First a correction.  I was misinformed by the media.  Louie Nelson, Sr. is not the oldest musher in the Iditarod this year.  He is 64.  Jim Lanier, now between Anvik and Grayling in seventeenth position with eleven dogs, is 66 years old.

Eye candy:  Lance Mackey in Anvik yesterday.
Photo credit:  Bob Hallinen, ADN

The mushers that local media have been calling the Fantastic Four:  Martin Buser, Jeff King, Paul Gebhardt and Lance Mackey, are in Eagle Island with 13, 13, 12 and 14 dogs respectively.  Buser was in an hour and twenty minutes ahead of King, winning the seven-course gourmet meal that is the prize (along with $3,500) for the first musher to reach the Yukon.  The other two came in close together almost two hours after Jeff King.  All of them have now taken both the 24 hour mandatory layover and the 8 hour rest that is mandatory on the Yukon.

Thirty-two of the 63 teams remaining in the race have reached the Yukon River.  Five are currently in Shageluk, apparently taking their 8 hour layovers.   Five others ahead of them on the trail have yet to take their 8 hour rests.  They include Zack Steer, currently out of Grayling in sixth position with fifteen dogs, and the current leader among the rookies, Sigrid Ekran, now out of Anvik in eighteenth position with twelve dogs.  Ms. Ekran left Anvik only three and a half hours ahead of rookie Silvia Willis (in 20th with 12), who has already taken her mandatory eight, so technically Ms. Willis is currently in line for Rookie of the Year.

Nineteen teams have scratched, including Deborah Molburg-Bicknell whom race marshalls were considering withdrawing for her slow pace.  The race does not end as soon as the leaders reach Nome, but neither does the Trail Committee keep checkpoints open and services going for mushers who lag too far behind the pack.

Bryan Mills, whose tibia is presumed broken after a hard bump from a root on the trail (no X-ray confirmation on that yet), is out of the Iditarod checkpoint in 37th position with fifteen dogs.
 

This shot of two of Ramy Brooks's dogs, Burt and Skittles, riding in his sled bag, was taken in Nikolai, probably by Ramy's mother Roxy whose reports from the trail are my favorite part of Ramy's website.  Ramy is now out of Grayling in fifth position with eleven dogs.

One team is now down to nine dogs and three others are down to ten, while only three still have the full sixteen dogs with which they started. 

There's a young man, Brian Tanner, 21 years old, living with his parents in Palmer, who has been getting into trouble with police because his parents won't let him use their internet connection after 9 PM.  Police have chased him out of the parking lot at the public library, and confiscated his laptop to scan it for kiddie porn.  The porn scan is routine, a cop said, on every computer that comes through their evidence room.  Brian Tanner's crime has nothing to do with porn.  He has been tapping into wireless networks to play online games in the middle of the night.  story here

If my 25-year-old "kid", who uses our connection more than I do and has my gratitude when he does it at night so he can keep the fire going while I sleep, needed any more evidence that he's got a great mom, there it is.  I wonder what those people are thinking... he's an adult... geez!

 

Zack Steer blew through the Iditarod checkpoint with fifteen dogs about nine last night, spending only ten minutes there before hitting the trail onward toward Shageluk.  That made him first out of Iditarod, but he must have slowed down or stopped somewhere, or got off the trail, because Martin Buser was first into Shageluk around 7 AM today with 14 dogs, with Jeff King and his fourteen an hour and a half behind him.

The Red Lantern rookie I mentioned yesterday, Deborah Bicknell, who checked out of Rainy Pass on Wednesday and got lost on her way to Rohn, was found about 4 PM Thursday 20 miles from Rohn, after State Troopers were called out to search for her.  She made it to Rohn about 7 PM last night with thirteen dogs and is still there as of 9 AM today.  She hasn't scratched, but if she doesn't pick up her pace soon she will be involuntarily withdrawn from the race.

Bryan Mills, with a broken tibia, blew through Ophir checkpoint about 4 AM today with fifteen dogs.

Sigrid Ekran with fourteen dogs and Silvia Willis with twelve, in 19th and 20th positions, running 23 minutes apart when they got into Iditarod early this morning, are in contention for Rookie of the Year.  Their closest competitor is Gerry Willomitzer in 31st position, who is down to 13 dogs after leaving one in Ophir yesterday evening.  Ms. Ekran has two black eyes and a broken nose from a collision with a tree early-on.

The oldest musher out there this year, Louis Nelson, Sr., 64, an Inupiat from Kotzebue, had been averaging about an hour and a half of sleep a day during the race, until he stopped in Takotna with 13 dogs for his 24 hour layover.

Okay, on to the significa -- that's the opposite of trivia, y'know?

Here's a Bush Administration atrocity that frosts my buttons and boils my blood **there, there, Kathy -- don't forget you're enlightened now**:

The federal agency responsible for protecting Arctic polar bears has barred two Alaska scientists from speaking about polar bears, climate change or sea ice at international meetings in the next few weeks, a move that environmentalists say is censorship.

adn.com/news polar_bears

The rest of this entry was inspired by my new friend Pauline, who for several weeks has been trying, every time I mention the weather, to reassure me that "Spring is just around the corner."  Around her corner, sure.  Here in my neck of the woods, we don't have a Spring -- except for that one alongside the highway at mile 89 where we get our water.

Seriously, every year after winter we have a brief period of time, too short to really be called a season, that keeps winter and summer from slamming into each other.  We call it breakup because the sun's warmth breaks up the ice, and cabin fever has a tendency to break up a lot of relationships... and the odd piece of fragile china, balky chainsaws, or anything that gets in anyone's way.

Generally, Alaskans say we have two seasons.  What we call those two seasons depends on who you ask and in which season you happen to do the asking.  Here are a few of the more common ones:

mosquitoes and no mosquitoes
snow and mosquitoes
snow and tourists
winter and Winnebagos
winter's coming and winter's here
winter and highway construction
snowmachines and four-wheelers
frost heaves and potholes
black ice and road construction
fishing and firewood

That's the humorous view, of course.  In reality, we have four seasons:  Winter, June, July, and August... and that's the truth!

Weather is milder today.  Here (about in the middle of that arrow marked "Willow" on the map at left) we got about five or six inches of new snow yesterday and the temp was zero last time I looked - that's Fahrenheit, it won't get up to zero C for a while yet.

The same six mushers I reported last night as out of Ophir are in the checkpoint at the ghost town of Iditarod.  This is about the mid-point on the trail.  The race goes through Iditarod only in odd-numbered years.  In even-numbered years, it takes a northern route from Ophir to Kaltag.

Lance Mackey was first into Iditarod shortly after midnight today with fifteen dogs, winning the GCI Dorothy Page Halfway Award and $3,000 in placer gold nuggets.  His average speed this year has been 7.04 MPH, overall, including rest.

Martin Buser in 8th place and Aliy Zirkle in ninth, left Ophir less than an hour apart, about three hours ago.  They have a time advantage over the current leaders, having already finished their mandatory 24-hour layovers.  Those two, Aliy and Martin, are the leaders of eight out of the front 20 teams who have now completed the 24-hour rests.  The eight includes Jeff King and Zack Steer, who had identical times between Takotna and Ophir.  Standings have been changing as I write this, and will be changing frequently over the next couple of days as the rest of the teams stop for their 24s.  These teams are working hard to pass those ahead of them.  Martin Buser's average speed from Takotna to Ophir was 11.36 MPH, the fastest of the bunch.

Bryan Mills, with a broken tibia, is out of Nikolai in 50th position, doing the 75 miles from Rohn in about ten and a half hours.

The current Red Lantern (the last place finisher carries a red lantern from Safety to Nome to signal the end of the race, and gets to keep a Red Lantern trophy) is Deborah Molburg-Bicknell.  She took her 24-hour layover in Rainy Pass, leaving there with thirteen dogs in 68th place about 25 hours ago.  She is a rookie, 61 years old, been mushing dogs since childhood.  Her average speed between Finger Lake and Rainy Pass was 4.05MPH.

Her nearest competitor, Kelly Williams in 67th place, took about nine hours for that run from Rainy Pass to Rohn yesterday morning, and was still in Rohn at last report.  Those at the back of the pack aren't competing for the prize money and virtually every one of them realizes that from the start.  Some of them are out there just for the experience and once they manage to finish a race may never come back again.  Others run at the back of the pack year after year.  Still others may spend a year or two at the back of the pack as they train a team of puppies, and could end up winning some day.

I don't know who to credit as photographer for this picture, but the dog is part of Eric Rogers's team.  I found the pic on Eric's website, in a piece about pre-race vet checks.  Follow that link for more great dog shots.

Photo by Bob Hallinen of Rookie Silvia Willis in Rainy Pass on Monday

See Jeff King/Bryan Mills update at end.

Greyfox made a rare morning phone call to me a few minutes ago to alert me to stories from the trail that appear on the front page of this morning's Anchorage Daily News.  Broken sleds and broken bones are just part of the story.

Lance Mackey, who last month won the Yukon Quest for the third time,

Blinding ground blizzards, lost mushers, loose dogs, and missing trail markers -- this year may have more of this sort of questionable excitement than any Iditarod in history.

I mentioned earlier that Dee Dee Jonrowe had scratched after breaking a finger...

It's early in the race yet.  Bryan Mills could change his mind.  I wish him well, whatever his choice.  If he doesn't make it this time, I hope he comes back.  He fits right in with the rest of these maniacs.

UPDATE (about 6:30 PM):

Broken-legged Bryan Mills spent about 8 hours in Rohn today, leaving shortly after noon in 50th place with fifteen dogs.

I found this shot from last year (one of the 4 times Jeff King has won the Iditarod), of his kennel caboose, in an article about his sled design work at Cabelas Iditarod.  Jeff got into Ophir in sixth place at 4:05 this morning.  He's still there, may be taking his 24 hour rest now.

By about 3 PM today, six teams had passed through Ophir, in this order:

Lance Mackey and 15 dogs
Paul Gebhardt with 14 dogs
Mitch Seavey with 14 dogs
Ed Iten and 15 dogs
Cim Smyth with 13 dogs
Tollef Monson with 13 dogs

Sigrid Ekran in 18th place, and Silvia Willis in nineteenth, are the leading rookies this evening.

A total of 14 mushers have scratched so far, eleven of them at the Rainy Pass checkpoint.

This morning on the local NPR station, I heard Jeff King talking about this year's trail.  He called it one of the roughest trails he has ever seen.  He said it was so bumpy it was, "like a field of cantaloupes," and "almost comical."  The stress was on "almost" and he wasn't laughing.

Aliy Zirkle lost the trail near Rainy Pass yesterday and spent about an hour and a half finding out she was on the wrong trail and getting back on track.  Several of the front runners followed her and lost similar amounts of time.  She met Zack Steer as she was headed back and got him turned around the right way.  When she tried to replace some of the trail markers that had been blown down, one of them was blown across another, forming an "X" which is the sign for "don't go this way." 

The lost time apparently hasn't hurt Zack Steer very much.  He was first into Ophir this morning, over an hour and a half ahead of Jeff King and almost two hours ahead of Martin Buser, but Martin's time into Ophir from Takotna was 26 minutes shorter, almost 2 MPH faster.  Lance Mackey was in 4th place, out of Takotna less than two hours behind Martin Buser.

Eleven mushers, eight of them Iditarod veterans, had scratched at Finger Lake and Rainy Pass checkpoints as of  7 AM today.

Yesterday in town with the wind trying to tear off my clothes and toss me around, I couldn't help thinking about the dog teams and mushers out on the Iditarod Trail.  At the vet, I set Tabby in her carrier on the ground as I closed my car's hatch.  The surface was icy and a gust of wind took the cat and carrier across the parking lot.  I had to wait for someone to unlock the vet clinic's door, which had been locked because the wind kept blowing it open.

Weeks of high winds have scoured the packed snow into a glistening sheet of ice, and that's what the mushers are traveling over.  To make it even more challenging, many of the trail markers have blown away, so it's easier than ever to get off the trail and get lost.  A nasty patch five miles from the Rainy Pass checkpoint has put four-time champion Doug Swingley out of the race. 

Greyfox shared with me an interesting Iditafact I hadn't known before.  Jeff King, a ranger at Denali National Park (shown here with his dog Bronte in a shot by Bob Hallinen), pulls a little enclosed kennel along behind his sled.  Routinely, one of his dogs rides in the sled and another in the trailing kennel so that he always has two fresh dogs to put in to replace any who tire or develop injuries.  Jeff has been an innovator in sled design and construction, too.  His daughters, who are also mushers, have raised and trained some of the dogs in his Iditarod team.

The way I feel following yesterday's trip to Wasilla makes me grateful not to be out there on the trail today.  The weather guessers say that the wind should die down and the temperature come up some by tomorrow, but that means it will probably snow.

We live in a culture where honesty is out of fashion.  Political correctness is dishonest; cosmetics present a dishonest face to the world; advertising, public relations and spin are just a few of the institutional forms of dishonesty endemic in our culture.

Sincerity, in at least one sense, is a word often associated with honesty:

George Burns said, "The secret of acting is sincerity.  If you can fake that, you've got it made."  One of the most puzzling aspects of human relations for me has been the fact that my sincerity and honesty have been questioned more often when I was expressing myself openly and truthfully than when I was trying to deceive.  Does that mean that I am good at faking sincerity, or does it say something about the incredibility of my personal truth?

Here we go again with the chastity thing.  Why is sex tied in with honor and honesty for women, but not for men?  Is it only a sexual double standard, or does our society set higher standards for women in other areas as well?  Personally, I place scant value on sexual chastity for men or women, although I think that safe sex is of great importance for the whole planet. 

I don't care about my "good name."  What other people think of me is none of my business, none of my concern.  The virtue that I value highly and think of as, "honor," is compounded of self-respect and integrity.

At least, I thought it involved integrity, until the dictionary pulled morality into the discussion.  Morality, for most people, is based on religious dogmas.  I am unreligious, if not irrelegious, and moralists are repugnant to me.  I thought that integrity referred to a state free of hypocrisy, a tendency to walk one's talk.  This exploration is doing nothing to resolve my confusion.  I may not want to know what the dictionary has to say about truth.

I guess I can live with that.  It's close enough to my truth, considering that this is a dictionary and not a work of philosophy.

Definitions courtesy of OneLook.

What did I get out of this exercise?  Honesty isn't as important to me
as I thought it was.  Honor has become a fuzzy concept.  Truth is still
as relative and variable as ever for me.  I'm still confused.  No harm
done.

Late tonight, after midnight, front end loaders will start scooping up snow off the lots on the edge of Anchorage where the dirty stuff has been stored to wait for the spring thaw after it was plowed from city streets.  The same dump trucks that hauled the snow out there will haul some of it back downtown, where it will be spread along a few blocks of 4th Avenue and through a crooked trail of back streets leading to an out-of-the-way parking lot.

In the hours after daylight, dozens of mushermobiles, specially equipped pickup trucks, will converge on downtown with dog boxes on the back, some pulling trailers with dog boxes like the one in my shot above (taken last winter at the Willow Community Center where Sunday's restart will occur).  Sleds that have been bungeed to the roofs of trucks will be lifted down, dogs will be hitched to the sleds, and the trucks will be driven by spouses or dog handlers off to that out-of-the-way parking lot to wait for the mushers and dog teams.  At one-minute intervals, this year's 82 teams will mush out of the ceremonial chute for the cameras.

The dogs and their drivers will run the tourist gantlet on 4th Avenue, and do their best to get past the stray dogs and an occasional inattentive driver who ignores the barriers and strays into their path.  If they make it safely to that lot on the outskirts of town, the dogs will be unhitched and put into their individual compartments in the dog boxes.    The sleds will be bungeed back on top of the trucks, and the teams will hit the road out of Anchorage and up this valley to Willow, where they will spend the night.  On Sunday morning, the unloading and hitching up will be repeated, and the Iditarod will actually start.  And it all started with old Joe Redington.

The book I picked up recently at the Salvation Army store, Alaskans, Life on the Last Frontier by Ron Strickland, includes a story told by Joe Redington, Sr. and his wife Vi.  Both of them are gone now, which only makes that glimpse into their lives more precious.  Joe was born in Oklahoma around the time of World War I, rode freight trains across the midwest during the Great Depression, served in the Pacific during World War II, and left his home in Pennsylvania for Alaska in 1948.  In the book, he says,

The Redingtons homesteaded at Knik, near Wasilla, and had a hunting lodge thirty miles up the old Iditarod Trail at Flat Horn Lake.  The trail, which had once been the mail route between Anchorage and the once-booming mining town of Iditarod, had long been disused and overgrown by the late 1940s when Joe started clearing out the brush so he could travel back and forth from his homestead to the lodge.

In the 'forties when Joe visited the Native villages of the Interior, every cabin had a dog team out back.  By the 'sixties, he noticed that most of the dogs were gone, replaced by snowmachines.  He started thinking about a way to keep the sled dog tradition alive.  Joe, Sr. and his sons were using dog teams for both work and competition.  The photo below shows Joe, Jr. (in the plaid shirt) in his dogyard in the 1960s.

Dorothy Page, another local legend, was in charge of events to celebrate the Centennial of the Alaska Purchase from Russia.  After many failed attempts to interest local mushers in a commemorative sled dog race, she met Joe, Sr. at the Willow Winter Carnival in 1966.  Her plans fit right in with his desires, and he took the idea and ran with it.  The 1967 race was named in honor of Leonhard Seppala and was called the Iditarod Trail Seppala Memorial Race. 

The Iditarod Trail was still choked with brush for most of its length.  The race that year was fifty miles, from Knik to Big Lake and back.  Fifty-eight teams signed up to compete for a whopping purse of $25,000.  To raise funds for the race, Joe and Vi donated an acre of land at Flat Horn Lake. The land was sub-divided into lots one foot square. Along with the deed to the lot, the buyer also got a "Certificate of Ownership" -- or as Redington once remarked --"about two dollars worth of paper!," because it didn’t cost a lot to subdivide the acre.
 
The following year, a purse of only $1,000 was raised and the turnout was smaller, but trail work continued even though most Alaskans were more interested in snowmachine races than in sled dogs.  Joe Redington and his family and friends continued clearing and grooming the Iditarod Trail, extending it all the way to Nome.  In 1973, the first Wasilla to Nome race was held.  Yeah, yeah, I know, a lot of hoopla happens in Anchorage and the "official" press releases say, "Anchorage to Nome," but the 1925 serum run didn't start in Anchorage, nor does the famous annual dog race to Nome. 

In 1925, diphtheria serum was carried by railroad from Anchorage to Nenana on the Tanana River, where the dogsled relay to Nome began.  Until 1983, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race started in Wasilla.  Since then, until recently it has still started in Wasilla after the false start in Anchorage for the TV cameras.  In recent years, due to global climate change, there hasn't been enough snow in Wasilla for the "restart" real start of the race, so it has started in Willow, thirty-some miles farther up the Susitna Valley.

Joe Redington, Sr. died in 1999.  His widow Vi (shown here with another great Iditarod competitor and booster, the late Colonel Norman Vaughan) continued to promote The Last Great Race until her death about a year ago.  They and others now gone such as Herbie Nayukpok and Susan Butcher (below) , who also passed in 2006, made the race an event of international importance and it serves as a fitting memorial to them.

I like to do things.  I almost never just sit around doing nothing.  The closest I come to such idleness is meditation, and that's something else entirely.  When I'm not up and about doing things, I am reading, writing, gaming or thinking, at least.

In recent weeks, the routine of trips to the vet with cats has required that I conserve energy between trips so that I could keep those appointments.  In general, I avoid setting appointments and making time-constrained commitments as much as possible.  That's because with ME/CFS, I don't know from day to day how relatively able or incapacitated I'll be, but I can usually expect to be down for a few days after each busy day.  Spontaneity, and readiness to act when the time feels right, is the way I get things done.

The effects of these weeks of demanding commitments and self-imposed idleness between periods of grueling activity have included physical manifestations such as the sensorimotor deficits responsible for a number of burns, bruises and cuts, and mental manifestations such as nightmares and cranky/crabby moods.

Having learned from experience how distressing and/or aggravating I can be to other people when they come into contact with me in such a mood, I have made myself rather scarce online.  Either that, or I've just been isolating, hibernating and vegetating -- you choose.  Only rarely does any neighbor venture into my hermit's lair, so that's no problem.

I could have forced myself out of the warmth of my bed and onto you here, but most days it was more comfortable over there anyway.  The big challenge around here since mid-February has been keeping the woodstove hot enough to keep the tropical houseplants alive.  That sometimes means having to maintain a differential of up to seventy degrees between indoors and out.  It's doable with vigilance, but easiest when Doug and I are not trying to sleep at the same time.  Add sleep deprivation to the list of factors contributing to my symptoms.

I get help to lighten my mood from Doug, who is a natural comic, and from Koji and the cats, who are irresistable four-legged furry things.  Greyfox does a lot for me too, with regular nightly conversations and frequent calls during the day with affectionate or inspirational messages.   Recently, we talked about Aaron Fotheringham, the 15-year-old extreme wheelchair athlete born with spina bifida.

Knowing that I've had a number of concussions, and also knowing how I feel about accepting challenges, Greyfox thought I'd appreciate this quotation from Aaron:

Yeah, I can relate.

Some of Aaron's skateboarding friends enticed him into a skateboard park in his wheelchair.  He learned to do a lot of things, like grinds and flips.  This page has lots of info, pictures and links about Aaron.  To see a video of Aaron's historic first wheelchair backflip, go here.