as he introduces himself as the person for whom the Athabascan village was named. "Got down to 35 below."

There are 11 Nikolais who actually live in Nikolai, says Nikolai. And every year most of the them join the other 80-some residents to help Iditarod mushers find some comfort in a landscape where comfort is rare.

"It's a demanding place," said Nikolai.

Windstorms oftentimes whip in off the Kuskokwim Mountain to the north. Blizzards occasionally blow out of the Alaska Range from the east. Interior temperatures can plummet to a bone-numbing 50 below and sometimes stay there for days upon end.

It hasn't been quite that bad on the Iditarod Trail this year, but it's been close enough. When mushers see a warm smile here, it often helps them to keep pushing against the forces of mother nature trying to crush their Iditarod dreams.

"The people here are nice," Warnke said.

The terrain out there, mushers add, was anything but. In a good year, the Farewell Burn offers up a snowy highway across frozen lakes, through willow patches and alongside the remnants of a forest that burned decades ago. This year, it was more like 80 miles of gravel, frozen tussocks, stumps and slippery ice.

"Pinball," Warnke said. "You're like a little pinball -- bang, bang, bang ..."

A month ago, Chinook winds raised temperatures to an unusual 52 degrees. Snow melted like crazy. Then came 25 to 35 mph winds and minus 35 for the next three days, said long-time Nikolai resident John Runkle.

The melted snow quickly froze into patches of ice and gravel.

"It's rougher than a cob turned upside down," Runkle said.

The 52-year-old understands trail conditions here better than most. About 40 miles south of the village, he maintains an unofficial Iditarod checkpoint called the Bison Camp for mushers and others wandering north along the trail.

"There's a lot of people this time of year traveling the Iditarod trail," Runkle said. "We set up camp weeks ago because we knew that's where people need to stop."

Situated in the middle of the Burn, the camp is named Bison Camp because it is where Runkle hunts the animals. There are about 375 of them in one of only four wild herds in Alaska.

The Bison Camp served as a good break for Seavey, who's running a rookie team of mostly 2-year-olds for his father, 2004 champ Mitch Seavey.

Luckily, 20-year-old Dallas also has Scarface, a veteran of his father's 2004 championship team along, too. Scarface's leadership came in handy when Dallas got hit by winds traveling at the speed of automobiles as he came through Rainy Pass.

Blowing snow made it impossible to see his lead dogs, he said.

"We were very careful to stay on the trail," he said. "We never got lost."

It did take them some time to make Rohn, however, and Dallas collected that frostbite on his cheek. It didn't get any better from there on. Like everyone else, he took a pounding in the Burn.

"You just bounce around, mogul after mogul," he said. "Those tussocks weren't a whole lot of fun. The sled's a little beat up, but we're fine."

Still, he was happy to be here, happy to be driving dogs in his second Iditarod.

This time last year, he was in Bulgaria, grappling for the USA Senior Wrestling team. Days after he returned to the states, he was diagnosed with mononucleosis, a nasty virus that kept him bedridden for seven weeks.

Anything on the Iditarod, even the worst things, are better than that.

"I couldn't be happier," Dallas said.

Trail takes a heavy toll

Judging from the Rainy Pass body count in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the difficult stretch of trail that climbs into the Alaska Range north of Finger Lake has never been so bad.

Normally, this twisting, turning 30-mile stretch crashing to the bottom of Happy River Gorge before climbing back to Puntilla Lake takes out two or three mushers. They bust up their dog sleds, suffer concussions after banging into trees or break something.

Especially this year.

Four-time champ Doug Swingley cracked ribs. DeeDee Jonrowe broke a pinkie finger. Randy Cummins from Big Lake smashed a shoulder. Lachlan Clarke from Buena Vista, Colo., tore a ligament in his ankle.

They were among 11 mushers felled by this one short stretch of trail. Add in three more who scratched at Finger Lake after seeing all the bad trail they wanted on their way in through the Shell Hills, and the 2007 Iditarod is on pace for a record number of dropouts.

That record is 20 from the snow-short year of 2003.

There was so little snow that year, the race start had to be moved to Fairbanks. But at least the trail got better as the racers neared halfway.

Not so this year. Mushers expect to take another pounding on more than 100 miles of frozen tussocks between Ophir and Shageluk, get a bit of a break fighting north into the Yukon River winds, before turning for the Bering Sea coast where they may face another couple hundred miles of banging among stumps, rocks and tussocks.

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