The Fine Madness of Iditarod

Gary Paulsen

Audio by Paper2Audio.

I do not hold the record for the person coming to disaster soonest in the Iditarod. There have been some mushers who have never left the chutes. Their dogs dove into the spectators or turned back on the team and tried to go out of the chutes backwards. But I rank close.

We made almost two blocks. The distance before the first turn. Wilson (the lead dog) ran true down the track left by the previous thirty-one teams.

Until the turn. At the end of two blocks there was a hard turn to the right to head down a side street, then out of town on back trails and alleys and into the trees along the highways away from Anchorage.

I remember watching the turn coming at alarming speed. All the dogs were running wide open and I thought that the only way to make it was to lean well to the right, my weight far out to the side to keep the sled from tumbling and rolling. I prepared, leaned out and into the turn and would have been fine except that Wilson did not take the turn. He kept going straight, blew on through the crowd and headed off into Anchorage on his own tour of discovery.

We went through people's yards, ripped down fences, knocked over garbage cans. At one point I found myself going through a carport and across a backyard with fifteen dogs and a fully loaded Iditarod sled. A woman standing over the kitchen sink looked out with wide eyes as we passed through her yard and I snapped a wave at her before clawing the handlebar again to hang on while we tore down her picket fence when Wilson tried to thread through a hole not much bigger than a housecat. And there is a cocker spaniel who will never come into his backyard again. He heard us coming and turned to bark just as the entire team ran over him, I flipped one of the runners up to just miss his back and we were gone, leaving him standing facing the wrong way barking at whatever it was that had hit him.

I heard later that at the banquet some people had been speaking of me and I was unofficially voted the least likely to get out of Anchorage. Bets were made on how soon I would crash and burn. Two blocks, three. Some said one. It was very nearly true.

Back on the streets I started hooking signs with the snowhook. They were flimsy and bent when the hook hit them and I despaired of ever stopping, but at last my luck turned and the hook caught on a stop sign just right and hung and held the team while I put Cookie back in the lead and moved Wilson—still grinning wildly and snorting steam and ready to rip—back into the team.

I now had control but was completely lost and found myself in the dubious position of having to stop along the street and ask gawking bystanders if they knew the way to the Iditarod trail.

“Well, sure I do. You take this street down four blocks, then cross by the small metal culvert and catch the walking path through the park there until you see the gas station with the old Ford parked out front where you hang a kind of oblique right . . .”

It is a miracle that I ever got out of town. Finally I reasoned that I had fallen somehow north of the trail and I headed in a southerly direction and when we had gone a mile or so Cookie put her nose down and suddenly hung a left into some trees, around a sharp turn and I saw sled runner marks and we were back on the trail. (As we moved into this small stand of birch and spruce I saw shattered remnants of a sled in the trees and found later that a man had cracked the whip on the turn and hit the trees and broken his leg and had to scratch.) He was not the first one to scratch; there had already been two others who gave it up before getting out of town.)

I was four-and-a-half hours getting to the first official checkpoint at Eagle River—a suburb of Anchorage—where I was met by the handlers and (my wife) Ruth. We had to unhook the dogs and put them in the truck and drive on the freeway to where the race truly starts, at Knik, on the edge of the bush.

"How's it going?" Ruth asked as I loaded the dogs.

"After this it ought to be all downhill," I said. "Nothing can be as hard as getting out of town..."

In the pre-race briefing, we had been told in general about some of the more difficult hardships of the race—the mountains, the interior, the cold.

At that time, someone had momentarily mentioned Happy Canyon. We were told that it lay between Finger Lake and Rainy Pass—comparable to stating that New York City lies between Boston and Washington, D.C.—and that it might prove difficult because of deep snow. Or something. I had written it down but had forgotten what I'd written.

We were not told that it was a near-vertical drop down a cliff, nor that it came soon after Finger Lake, when the dogs were still rested and fresh.

I was doing something in the sled—tightening a lashing—and I looked up to see the front end of the team suddenly drop off the edge of the world.

The morning had dawned clear, but a wind had come up, blowing new snow in swirling clouds. I could not at first see where the dogs had gone because of this, but as I rapidly approached the drop point, watching each set of dogs drop out of sight, the wind eddied and momentarily cleared, and I got my first true look at Happy Canyon.

I am not religious but I think I would have prayed had there been more time. Spread out below me, as far as I could see, was an enormous canyon. The far side seemed miles away and the river down below a tiny line in the middle.

“S—" I had time for the one word . . . and then the sled, pulled by the now falling team, came to the drop-off.

I honestly do not know how I made it. Later, I was speaking to an Englishman who had run the race, and in typical British understatement, he said, "It's rather like falling, isn't it?"

Plummeting would be more the word. There was something approximating a ledge-trail that went down to an impossibly abrupt switchback, but the trail didn't matter.

Cookie, realizing that to survive she would have to stay ahead of the suddenly falling team, sled, and musher, said to heck with the trail and jumped off the edge, aimed straight down. The team, used to following her blindly, jumped off after her.

I grabbed the handlebar of the sled with both hands and hung on, dragging on my stomach as we careened, flopped, rolled, and tumbled some five hundred feet down to the frozen river below.

I would like to say that because I kept my wits about me and was cool in the face of a crisis, I used my body as a living sled drag, which kept the sled from running over the dogs, and through a series of delicately performed maneuvers, we came smoothly to a stop on the river ice below.

I would like to say that, but it would be a lie. While in reality that is exactly what happened, it was all accidental. As soon as we started down, I closed my eyes, I may have screamed, as two mushers who were on the ice repairing broken sleds said, but I can't remember doing so. When I opened them, I was lying on the river ice, the dogs were lined up in front of me perfectly, and the sled—wonder of wonders—was upright and all the gear intact.

Off to the side, the two mushers stood clapping softly. One of them smiled and nodded. "Far out—I'm going to do it that way next year."

I stood, shook the snow from my clothing, and shrugged. "I didn't know any other way to play it."

"Right."

“Dumb luck...”

At that he nodded and was going to say more except that we heard a bellow and turned to see what appeared to be a lumber yard exploding as the next team came over the edge. Gear, bits of sled, dogs, man, odds and ends of clothing all came down in a roiling mass of barks and screamed curses.

I set my hook and helped the other two men catch the dogs and relocate the gear. The musher, a short-set man who had run the race several times, nodded and smiled at me. "Don't you just love this race?"

And I was taken aback to realize that he truly meant it—he really loved the race. Here was a man who had run the race several times, had never won, never even been in the money (they pay down twenty places), and he truly loved the race.

I mumbled something to him and lined my team out and left. Had I thought on it, considered my own feelings, I would have recognized that I was coming to be the same way. The race was already becoming an entity to me—becoming more than a sum of its parts—was becoming The Iditarod.

1 Iditarod: an annual sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska.

2 scratch: quit