I mentioned yesterday that the snow is deep and wind was causing problems for competitors in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, and for the trailbreakers trying to set the trail for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race that begins tomorrow.  Some of the mountain bikers, skiers and runners in this year's Iditarod Trail Invitational were missing at Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range.  Today's news said that some had turned back and others had made it through the Alaska Range.

For details, click the image below (not my work, taken from AlaskaUltraSport).

This week's subject was suggested by Photographics--
 

Your choice of landscape, within a five minute time span, retaining zoom length and focal height, take four photos from a centerpoint, displaying light effects in photos due to its incoming direction of N. E. W. or S.

Everyone is welcome to join in. All you have to do is post one or more photos regarding this subject on your site and comment on this week's challenge that you have posted, so we can all come by and have a look.

Each Friday there will be a new challenge as long as you keep sending in subjects. (previous and upcoming subjects.)

Have fun!  The photo challenge is not a contest. It's not about who comes up with the best photo or who has the most expensive equipment. It is about people from all over the world who love taking pictures. There's enough competition going on in the world, so you can't win anything, except maybe some new xanga friends.

Last weekend, Greyfox and I set yesterday as the tentative day for my town trip.  The car was too deeply buried in snow and the driveway had a wide, deep berm thrown up by the snowplow.  Doug has worked on the shoveling at least a little bit every day night and sometimes during the scant daylight on either end of his nocturnal waking hours.

Not yet fully recovered from the fatigue incurred in the previous trip on January 28, and/or the respiratory infection I came down with subsequently, I have not been looking forward to going again.  The Old Fart and I have spent a lot of our phone time discussing scheduling for the trip.  He has accumulated some groceries that were on sale and a lot of clothing he salvaged from other people's discards, so we need to connect for more than just some hugs and a shared meal.

By yesterday, we had pushed the proposed date to Sunday, and then I realized that going to Wasilla on Sunday would mean I'd have to get through the traffic in Willow associated with the Iditarod Restart, and on the way home in the evening I would be facing the oncoming headlights of homeward bound Anchoraguans and others from all over Southcentral Alaska who had made the trek to our little town for its one big annual event.

This morning we worked out my kind of plan:  no schedule at all.  I am free to do the required water run today* (Woohoo, Doug got the car shoveled out!) and gather up the books, videos and other items I'm supposed to take in to the Old Fart, at my leisure.  Then I'll give him a call when I decide I am ready to go.  This works for me.  I had been feeling so pressured that I had been dithering over what needed to be done first, and getting nothing done in the process.  The only thing I detest more than a schedule is a deadline.  Spontaneity is my thang.

*UPDATE, about half past two:  We did the water run.  Since last night when Doug had brushed snow from the car, new snow to a depth of about five or six inches had built up... but not all of it was snow.  It had rained, so that a layer of ice about a quarter inch thick was sandwiched between snow layers.  Getting out of the driveway was a challenge, because the car was in a bowl created by the snow that had fallen all around but not under it, and because that icy layer in the snowpack was S_L_I_C_K.

It was, and still is, snowing so thickly that the wipers had a hard time handling it.  Visibility was about 18 inches -- from my nose to the windshield.  The turnout where we park by the spring hadn't been plowed recently.  The trail down the slope to the spring was deep in snow.  Doug did most of the work, so now both of us are exhausted... but we're well-hydrated.  Woohoo!

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Don't Maybe, partially, trust the 43 Things Personality Quiz.  It calls me a "believer."
 Balderdash!  Bullshit!  Oh, well... it's 2/3 true.

Out of 79 mushers who signed up for the 2009 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, twelve have withdrawn before the start.  Of the remaining 67 active mushers, 15 are rookies, either on the trail for the first time this year, or making another attempt after previously having tried and failed to finish.  Out of this year's crop of rookies, one is a lawyer, one a medical doctor, and one a veterinarian.

Photos and musher bios are from Iditarod.com.

  The lawyer is Chad Lindner, 30, son of Iditarod veteran Sonny Lindner (13 finishes, five of them in the top ten, $126,997.00 total prize money).

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Lou Packer, MD, 55, says he "...got sick and tired of the Lower 48 and moved to Alaska as soon as it was possible." He's been here for 22 years. "I watched the 7th Iditarod start when the Pope came to visit. I realized it was a sign from the heavens above that I should run the Iditarod, after all, dog backwards is GOD. Being immediately hooked, I ran a couple of other people's dogs a few times and each time my craving for dogs got worse and worse. Finally, after completely filling my head with rocks, dodging macho-pause and throwing all sanity and reason aside, I moved my family to Wasilla, built Urgent Care at Lake Lucille, and began running dogs with zeal in 2006."

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Timothy Hunt, DVM, 43, was born in Michigan and lived in Detroit and Marquette  A veterinarian for the last 19 years, he graduated with his DVM from Michigan State University. He began mushing in 1993 and says that after working as a veterinarian on the Iditarod many times, he became interested in actually running it.  Dr. Tim sells his own brand of dog food at drtims.com.

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The '09 rookie who has been getting the most media attention in Alaska is Harry Alexie, 31, born in Kwethluk, Alaska, now of Bethel.  He is a member of the Alaska National Guard, and the Guard is sponsoring his Iditarod run.  They leased dogs from current Iditarod Champion Lance Mackey and engaged Lance to train Harry, which is why Lance did not run this year's Yukon Quest -- but he will be in the Iditarod.

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It has been two or three years since I first learned of Kim Darst and her dream to be the first person from New Jersey to run the Iditarod..  Kim, 40, was born and raised in Blairstown, New Jersey. She is a helicopter pilot by profession.  She says, "One of my students purchased an Alaska Husky from Susan Butcher for me as a gift. It all started there. My kennel consists of 30 Alaskans all of Susan's lines with the exception of four of Rob Downey's. I have worked the last 10 years to get to this point and look forward to getting Susan's dogs back to their origin."  Kim has a website.

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Jen Seavey, 22, was born in Montana.  She says, "When I was in first grade, I decided that I was going to move to Alaska and run the Iditarod." Her dad made her a sled out of a milk crate and some old skis. She harnessed her German shepherd in a horse halter and made him tow her around. "When I was 18, I stumbled upon an ad on the Internet for handlers at the Seavey's Iditarod Racing Kennel. After a couple of phone calls, I decided that college would have to wait, and I bought a one-way ticket to Alaska. I met my husband, Dallas Seavey [also competing in this year's Iditarod, with two previous finishes, in '05 and '07], when he picked me up at the airport. I handled for the Seavey kennel for two winters and worked as a tour guide in the summers."  Jen's father-in-law is 2004 Iditarod Champion Mitch Seavey, with 15 finishes, 7 of them in the top ten, and $381,654.33 total prize money.

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Rob Loveman is my pick for the rookie with the best website.  He is a 52 year old nuclear physicist with a recent hip replacement.  He earned his B.S. from Caltech and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. In addition to mushing, physics, climbing, and skiing, Rob enjoys Taekwondo which he has been studying since 1979. He is hoping to make a career by writing about his misadventures with all of these.

Below are a few of Rob's dogs, from his website:

"Sonny or Sundance has led in both the Open North American Championship and the Fur Rendezvous. As a nine year old, he no longer had the high end speed to do those races, so for retirement, he signed up to do something easy, the Iditarod. Now ten, it's not clear if he's going to make the main team or not. Still, he'll be able to get me through the streets of Anchorage at least one more time. Right now, he's enjoying running with everybody else and being a sled dog. He's also earned himself a nickname: Sir Sundance Droolsalot."

"The first run of the first season I had Sybil, she and Mink were together at swing. Mink had a problem and I was taking her off of the line. The two leaders, Mitzi and Gonja, were not really doing a good job of keeping the line out….but Sybil was. After that run, I tried Sybil in lead only to see that she’s a little spark plug. And she likes being in lead. Since then, she's been in my lead rotation."

"Tempest is a smart sneaky mischievous devious calculating animal. Everything I like in a dog. She is also quite strong….and strong willed. We had a couple of minor battles when I was trying to put her into a box in a way that she didn’t approve of. Since that time, she’s been moved to the lower boxes and we seem to have reached some sort of agreement as to how she is to be put into her box. Tempest is also one of the “Wise Bitches.” I put dogs back on their lines after runs or play time by calling each over by name, giving them a treat and then attaching the snap. Tempest, Mitzi, and Fondue all make a pretty good habit of following me around looking for pieces of treats that the dogs let slip out of their mouths. Tempest was also evidently imprinted by a cow at an early age. I can understand that given that she is a pie-bald. Anyway, her howl is often a Siberian mimic of a cow and ends up sounding more like a foghorn than either a dog or a cow. She now has the nickname, 'Foggy.'  There is nobody in the kennel that breaks a bigger smile than Tempest when she’s being hooked up for a run. There are dogs who can grin ear to ear….and Temp is one of them."

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Iditarod "starts" ceremonially in Anchorage on Saturday.  Then, after a run across town through city streets, the dogs are loaded back into their boxes on the backs of the mushers' trucks for the ride up the Susitna Valley to Willow, the little town just down the road from here, for the re(al)-start on Sunday. 

Excitement is building here in the Valley.  No place on the planet is sending more teams to the Iditarod than Willow has.  Two Rivers, AK, and Willow are each home to five of this year's teams.  Four teams are coming from Fairbanks and four from Wasilla; three each from Anchorage, Kotzebue, Seward and Whitehorse, Yukon Territory (Canada, for those who don't already know that Yukon is not part of Alaska and Alaska is part of the United States).

Bjornar Andersen, of  Norway, has come the farthest for this year's competition.  In his two previous Iditarods, '05 and '06, he finished fourth and sixth, for total prizes of $100,222.22.

I glanced over where Doug is napping on the couch and saw this --

Granny Mousebreath is in her usual place.  If Doug is reclining on the couch, she is usually crouched on his chest or stretched across his middle like a furry seatbelt.  The little guy in the crook of Doug's elbow is Marmel Odd, AKA Klaxxon, the biggest, loudest, and most aventurous of P.K.'s motley kitten crew, the only one yet to venture out of the nest on his own.

Newton Marshall finished the Yukon Quest with ten dogs, in thirteenth place, winning $3,000.  It wasn't the championship, but he is proudly displaying a little trophy earned on a cold night at Eagle Summit:  a black spot of frost nip on the tip of his nose.

At the finish, he was asked whether he’ll continue mushing.   His answer:  “Yeah mon, most definitely.”

"Steel drum music began to filter over the river bed as the crowd awaited Jamaican musher Newton Marshall. The film crew that has been following him for over a year was on hand as well as a number of other media outlets. Champion musher Hans Gatt who has been training Newton watched the river for the familiar bob of a headlamp and the sound of his dogs. Newton rounded the bend and the crowd cheered and applauded as he came down the chute. When asked how hard his journey had been he stated that many things in life are hard and he was proud."

Maybe I'd have been better off just going ahead and posting the quotes on the church/state issue that I've been collecting, before checking my email today.  The email gave me so many prospective blog topics competing for my attention, that I cannot decide what to blog about.

• The Google Alert I set up for "Iditarod Air Force" brought me an article from the Issaqua Press, by Bernadette E. Anne, Iditarod communications coordinator, responsible for analyzing and planning for the tech needs of the race's Anchorage and Nome headquarters, as well as each checkpoint along the trail.  "I coordinate implementing communications technologies for Internet, e-mail, desk and laptop computers, land lines, cell phones, satellite phones and pagers that support the function of internal communication for race operations.  ¶ I have an incredible team of 100 people who happily volunteer each year in Anchorage, Nome and all along the trail in less than ideal conditions: sleeping on a floor, going without a shower for 10 days, sleep deprived the entire time and, in some locations, only a bucket for a toilet. Trail volunteers must have gear to take them to minus 40 and half of our team comes from outside Alaska to just do this.  ¶ It’s hard work, but to see the incredible bond between canine athletes and their human mushers while out in the vast beauty of rural Alaska is an experience like no other."
• She included a link to the IAF website, so I went to check for updates and got distracted by the procedures for pilots transporting dogs:

• Make sure the dogs that you transport can't get at vital parts of your airplane.  Some like to chew anything, everywhere, including wires under the dash. If a dog is vicious (a rarity) or shy and seemingly apt to escape, put it in a burlap bag and secure the opening before loading it in the aircraft.

  A dog handler will meet your aircraft when you land at a hub (Anchorage, McGrath,, Unalakleet, Nome).

  Do not open the door of your plane until you have ascertained that every dog is secure and not able to jump out.  A loose dog can quickly become a lost dog!

  Top priority dogs wear a RED collar.

  Second priority dogs wear a BLUE collar.

  All other dogs should be transported according to the length of time they have been held at the checkpoint, commencing with those that have been there the greatest length of time.  The potential loss of a dog will be handled as Emergency Flights. The Race Judge, Checkpoint Vet, Chief Vet and Director of Competition and Logistics will be notified immediately and they will pass on to you the appropriate action to take. Remember, you are a volunteer in this situation and not a Race Official. 

  PRIORITY HAULING 

  1.  RED COLLAR DOG:  This is an animal which is apt to die if not attended to promptly.  A dog wearing a red collar takes priority over everything else and everyone else. Take it out first!

  2.  BLUE COLLAR DOG:  A dog wearing a blue collar, though not in as serious conditions as the red collared animal, is still in serious condition and takes priority over human passengers.
  

MORE

• To complicate things, as I'm typing, I'm listening to Talk of Alaska.  The topic is the Centennial of the old Iditarod Trail, a gold rush route from Seward to Nome.  I  have learned that during the Gold Rush, more people walked the trail than mushed it with dogs.  There were a series of roadhouses 20 miles apart, and the prospectors and miners would snowshoe from one to the next for days and days, inbound from Outside with high hopes, and outbound to Seward to catch a boat headed south, more often disappointed than heavy with gold.
• A caller from McGrath reported that the snow cover out there is deep this year.  It has been snowing a lot at this end of the trail, too.  Trailbreakers are going to have a real job setting the trail, and if the snow continues into coming weeks as it has been, the race could be slow and hard... harder than usual, I mean.
• The newsletter in my inbox from Der Spiegel, with its digest of international news and opinion, provided this striking image of migrant laborers at a job fair in China:
     
• A story from SpiegelOnline, titled The End of Arrogance, reflecting international acceptance and approval of the new U.S. administration, comments on our busy new Secretary of State:
• If there is one thing that the key players in Democratic and Republican foreign policy have in common, it is the rings under the eyes of the respective secretaries of state. Madeleine Albright wore them like badges of honor, and so did Condoleezza Rice. With the transfer of the State Department's official Air Force Boeing 757, the rings are now Hillary Clinton's. After only a month in office, Clinton already looks exhausted.
• Other stories from Der Spiegel:
• Swiss bankers say, "We are not the bad guys."
• The city of Cologne's municipal archive, with documents dating back to 922, collapsed, bringing down parts of other surrounding buildings.
• The German press from all parts of the political spectrum appear to be in agreement that the $5 billion from international donors going to reconstruction in the Gaza strip is going to be wasted if it all goes to Fatah:  "It is absurd to now plan the reconstruction of the infrastructure destroyed in the recent military conflict with Israel without Hamas."

I can't decide what to blog about... too scattered, too many ideas...  I guess I'll just go post the quotes and come back here and post a link. 

While I was thinking over this story, trying to decide how much of the back story I'd need to tell so that it would make sense, an odd thought occurred to me.  I have watched one business after another fail and disappear in the quarter century I've been in this neighborhood. 

Several people have cut and sold firewood for a while, then gone under and gone away.  The lodge just down the highway has gone through at least half a dozen sets of owners, then was sold in a tax auction and is now closed with a notice on the door about some sort of litigation with former owners.  A lodge up the valley washed away in a flood and was replaced with an ice cream shop.  That failed, and some people from Outside came in and opened a campground there, which was washed out in the next flood.

Closer to home there are a motel and a camper park that I watched being built by two retired couples before Doug was old enough to go to school.  Disability and deaths in the families led both couples to sell out within a few years of each other, and I have lost count of how many people have tried to make those businesses work since then.

Somewhere in the middle of the string of owners at the RV park were Jerk and Bitchy, a middle-aged couple who had lived in cities and worked for other people all their lives.  He wanted to be his own boss, and she, having worked for decades as a bartender, wanted to own her own lounge, bar, nightclub, or something of the sort. 

I can't imagine what Bitchy was thinking when she bought the RV park, laundromat and general store, and turned the store into a bar.  They had signed a covenant with the seller that committed them to keeping the general store as a general store for as long as they owned the property.  Maybe she thought that since the sellers were moving to Arizona, nobody would notice that they had broken the covenant.

They incurred a lot of expense in the remodeling, inconvenienced and alienated nearby residents (those not already turned off by their attitudes) with the noise and litter created by their rowdy clientele, and violated state liquor laws in the process.  The sale was voided and they were evicted, having blown their nest egg with nothing but (one hopes) some expensive lessons to show for it.

The motel has had a similar string of owners and caretakers.  One bunch opened a tire repair business on the property.  Another (or maybe the same ones) had a meth lab in one of the motel units.  Enter:  The Neighbors from Hell.  That's the designation Greyfox devised to make them easier to talk about, since we don't know their names... or I don't.  I think he now knows their names, because he told me in today's phone conversation that he had seen a story in the Anchorage Daily News about them.

These are the people who, last fall, pushed an old junk pickup into my yard from the lot next door, where they now live and which they are supposed to be buying from my former neighbor, Grayhorse.  Last fall, when I had my first and only interaction with tnfh, I learned from the neighbors on the other side of them that they had not been paying Grayhorse as agreed.

These people, tnfh, had been living at the motel and were, according to the news story, evicted for non payment of rent... to Jerk and Bitchy, who had found a financial backer and taken over the motel from another set of owners who gave up and went south, shortly before J&B's shady dealings caught up with them and they left.

That neighbor who pushed the truck into my yard, pulled a gun on the new caretaker of the motel (who was trying to negotiate with him to remove his junk from my yard), and was climbing around on roofs, demolishing the motel for building materials to be used in repairs to Grayhorse's old place -- that little nfh, according to the news story, is subsisting on $1,100 a month disability payments for a back injury.  Given the amount of traffic around his place and the particular neighbors whose vehicles come and go from there, I suspect that he has another questionable source of income, too.

I'm not entirely clear on details of the litigation between Jerk and Bitchy and tnfh, except that ADN reported that tnfh says he was buying, not renting, the motel and didn't make payments because Jerk and Bitchy hadn't set up an escrow account.  To be honest, I'm only mildly curious about the details.  My response to the story, as Greyfox related it to me, was a sort of detached satisfaction that two such deserving parties are causing trouble for each other and leaving me alone, at least for the present.

The first four finishers in the 2009 Jr. Iditarod:
(Photos of yesterday's start are from gomush.com.)

Cain Carter (17), stepson of four-time Yukon Quest Champion, two-time Iditarod Champion, first man to win Quest and Iditarod in the same season (and he has done it twice in a row), Lance Mackey.

Update:  12:39 PM  I called it!  Details later.