My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  A time adjustment was factored into each musher’s 24-hour layover. Since I had mushed the first dog team out of Anchorage, my mandatory stop was extended by 2 hours, 43 minutes, which boosted my layover to almost 27 hours. That accounted for the rude surprise I found waiting Thursday morning on the checker’s time sheet. Though I had beat five teams into Rohn, they were all scheduled out ahead of me.

  By noon, everyone was scrambling to go, including the checkpoint staff. The musher’s tent disappeared before I took a planned nap. Flames danced over roaring trash barrels as vets and checkers burned everything nonessential. The crackling fires and smoke gave the scene an apocalyptic edge. I was anxious to get moving.

  Lee and Garth were the last out before me. As I helped guide Lee’s dogs to the trail, I kidded Barry that he had better push his dogs for all they were worth, because we would be coming at him like a steamroller. He laughed. We both knew my dogs were faster. And I didn’t plan to carry that damn Red Lantern any farther than I absolutely had to.

  I was required to stay until 6:03 P.M. It was closer to 6:30 by the time I pulled out of the camp. The checkpoint staff turned out in force and cheered my departure. The last sled in Iditarod’s 70-team field was again on its way.

  I had Chad in single lead. He and the other dogs were supercharged by their 27-hour rest. Maybe 200 yards from camp, a bump threw the sled sideways in the air. I landed flat on my chest and got the wind knocked out of me. The team dragged the overturned sled and me about 75 yards, spewing a trail of cassette tapes, brownies, batteries, and juice containers from the rear sled-bag pocket. I finally stopped the dogs in an icy section, which offered little for the snow hook to bite into. I looked longingly at the snacks and tapes scattered behind me. Those cassettes represented tunes carefully selected for the coming run through the Burn. A Miles Davis tape, which I had been saving, lay in the center of the trail, perhaps 7 feet back.

  Raven was chirping like a poodle. Spook was baying. Harley and Cyrus were jerking the sled forward, inch by inch.

  “Sorry, Miles,” I said.

  I shifted my foot, and the brake sprang free. Chad felt the release and leaped at the trail ahead. The team whipped my sled with mad zeal.

  I did what I could to hold the dogs to a reasonable pace, but paws were flying as we entered a narrow tunnel in the spruce. The sled glanced off several big trees without incident. Then, with a sharp “crack,” my right rear stanchion nicked a small tree and splintered. The handlebar felt like a limp noodle.

  Snow was falling, each flake lengthening the gap between my team and those ahead. I tied the team to a tree and examined the damage. Didn’t look that bad. A few hose clamps should do the trick. In less than 40 minutes, I was back on the trail, aiming to close that gap on Barry Lee.

  “Nothing to it,” I thought, pleased with my ingenuity.

  The patch job held for about 15 minutes, until I smacked another tree, further busting up the stanchion and a rear support bar.

  The light was fading as I chopped down a small tree and lashed it over the stanchion like a splint. The repair job made for sluggish steering. I traveled a few miles before an abrupt dip in the trail sent me nose-diving into the runners. Pieces of my headlamp reflector fell when I lifted my head. The bulb was still burning, but it cast a splotchy light. Looking at my sled, I blinked a few times, unwilling to accept the truth. The splint had held, but now the companion rear stanchion was broken.

  “No longer funny, guys,” I said, using a tone that caused the dogs to perk up their ears.

  I couldn’t believe it. Snow was pouring down on us. Flakes sizzled on the bare bulb of my crunched headlamp. The next checkpoint, Nikolai, was at least 75 miles away, and I had a broken sled.

  First priority was the headlamp. I pieced together shards and formed a crude reflector, which I attached to the bulb bracket with first-aid adhesive tape. The patched reflector threw a fragmented beam, but light of any kind was precious. Then I chopped down another thin tree and fashioned another splint. The overhaul took 90 minutes and turned my sled into something more suited to Fred Flintstone than an Iditarod musher.

  Only traces remained of the tracks ahead, but the trail remained obvious through dense groves of spruce and snow-covered tussocks. Navigation got tougher as we entered the Post River Valley, where the trail crossed gravel bars and zigzagged through driftwood piles. “Chad,” I whispered, “you’re following something out here, but where are the markers?”

  I heard later that a number of mushers had got lost in the area, including Runyan and Swenson. That might explain why Chad confidently charged down several blind alleys. Trouble was brewing as I turned the team around several times. But I had ground to make up, and Golden Dog was still my fastest leader. I tried to erase the disappointments with quick snacks, but it wasn’t Chad’s night. The third or maybe fourth time I second-guessed his judgment, Chad’s ego crumbled. He buried his head in the snow and refused to budge.

  This was no place to argue. Placing Rainy and Harley in lead, I drove the team hard for several hours. I couldn’t detect the trail myself, but we passed enough markers to maintain my confidence in the lesbian. Our luck ran out on the edge of a large lake. Rainy charged into the white expanse, but her clues ended at the shoreline. She swung the team right, then left, searching for a bearing. Then she looked at me, but I couldn’t help. From what little I could see through the white soup, the broad lake’s white surface was seamless and perfect.

  Throwing the sled on its side, I halted the team on the snow-covered ice and ran up to Rainy. She shied, as always, but looked at me as I knelt down beside her. “It’s not your fault, little girl,” I whispered. “Not your fault at all.”

  Pulling the dogs off the lake, I bedded the team in a clump of bushes. It was snowing again, blowing loose powder anyway. I dug a pit to shield the cooker from the wind. After serving the dogs a hot meal, I emptied my sled for the second time and climbed inside. I slept fitfully, haunted by the knowledge that I was alone — in last place — at least 800 miles from Nome.

  CHAPTER 6. Alone in the Burn

  In the grey light of dawn, I rejoiced.

  Out in the center of the lake — a solitary marker pole greeted me. My fine friend, the trail marker, was an inch and a half wide, stood two feet tall in the snow, thin as a reed, but capped with fluorescent orange tape that blazed wonderfully against the lake’s broad sea of white.

  Rainy and Harley made a beeline for it, plowing through six inches of new snow. I was heartened, but worried nonetheless. The powder wasn’t deep enough to stop the team, but it was bound to slow us down, which meant that Lee and Garth would increase their lead.

  A traffic jam clogged the trail out of Iditarod, 250 miles north. Early Friday morning, March 8, Susan Butcher had mushed out of the darkness into the glare of the TV lights set up by the banks of the Iditarod River. Three thousand dollars in silver ingots was waiting for the first musher to reach the ghost town of Iditarod, but Butcher refused to claim the prize. She told race judge Chisholm that she wanted to wait for Dee Dee.

  “We mushed eighty miles together, and I want it to be a tie,” Susan said. Her request was rooted in anger. The run from Ophir had taken 25 hours, twice as long as usual because the front-runners had had to break their own trail. The Iditarod’s defending champ was seething.

  Race marshal Kershner had seen this coming. Following the debacle with Adkins, he had intercepted the trail-breaking team on the Yukon River and ordered them back. Kershner wanted them to blast through to Ophir, but the snowmachiners had backtracked only as far as Iditarod before turning around.

  According to Butcher, she, Jonrowe, Adkins, Osmar, Buser, Barve, and King had traded off the front position, sharing the burden placed on lead dogs cutting a new path through the drifts. Although Swenson and Runyan had arrived at Iditarod along with the others, their names were noticeably absent from Susan’s honor roll.

  “What a bunch of crybabies,” responded Swenson.

  Runyan
ducked the name-calling, saying that he was just running at the best pace for his dogs.

  The newcomer to Iditarod’s front pack, Jeff King, cast the dispute in strategic terms. “This isn’t a Boy Scout trip. It’s a race,” he told reporters. “You don’t get in the ring and grease Muhammad Ali’s gloves for him.”

  As the sun rose Friday morning, Runyan mushed out of Iditarod in first place. By noon, a front pack of 18 teams was on the trail to Shageluk, with Jonrowe and Butcher bringing up the rear.

  Back in McGrath, Lynda Plettner was peeved. That damn Urtha had Abdul, her best leader. After the experience of watching him struggle through the Klondike, Plettner had made sure that the rookie’s entire Iditarod team was first-rate. All Urtha had to do was feed those dogs and hang on. She was the one driving the kennel’s puppies. So WHERE was he?

  Urtha Lenthar had appeared to be in good shape when Plettner left him in Rohn. Checking the time reports, she noticed he was a little late getting out. Linda could understand that. But it didn’t explain his interminable delay in the Burn. The pups had hauled her across in ten hours. Urtha had the better team, so he should have mushed into Nikolai hours ago.

  Plettner mushed on to McGrath, where she spent more long hours waiting and hounding officials for an explanation. Word was finally relayed that Lenthar had RETURNED to Rohn after getting lost. What was happening out there?

  Urtha finally reported in at Nikolai. Plettner got him on the phone. It was a troubling conversation. The schoolteacher sounded extremely discouraged.

  “Look,” Plettner said, growing impatient. “Like, I’ve been sitting here an enormous amount of time. So I’m going to, like, casually move over to Takotna. Call me there when you get to McGrath.”

  Leaving Rohn, Bill Peele was concerned about his lead dog. Most of the team looked frisky and refreshed, but that darn Charlie had been acting up again. Peel stopped his team near Farewell Lake, intending to shift his ornery leader to a less critical position. The cunning dog sniffed an opportunity. He twisted out of the novice musher’s grip and dashed off into the surrounding stunted spruce. Charlie didn’t stray far, but he refused to come back.

  Peel offered Charlie food. He tried hiding behind his sled, hoping the escapee might draw in close enough to catch. He wasted hours trying to coax that dog back. Nothing worked. At a loss, Peele decided to drive his 15 remaining dogs to Nikolai, where he could consult with Iditarod officials. Charlie howled and howled as the team pulled away. As Peele crossed the Burn, those mournful cries haunted the kind-hearted musher from North Carolina.

  Traveling just ahead of me was Barry Lee. Babying his dogs was paying off. During the first three days of the race, he had limited runs to an easy three hours. He was “sweetening the team,” as he called it, for harder driving later. Now, after a daylong layover in Rohn, his team was supercharged.

  Lee had invested three hours fixing the snowmachine track he used as a primary brake. Streaking out of Rohn, the hefty musher put that drag track to use, trying to hold his dogs to a reasonable pace. But the jury-rigged brake snagged on a stump and tore loose.

  Lee had grown up driving crazed sprint dogs. He didn’t use a brake then. He decided he didn’t need one now. Skills polished 20 years ago on the track in Anchorage came back as Lee jockeyed his sled past trees, rocks, and other encroaching hazards. The sled ricocheted through the ruts carved by local buffalo, catching air as the runners skipped across frozen mounds of overflow. This was mad, just mad. Barry loved every moment of it.

  Lee kept an eye on his watch, and, exactly five hours after leaving Rohn, he shut his team down for a well-deserved meal. Based on his brother Bobby’s geographic clues, Lee reckoned he had covered at least 45 miles, putting the team near the start of the Burn, which sounded like a good place to tackle in the daylight.

  The stars were bright as Barry Lee climbed into his sleeping bag. He felt good. His whole life had built toward this moment when he would rest alongside honest dogs on the Iditarod Trail.

  Snow began falling. It was coming down hard when Lee awoke four hours later. Alan Garth had passed by during the night. The Englishman’s tracks were already covered by half a foot of new snow.

  As Lee resumed the chase, the dogs — so puffed up with excitement upon leaving Rohn — deflated before his eyes. Watching them slog through the thickening snow, the musher grimaced. He had his old team back — that wretched bunch from the Klondike 200.

  There were tracks and evidence of a camp. Clearly another team had rested here overnight. The discovery, after 14 hours of traveling solo, provided a major boost to my entire team. Tails high, my dogs excitedly sniffed the campsite. Rainy appeared more alert and quickened her pace. I was thrilled, but tried to keep it in check. The team ahead probably had a lead of several hours, and it didn’t seem likely we were gaining much ground.

  The deep snow knocked a couple miles an hour off our speed. Weighted down by the twin tree-splints, my sled felt sluggish, and I couldn’t do much pushing on the hills for fear the handlebar would break.

  Under a gray sky, I followed the trail through thinning strips of spruce. Before too long, I mushed past the last of the living trees and entered a charred land of the dead. I knew this place, if only from legend: Farewell Burn.

  Pictures of the Burn didn’t capture the desolation left by the huge forest fire that swept the area in 1977, charring 360,000 acres. Fourteen years later, the land remained a graveyard, littered with rotting stumps and a spider web of skeletal trees.

  It got colder as I entered the dead zone. A breeze soon picked up, and I rode with my back to the cutting wind, fiddling with face masks, seeking a magic combination that might keep my face pink and alive. Above all, I wanted to avoid the Aussie’s fate.

  I’d been in Ruby for several days, covering the last teams passing through the checkpoint. I was booked to depart on the next mail plane out when the call sounded over the checkpoint radio. A rescue was in progress.

  The injured musher was shivering, drenched in sweat, and bundled in a blue sleeping bag when he arrived. It was Brian Carver, a soft-spoken farmer from Melbourne, Australia, who had been thrust into the race after a musher friend had suffered a training accident. I’d written a funny little story about Carver’s last-minute search for an Australian flag so he could show the home colors when leaving the starting chute.

  Traveling in the back of the pack with Mowry and Peter Kelly, the Aussie had proved a game, if quiet trail companion. In retrospect, his companions recalled that Carver had, perhaps, acted unusually listless when they camped the night before the accident. He hadn’t bothered to change his socks and gloves like the others. He wasn’t hungry. The Aussie had just puffed on his cigarettes and watched the others.

  The temperature was falling. Kelly realized that from the way his glasses kept frosting up. Mowry reckoned Carver must be tough to bear the temperature, wearing nothing but those thin glove liners. None of the rookies knew exactly how cold it was, but they agreed it was bad, maybe 20 below zero.

  The next morning Carver, moving with zombie precision, abruptly broke camp and mushed straight through to Sulatna Crossing, the next checkpoint. Volunteers at the remote tent camp were appalled by the musher’s condition as he struggled to sign in: three of Carver’s fingers and several of his toes were frozen solid.

  It was obvious to them that the Australian was in need of immediate medical attention. Carver wasn’t so sure. His chalk-white digits weren’t pleasant to look at, but the injury wasn’t painful, not in that frozen state. He clung to the hope that he might yet tough out the race.

  Ham radio operator Rich Runyan, then working his first Iditarod, patched through a call to a doctor at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. After a hurried conference, the doctor read the musher a medical report over the radio. The Aussie’s determination faded as he listened to the clinical analysis of the miseries — starting with potential amputations — he faced if any of his frozen parts thawed and refroze out on the trail. Carver reluctantl
y scratched.

  Mowry arrived at Sulatna shortly before Carver boarded the plane for Ruby. He was shocked by the other musher’s injuries.

  “Don’t you do it, mate,” the Aussie told him.

  Carver’s frostbite was thawing by the time he landed on the river below Ruby. The internal blood fire had begun, leaving him feverish and helpless, with that left hand jammed under his right armpit and his knees hunched in the sleeping bag. Throwing off my camera bag, I helped the two pilots carry him from one plane to the other. The musher groaned when we bumped his feet against the door frame.

  Carver recognized me and pulled himself together to answer a few short questions.

  “They say it was forty below,” he whispered quietly. “I had no idea it was so cold. It was a great Iditarod until this happened. I just had no idea it was so cold.”

  “Are you guys racing or what?” The caller was Madden. He sounded nervous, as if this morning’s Two Rivers’ Tune-up represented his serious racing debut instead of mine.

  It was a cold November morning, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I was running in and out of the house, loading Mowry’s old utility truck. Any concern I might have felt about the sting of the air was dispelled by the thermometer dangling outside our cabin door. Twenty below zero. Nothing to it, I thought. Training in Fairbanks, we dealt with temperatures in that range all the time.

  My gear seemed unusually stiff. The lines weren’t pliable. Normally limp harnesses were kinked and had to be stretched apart. But I was too busy to pay attention to that since I had drawn the first starting position.

  I was running eight dogs. Rainy and Casey were leading, with Pig, Bo, Screech, Beast, Betsy, and Raven filling the spots behind. It wasn’t our best team, but one selected to minimize surprises. I hadn’t given much thought to my personal gear, placing faith in my familiar motorcycle suit, a trusted 14-year-old memento of my days as a photo-lab delivery driver. I had a balaclava covering my head, but it wasn’t tucked in, leaving most of my neck and face exposed.