…and misquoted.
The top ten were all in in under ten days.
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.
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.”
Days
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