Alaska Journal (Being the record of a lower 48er who comes to the 49th for a ”wilderness adventure”):
Day 1: The coastal ski trail just outside Anchorage where ravens sulk in the gloom. The sun is late and low, the city groans under the vaporous burden of a paralytic 28 below zero temperature, and a 35 m.p.h. wind drives shards of cutting snow in off the jagged sea ice of Turnagain Arm.
We have done a dumb thing and we are going to die. We are here for an
”Iditarod Experience,” and we took this little cross-country ski tour just to get the feel of things. Now we are going to freeze as solid as icebergs. We have never experienced such cold. It attacks our unacclimated bodies with piranha-like savagery, ripping at exposed skin and sucking the warm blood from our hands and feet. We bow to it as whipped dogs.
I am dressed in all the winter clothing I brought along, but I feel naked, fleshless even; and the ferment of my obviously impaired brain is congealing into raspberry sherbet. Agony and fear are all that it can handle, along with a jolt of anger at being lured into such an incredibly stupid situation by son-in-law Tim Andrews and his misguided friend Dave Doehlert, who has plans for us to dog-sled up onto a glacier where we are to sleep. In a tent.
Oh, Hell, where is thy warming fire?
Day 2: On a remote snow-covered road that heads west off the highway between Anchorage and Fairbanks. The Alaska Range, with Mt. McKinley as its centerpiece, dominates the skyline off to the northwest. Temperature 22 below. Wind cold enough to slice steel.
”Your timing is great,” says last night`s host, Scott Vaughn. ”This may be the coldest weather we`ll get here all winter.”
It had taken all night in front of Scott`s roaring fire to thaw out my feet-the left one suffered a spot of frostbite-and now they are encased in borrowed sealskin-caribou mukluks. The rest of me is swaddled in enough borrowed arctic clothing to dress a platoon, and we are about to ride dog sleds 23 miles across the frozen muskeg to a camp.
Mushers-people who drive dog teams-Ron Robbins and John Rogers, along with Robbins` 14-year-old son, Buddy, have been wrestling dogs for an hour or so, leading them off their tie chains, transporting them in a special pickup truck and then harnessing them and hitching them to sleds.
Some of the dogs have run the Iditarod, a race of 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome. Hitched into two 14-dog teams, all of the dogs fill the frozen day with their impatient yaps and barks as they leap and lunge against the tug lines. The cacophony is deafening, and it covers my own whimpering.
That we are to head off into the fangs of this freezing wind on dog sleds in what Ron and John call the Iditarod Experience boggles my lower-48 mind.
And then we are off, Ron guiding the dogs from the front sled, Tim in the cargo sled behind Ron, and me riding the runners of the second sled and hanging on with the tenacity of a woodtick. John and Dave follow in another rig.
The dogs` power is unbelievable. We seem to fly over the frozen muskeg, which means that the wind slashes even harder and only woolen face masks save us from immediate frostbite. The trail twists and turns between the black spruce and alder, and when it dips across a frozen stream, the cargo sled spills and we are suddenly floundering in the snow like fresh-caught carp buried in crushed ice.
Upright and on our way again, the wind worms its way through a tiny opening and puts a frostbite brand on my throat, and the magnificent sight of the Alaska Range is etched forever onto my frozen eyeballs.
The camp is a small log cabin perched above Twenty-Five-Mile Lake, and our arrival there is marked by a final plunge up and down and around a twisting, hilly trail that the dogs navigate as if they are racing to get Mother Hubbard`s last bone. It would be hair-raising except that my hair is held down by two stocking caps, a scarf and a parka hood.
Ron points out the claw marks where a grizzly tried last fall to get into the cabin, and he adds that all bears have long since crawled off into hibernation, a plan that, at the moment, seems to make infinite sense.
Later, when the dogs are fed, and a fat, gibbous moon bathes the wild country in glorious frigid light, we spread sleeping bags on the floor and crawl in with the hope that somebody else will get up in the night to feed wood into the old stove in the corner.
At some point during the wee hours, the dogs break into melodious howling. It is a haunting, beautiful sound.
”That means they are happy dogs,” John mumbles from his sleeping bag.
The dogs are sleeping outside on the snow. The wind is blowing and it is 20 below. They are happy?
Day 3
At Twenty-Five-Mile Lake. Still dark at 9:30 a.m. Temperature 18 below, the morning wind out of the northwest beginning to have its way with the spruce spires.
Today we are to solo with dog teams on a 14-mile round trip to Bunco Lake.
”Do you want five or six dogs?” Ron asks. Then, without waiting for an answer, he announces five will probably be enough.
All 28 dogs go into a frenzy when they sense that a trip is in the offing. We learn how a harness fits over a dog`s head and where its legs go through the straps, and how to hang onto the leaping, squirming animal until it is snapped onto the tow line.
The teams are formed and John says, ”Don`t let go of your sled no matter what happens, because the dogs won`t stop and you might have to walk for miles.”
The start is akin to a rocket launch. The dogs plunge down the hill, the sled lurches and jerks my arms so that my feet slip off the steel brake that is supposed to spear into the packed trail to slow things down. In an impossible effort of cold fumbling, I struggle onto the backs of the runners just as the first sharp turn comes up and, as the dogs speed up, the sled skids off the trail and upends in the deep powder snow.
Somehow I hang onto the crossbar and skid along in the snow while the dogs keep pulling as if it is normal for the sled to be on its side and the driver to be surfing along like a seal. An uphill turn gives me a chance to right the sled and regain the runners, and then we are off across the muskeg in a ride so wild it makes you forget that your eyes are freezing open and your mouth is freezing shut.
Then the trail flattens and suddenly you feel a strange surge of pleasure, the kind that comes the first time you ride a bicycle or negotiate the intermediate ski run. The dogs pull at a fast steady trot, sometimes breaking into a lope, and the sled slides over the trail with a quiet hiss.
Gradually you develop a feel for the dogs and the sled, leaning into the turns and slowing the team down to avoid spills. There is a rhythm to it, and it gets into your blood enough to warm it so that you may last another hour before you freeze to death.
The 14-mile trip is completed in an astonishingly short time, and we are back at camp, and, amazingly, not feeling the cold nearly so much.
The dogs are unharnessed and tied up; and a strange mixture of fish, chicken, lamb, beef and dog food is blended with the water from melted snow and put on the stove to heat. It is an ugly-looking gruel and it is heated to conserve the calories the dogs must use in digesting it.
Then, when it is almost ready, a hanging water can inexplicably falls onto the corner of the big rectangular pan and upends it all over the cabin floor-the cabin floor we sleep on. There is a memorable moment in which everyone scrambles to clean up the flood of fish heads and soup. Outside, the dogs are howling.
Day 4
A heat wave hits the Twenty-Five-Mile Lake cabin area as the temperature climbs to five below and the wind skidding down off the Alaska range subsides to a steady hiss.
The contrary weather has scuttled plans for sleeping on the glacier, a turn of events which, quite frankly, I am able to bear. Not only is it too cold for our camping gear, but there has not been enough sustained cold to solidify the Chulitna River, which we must cross to get to Ruth Glacier. Ron tells us that several days ago, 80-year-old Milt Trump, a 60-year veteran of Alaska, disappeared when he tried to cross a river to get to his daughter`s house for Sunday dinner.
We make another run out across the swamps and thickets, each with our own team of five dogs; and it is on the return trip in the late afternoon that it all suddenly comes together and the likes of Robert Service and Jack London grin at us from the muskeg shadows.
The long twilight is upon us, and the moon edges up as a great yellow egg-shaped eye, dominating all that it surveys and giving a pale, surreal cast to the harsh wilderness. The intervals between dog sleds increase until there is a sense of solitude and intimacy with the unyielding land.
The wind is at my back and the action of riding the sled has warmed my body and even thawed my brain until it seems to function with a strange exhilaration. The dogs run with a serpent-like fluidity over the trail, and the bumps of the drifted snow give the sled an undulating motion that you absorb with your knees in a rhythmic, dancing motion.
If there is such a thing as ”the spell of the North” I fall under it.
That night around the warm stove, the stories flow like good wine.
Gold stories, like the time that John found 14 ounces of nuggets at the bottom of a little rock slide.
Bear stories, as when John used all of his ammunition to down a charging bear and then immediately went to town to trade in his rifle for a bigger one. Moose stories, such as last winter when Ron had to shoot two that came into his yard and tried to stomp his dogs, or when another moose trapped May Hanson in her house and then damaged the propane fuel line so that she had to spend two or three days without heat, and how you must give a moose the right- of-way on the trail and the big .44 pistols strapped onto the dog sleds are only to be used as a last resort.
Dog stories, of how one proven animal can sell or lease for thousands of dollars, and how a small 45- to 50-pound dog can follow an obliterated, week- old trail, and how they live only to pull a sled, and how 14 of John`s dogs once got loose and were shot by a trapper who mistook them for wolves.
Day 5
A blue cloud bank dares the sun to make its 10 a.m. appearance at Twenty- Five-Mile Lake, as the temperature climbs to above zero.
Today we make the 23-mile run back out to the road and we are promoted to seven-dog teams for the trip. By now we are old hands at wrestling the dogs into their places, and we kid ourselves that it is our experience and not that of the dogs that is facilitating the preparations.
The lead dog on my team is Sky, who has run the Iditarod two or three times. Mushers describe such a dog as having ”been to Nome.” Sky and the six other dogs are in a frenzy to get on the trail, and when I pull the release snap and grab up the snow hook, they leap down the trail and spill me so deep into the snow I must swim to the surface.
Then there is the long ride out, except it doesn`t seem long because the dogs run with such grace and power, and the scenery is so magnificent and the cold is no longer a threat, and from beneath the sled runners the muskeg whispers a song of losing your heart to the Northland.
Come on, Sky, take us to Nome!
