March 16, 2006

• I’m being quoted

  …and misquoted.

  What I actually wrote was, “A healthy dose of outrage is preferable to
  all this lethal apathy.”  I’m setting the record straight and
  making it clear that these are MY
  words because the person who misquoted it also wrote, “A quotable
  quote!  She better peg it before wikiquote takes it!”  Dina, make sure you get it right before you have it tattooed on your palm.

  Is anyone still interested in the latest Iditarod standings?  I
  suppose that those who are could be looking them up for themselves, but
  I’m still going to give you my interpretation.

  At latest count, thirty mushers had made it into Nome.  Robert
  Bundtzen, in thirtieth place, checked in at 5:25 this morning.

  The top ten were all in in under ten days.

  Martin Buser pushed ahead of the fastest of the rookies and came in in
  23rd place, in 10 days, 11 hours, 47 minutes.  In many years, that
  would have been fast enough to win the race (If Doug wasn’t hanging
  around waiting for me to get off here, I’d look that up and tell you
  how many.), but it wasn’t good enough this year.  It’s quite
  possible that Marty’s dogs are fast enough to have won if he hadn’t
  wrecked his sled and had so much other bad luck on the trail.

  Mike Jayne passed the Norwegian pair, Albrigtsen and Sorensen, to become Rookie of the Year in 25th place.

  Rick Swenson, only person to win this race five times, finished in 26th place this year.

  Once again, Rachael Scdoris, who forced the Committee to change the
  rules just for her, has proven she only needs her seeing-eye musher some
  of the time.  She checked into Koyuk at 4:54 this morning in 55th
  place.  Danny Seavey was in next at 5:04, and Rachael’s visual
  interpreter Tim Osmar checked in at 5:10 in 57th place.  Some
  year, I’d like to see Rachael and her dogs try  it on their
  own.  If Doug Swingley (who finished second this year) can do it
  with his frozen corneas, she can do it, too.

  Ben Valks, the Red Lantern, is still going, checking into Kaltag where
  the teams leave the Yukon for the run up the coast, at 4:35.

  In
  White Mountain just before Jeff King’s run to his first-place finish
  Marc Lester got this shot of lead dog Bronte reaching out a paw to
  Jeff, and Anchorage Daily News reporter Kevin Klott talked to him about
  becoming the oldest musher ever to win:

  People, he said, had been telling him before
  the race that “you’ve won the Kusko, the (Kobuk) 440 and the Iditarod,
  but still, you’re getting too old.”

  And here he was about to show them that
  although he might be getting on in years, neither he nor his kennel
  were past their prime.

  At the start “in Anchorage, I was confident that I started with the best team I’ve ever had,” he said.

  “They’ve been great: No lameness, no dogs
  that were more tired than the others,” he said. “They were very well
  matched. It’s been like a magic carpet since we left. I appreciate my
  good fortune.”

  He appreciated his good dogs, though, even more.

  “This is 20 years of doing (Iditarod),” he
  said. “So there’s a certain amount of calculation of what time it will
  be, where and when we will get there,” but in the end everything comes
  down to what the dogs are willing to do.

  It was early Sunday morning when the race
  made its pivotal turn toward the Bering Sea Coast, when King checked
  out of Kaltag 11 minutes behind Swingley. The forecast reported strong
  winds blowing snow over the Kaltag Portage.

  King harnessed his team, knowing it might be
  tough going but unaware he was about to confront an epic 90-mile
  adventure over a windblown, drifted trail to Unalakleet. Five-year-old
  Salem was alone in lead.

  “You could see the moon up through the spin drift,” he said. “Basically the world was a cloud of blowing snow at our back.”

  Outside of Kaltag, King found the trail
  crossed with snowdrifts as tall as the length of his sled and hard as
  ice. They dropped steeply in waves, and King had to maneuver his sled
  though dozens of them over a 7-mile stretch. It was tough going.

  “One of my dogs lost his footing,” King said.
  “Between maneuvering the sled and trying to see through the snow, I
  wanted to make sure I saw a marker first.”

  Snow pelted his face in the swirling wind as he tried to confirm he was still on the trail.

  “I don’t remember seeing it, but I remember sensing there still was something wrong,” he said.

  Suddenly, he said, he realized he was looking
  ahead at two dogs running in lead instead of one. Somehow, he decided,
  one of his black females in heat must have gotten loose and was looking
  to run along with Salem.

  King braked his sled, put in his snow hook and screamed the dog’s name. She ran 20 yards away.

  “The wind actually makes dogs nervous,” he said. “Wind was blowing in their faces, in their ears, in their fur.”

  Racing dogs don’t like running loose, King said, especially when it’s dark and cold.

  “Dogs like organization, confinement and want
  to be a team member,” he said. “Getting loose can be disorienting to
  the point where they don’t come rushing over to you.”

  King finally figured out the loose dog wasn’t
  one of the females, but Angus, one of his wheel dogs who’d somehow
  broken his harness.

  With the wind blowing at his back at nearly 35 mph, King was stalled on the trail, yelling, “Come here, come here, come here.”

  Finally, Angus came, but just as King grabbed Angus’ harness, the rest of the team went past.

  King freaked.

  He yelled again, “Come here, come here, come here.”

  But the sled was pulling away.

  “Oh my God,” King said. He tried to chase the
  sled, but he struggled with Angus and kept post-holing in the drift.
  Meanwhile, the wind blew the sled out of reach. Instinctively, the dogs
  went forward with it.

  “My hand never got 10 feet from the sled,” he said. “I yelled, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ They wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “I thought, ‘If I let (Angus) loose, they’re going to chase him.’ So I didn’t want to let go of him. But I did.

  “(Then) I watched my sled disappear into a moonlit cloud of swirl like something out of Harry Potter. It just disappeared.”

  King knew Swingley would be arriving soon, but didn’t know when.

  “Who’s in lead?” King thought. “Salem!”

  Before the team was out of earshot, he
  yelled, “Salem! Whoa, Salem! Whoa!” He didn’t know whether Salem heard
  or not, but he started punching trail, hoping he was going the right
  way, praying that maybe his snow hook would catch again and anchor the
  team.

  “I didn’t go more than 100 feet. Then, in the
  moonlit fog, is this silhouette of my sled,” he said. He yelled, “I
  can’t believe it!”

  King walked up to the sled. Found Angus had
  stayed there with the team. Snapped the dog into the gangline. And
  hugged them all, maybe Salem the longest.

  The snowhook “was dragging along, but it
  didn’t appear to be making a lot of friction,” King said. “So I’m
  willing to give a significant amount of credit to my leader.”

  Salem, as King describes him, is an ugly gray dog who loves his master and running. He’s athletic and “very macho,” King said.

  And if Salem hadn’t stopped at “whoa,” King
  said he believes he might have lost this race. The whole incident took
  about three minutes, he said, but it could have cost him hours.

  “It could have cost me the race,” he said.
  “It certainly should have cost me more than three minutes, and I will
  absolutely take luck as part of what happened. But it isn’t just luck.
  That dog loves me, and he knew that I wasn’t on the sled.

  “If he didn’t love me, he wouldn’t have done that because they wanted to get out of the wind.”

  adn.com

  

  • 12:32 pm
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