The Ceremonial Start can appear to be a bit of a circus; in fact the whole of the Iditarod can appear to be a bit of a circus. As a dog musher, when asked what it is I like most about running dogs, I am genuine in my assertion that I love the solitary nature of the trail, being out in the wilderness with just myself and the dogs. On the Quest, with its often limited field, you can be a mile in front of, or behind another musher and have no idea they are so close. You can run 60 miles from a checkpoint to a camping stop and never see another team; if you fall asleep when camping, teams will whisper by you and you might not see a team for over 100 miles; on the 2015 Quest I went 560 miles without seeing another dog team. On the Iditarod, where fields can often extend well beyond 80 competitors, it feels like the moment you drop your snow hook to camp, or even just snack your dogs, you are surrounded by teams, some cheerfully apologising for passing so close to your team, maybe clipping the sled or snow hook, others, often the more seasoned veterans, scowling in a questioning manner as to why any dullard would stop in such an inconvenient location. On the Quest I have cut a solitary figure in the final checkpoint on the race; the two times I have been in White Mountain, 80 miles from the finish, I have been surrounded by teams – on the Iditarod you are never on your own. This fact is greatly amplified by the first few checkpoints on the Iditarod. Normally, particularly on races you are unfamiliar with, the first indication that you are getting close to a checkpoint, barring possibly seeing a bush plane landing, is that the dogs pick up speed, sensing that there is a change ahead, possibly smelling or hearing the sounds of a checkpoint, associating the smells and sounds with food, straw and sleep. On Iditarod I have been well over a half a mile from the first couple of checkpoints at Yentna or Skwentna when I have heard the increasing cacophony of hundreds of sled dogs failing to either sleep or rest in a checkpoint, the noise getting ever louder as we close in on the checkpoint. Our primary aims, whether in a checkpoint or camping by the trail, are to get a full meal into the dogs and for the dogs to both rest, and sleep, for as long as possible – every time we stop. In a checkpoint where the noise can be heard from almost a mile away, mushers may be able to get a hot meal and a warm sleeping spot but dogs are going to get no rest at all. With this in mind my race strategy, when running on the traditional Iditarod routes at least, has been to run through at least the first two checkpoints and camp on the trail; in 2016 I decided to run through the first three checkpoints: Yentna, Skwentna and Finger Lake. It is not always easy to run through a checkpoint, often where you need to stop for five to ten minutes to grab resupplies from drop bags and maybe a fresh bail of straw: the dogs are expecting to stop and be fed. Running through the first few checkpoints on Iditarod is however aided by the fact that they are relatively close to the start and close to each other: on the Quest, on a Whitehorse start year, the first checkpoint, Braeburn, is 100 miles from the start – for Iditarod Yentna is less than 40 miles from the Iditarod start, Skwentna just over another 30 miles and even Finger Lake is only 110 miles from the start. The fourth checkpoint, Rainy Pass is still only 140 miles from the start so the run from the Start to Rainy Pass can be nicely broken down into three 45 (ish) mile runs, going through each of the checkpoints and camping on the trail and therefore avoiding the distractions of the first three checkpoints.
And this indeed was my plan for the 2016 race with the hope that dogs and musher would arrive in Rainy Pass relatively rested and in good shape despite skipping through the first three checkpoints – plans; mice; men!
The first time I ever tried to ‘blow through’ a checkpoint was Braeburn on the 2015 Yukon Quest – it did not go well and it ended up taking almost an hour to get through the checkpoint and back on the trail; this was not at all good for the dogs. With the 2015 Iditarod taking the unusual route of starting in Fairbanks due to low snow through the Alaska Range, and with checkpoints nicely spaced apart, there was no opportunity, or need, to run through checkpoints on that race. For the 2016 Quest starting in Fairbanks, the distances and locations of checkpoints relative to the big summits was again not that conducive with running through checkpoints and so the next opportunity I had was on the 2016 Iditarod. With the race now returning to a traditional Anchorage/Willow start my pre-race plan was to run through Yentna to around 50 miles and then camp on the trail, another 50 miles through Skwentna and again camp on the trail, then run through Finger Lake and down the Happy Valley Steps for a 40 mile run into our first checkpoint stop in Rainy Pass. Running through Yentna was actually pretty easy; it is less than 40 easy trail miles, mostly on the river, from the start and so the dogs were still really hyped up and didn’t want to stop when they reached the checkpoint; light was still pretty good and so there were no high power lamps to distract the dogs and remind them of other checkpoints, not too many teams had stopped and the checkpoint is such that you arrive, sign in and out without leaving the trail (there are a number of chutes to run through allowing the volunteers to process teams quickly), you are only 40 miles into the race and so no need to access any drop bags and you are almost straight back onto the race trail before the dogs realise there was even a stop there.
Getting through Skwentna always seems a bit more involved although having recently camped, and still less than 70 miles into the race, the dogs were no less pumped up than they were in Yentna. I however now needed a fresh bail of straw for our next camping stop as well as a resupply of dog and human food and snacks and a new set of booties for the dogs and so needed to stop and access the drop bags I had sent out before the race. Even looking back now, stopping in Skwentna in 2016 reminds me somewhat of Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen et al stopped halfway up the river for the ‘ Playmates’ Show’ emerging from the darkness and solitude of the river into the bright lights and hubbub of ‘civilisation’. Now late at night/early in the morning, the run through the checkpoint was illuminated by portable lamps powered by small generators, there was a buzz and an excitement everywhere with many volunteers offering support so that I could get straw, fuel and drop bags as quickly as possible, dogs from the teams that had decided to stay were screaming at their neighbours, after the previous silence on the trail everything seemed frenetic and otherworldly - this was definitely not a Yukon Quest checkpoint. Having camped only about 15 miles before Skwentna it seemed that the dogs wanted out of this bustling hub of activity as much as I did and within less than 10 minutes we were enveloped once again by the solitude and silence of the trail and back on our way towards Finger Lake.
No matter how much I train, my biorhythms always remain the same, and are now, as they were back in the 90s when we would work night shifts on the aircraft carriers, seemingly tuned so that around 2am my body begins to shut down and no matter how much I fight it, it does not begin to come back fully online until about 6am; this is the time of night when I always struggle the most to stay awake and focused. Unfortunately 2 am to 6 am are 4 of the best hours for running dogs in terms of temperatures, although I do feel that dogs’ biorhythms closely align with our own. My strategy now meant that I needed to run through the night and would make our next camping spot just after day break. This was not ideal as it would mean our third run, after camping, would be partly in the heat of the afternoon but so early in the race everything was a trade-off.
Just after daybreak, we passed a few other teams resting up and I started looking for a camping spot for ourselves. For me finding a good location to stop is never as easy as it sounds, largely because of how lazy I am. In theory you can stop pretty much anywhere, snow shoe down a section just off the trail and then lead the dogs in and off the trail. Trail etiquette, and common sense, dictates that you need to get the dogs clear of the trail, firstly so that you are not blocking the trail for teams coming up from behind but also because you want your own dogs to rest and not be disturbed by passing teams. When you camp by the trail you always put down straw for the dogs to sleep and invariably feed in and so teams coming later associate straw both with rest and food. If the straw is too close to the trail, deep into the race tired dogs may try to dive into the straw to rest, earlier in a race dogs may dive into the straw looking for food – it is always best for everybody to bed dogs as far off the main trail as possible. In reality I try to find places where the trail breakers have either deliberately run off the trail in order to put in possible camping spots or where other snow machines have run off trail for fun. These areas are usually partly packed and so okay to walk on, and more likely that snow hooks will hold, and better for the dogs to sleep on; these side trails will often reconnect to the main a few yards further on and so don’t require leading the dogs through deep snow in order to rejoin the main trail. Somewhere between 0600 and 0700, and about 10 miles short of Finger Lake, so close enough that the dogs would easily run through the checkpoint when asked later in the day and yet still within striking distance of what would be our first checkpoint stop at Rainy Pass, we found a short side trail off the main trail and pulled in for our second camping stop of the race.
As I have said before our main focus when we stop are food and maximum rest and sleep for the dogs – my number three priority is food for me J A main meal for the dogs consists of around 1 cup of kibble plus 1/2 lb of meat per dog per meal. With trail temperatures almost always below freezing and normally down in the -20C’s, the raw meat we carry in the sled is always frozen solid. In order to feed the dogs we have an alcohol fueled cooker that we use to melt snow and then boil water and then pour the boiling water on top of the meat inside a cooler so as to thaw the meat – we never try to cook the meat directly inside the cooker as we may need that for our own food and drinks and wish to avoid food poisoning or giardia. In fact our main source of nutrition on the trail tends to be boil-in-the-bag meals which we drop into the pot we are using for melting snow/boiling water for the dog food. Then whilst the meat is thawing out we are able to eat nutritious hot meals. Having stopped to camp, early on Monday morning, ten miles short of Finger Lake, this was the routine I followed.
Sled dogs taking part in long distance races typically require 10-12000 calories per day; I have learnt through trial and error and, well, bitter experience, that I also need A LOT of calories in order to maintain my impressive physique . Having made a meal for myself, and eaten it, when preparing the dogs’ meal, then having bedded the dogs down and repacked the sled I decided I needed to make another meal for myself – just in case I was getting too waif-like. Unfortunately by this point my cooker had now just died down and gone out so if I was going to melt snow and heat water to boil a bag of food I was going to have to get the cooker going again. Relighting a warm alcohol cooker is always an ‘interesting’ evolution. If the alcohol pan in the bottom of the cooker is still warm, the fuel being sprayed in can ignite immediately with the very really threat that the stream of fuel from the bottle to the stove can also ignite, blowing up the fuel bottle and causing serious injury to the musher. Having finished a difficult Yukon Quest only two weeks before, and having had no sleep the previous night, I was absolutely exhausted and so really not thinking properly. Very carefully I poured the fuel into the alcohol pan, keeping my head clear of the cooker and ready to jump back if the fuel self-ignited; all was good – now I just needed to relight the alcohol. I have found that the best way to do this is to use weather proof matches to light a piece of tissue paper that I keep in my fire lighting pack, drop the tissue into alcohol pan and start melting snow. In order to make sure the match lit the paper I leaned over and into the cooker for shelter from the wind. Although the fuel had not relight when I poured in the fuel, hot gases must have been circulating around the top of the cooker because as soon as I struck the match the cooker blew up into my face. In what must have been microseconds I realised a) I was in serious trouble and b) my hair and possibly my clothes were on fire; although totally blind I immediately dived into where I thought the snow bank was and started covering myself in snow. As I lifted myself up and gingerly opened my eyes I realised that I could still not see, slowly however some light and dim vision returned. I could still smell burning and looking around as best I could; I could see that the back of my parka was on fire, it must have caught a spark off my mid-layer jacket as I dived into the snow. I threw snow on my parka and made sure my hair and other clothes had gone out. My eyes and face felt extremely sore and my vision was still so dim and blurred that I figured that alone, ten miles from a checkpoint and with 16 dogs to try to look after, I was in very deep trouble. I wandered onto the main trail hoping that salvation would come along and sure enough a few minutes later a dog team appeared around the corner. I stopped the bemused musher and asked if they could check my eyes and face and let me know how bad things were. Fortunately the musher was Matt Failor, one of the nicest and most professional mushers you could ever meet. Matt and I had run large parts of our rookie Quests together in 2013 so knew each other well. Initially Matt was confused as to why I would stop him and ask him to check out my suntan but eventually he ascertained what had happened and assured me that things did not look too bad. Still I was now exhausted, in some degree of pain and feeling like a complete idiot -oh and I had a massive hole in my new parka and my mid layer jacket was severely melted- this was not going to be a fun race and we were still less than 24 hours into it. But then again every circus needs a clown and I did have a bright red nose!
And this indeed was my plan for the 2016 race with the hope that dogs and musher would arrive in Rainy Pass relatively rested and in good shape despite skipping through the first three checkpoints – plans; mice; men!
The first time I ever tried to ‘blow through’ a checkpoint was Braeburn on the 2015 Yukon Quest – it did not go well and it ended up taking almost an hour to get through the checkpoint and back on the trail; this was not at all good for the dogs. With the 2015 Iditarod taking the unusual route of starting in Fairbanks due to low snow through the Alaska Range, and with checkpoints nicely spaced apart, there was no opportunity, or need, to run through checkpoints on that race. For the 2016 Quest starting in Fairbanks, the distances and locations of checkpoints relative to the big summits was again not that conducive with running through checkpoints and so the next opportunity I had was on the 2016 Iditarod. With the race now returning to a traditional Anchorage/Willow start my pre-race plan was to run through Yentna to around 50 miles and then camp on the trail, another 50 miles through Skwentna and again camp on the trail, then run through Finger Lake and down the Happy Valley Steps for a 40 mile run into our first checkpoint stop in Rainy Pass. Running through Yentna was actually pretty easy; it is less than 40 easy trail miles, mostly on the river, from the start and so the dogs were still really hyped up and didn’t want to stop when they reached the checkpoint; light was still pretty good and so there were no high power lamps to distract the dogs and remind them of other checkpoints, not too many teams had stopped and the checkpoint is such that you arrive, sign in and out without leaving the trail (there are a number of chutes to run through allowing the volunteers to process teams quickly), you are only 40 miles into the race and so no need to access any drop bags and you are almost straight back onto the race trail before the dogs realise there was even a stop there.
Getting through Skwentna always seems a bit more involved although having recently camped, and still less than 70 miles into the race, the dogs were no less pumped up than they were in Yentna. I however now needed a fresh bail of straw for our next camping stop as well as a resupply of dog and human food and snacks and a new set of booties for the dogs and so needed to stop and access the drop bags I had sent out before the race. Even looking back now, stopping in Skwentna in 2016 reminds me somewhat of Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen et al stopped halfway up the river for the ‘ Playmates’ Show’ emerging from the darkness and solitude of the river into the bright lights and hubbub of ‘civilisation’. Now late at night/early in the morning, the run through the checkpoint was illuminated by portable lamps powered by small generators, there was a buzz and an excitement everywhere with many volunteers offering support so that I could get straw, fuel and drop bags as quickly as possible, dogs from the teams that had decided to stay were screaming at their neighbours, after the previous silence on the trail everything seemed frenetic and otherworldly - this was definitely not a Yukon Quest checkpoint. Having camped only about 15 miles before Skwentna it seemed that the dogs wanted out of this bustling hub of activity as much as I did and within less than 10 minutes we were enveloped once again by the solitude and silence of the trail and back on our way towards Finger Lake.
No matter how much I train, my biorhythms always remain the same, and are now, as they were back in the 90s when we would work night shifts on the aircraft carriers, seemingly tuned so that around 2am my body begins to shut down and no matter how much I fight it, it does not begin to come back fully online until about 6am; this is the time of night when I always struggle the most to stay awake and focused. Unfortunately 2 am to 6 am are 4 of the best hours for running dogs in terms of temperatures, although I do feel that dogs’ biorhythms closely align with our own. My strategy now meant that I needed to run through the night and would make our next camping spot just after day break. This was not ideal as it would mean our third run, after camping, would be partly in the heat of the afternoon but so early in the race everything was a trade-off.
Just after daybreak, we passed a few other teams resting up and I started looking for a camping spot for ourselves. For me finding a good location to stop is never as easy as it sounds, largely because of how lazy I am. In theory you can stop pretty much anywhere, snow shoe down a section just off the trail and then lead the dogs in and off the trail. Trail etiquette, and common sense, dictates that you need to get the dogs clear of the trail, firstly so that you are not blocking the trail for teams coming up from behind but also because you want your own dogs to rest and not be disturbed by passing teams. When you camp by the trail you always put down straw for the dogs to sleep and invariably feed in and so teams coming later associate straw both with rest and food. If the straw is too close to the trail, deep into the race tired dogs may try to dive into the straw to rest, earlier in a race dogs may dive into the straw looking for food – it is always best for everybody to bed dogs as far off the main trail as possible. In reality I try to find places where the trail breakers have either deliberately run off the trail in order to put in possible camping spots or where other snow machines have run off trail for fun. These areas are usually partly packed and so okay to walk on, and more likely that snow hooks will hold, and better for the dogs to sleep on; these side trails will often reconnect to the main a few yards further on and so don’t require leading the dogs through deep snow in order to rejoin the main trail. Somewhere between 0600 and 0700, and about 10 miles short of Finger Lake, so close enough that the dogs would easily run through the checkpoint when asked later in the day and yet still within striking distance of what would be our first checkpoint stop at Rainy Pass, we found a short side trail off the main trail and pulled in for our second camping stop of the race.
As I have said before our main focus when we stop are food and maximum rest and sleep for the dogs – my number three priority is food for me J A main meal for the dogs consists of around 1 cup of kibble plus 1/2 lb of meat per dog per meal. With trail temperatures almost always below freezing and normally down in the -20C’s, the raw meat we carry in the sled is always frozen solid. In order to feed the dogs we have an alcohol fueled cooker that we use to melt snow and then boil water and then pour the boiling water on top of the meat inside a cooler so as to thaw the meat – we never try to cook the meat directly inside the cooker as we may need that for our own food and drinks and wish to avoid food poisoning or giardia. In fact our main source of nutrition on the trail tends to be boil-in-the-bag meals which we drop into the pot we are using for melting snow/boiling water for the dog food. Then whilst the meat is thawing out we are able to eat nutritious hot meals. Having stopped to camp, early on Monday morning, ten miles short of Finger Lake, this was the routine I followed.
Sled dogs taking part in long distance races typically require 10-12000 calories per day; I have learnt through trial and error and, well, bitter experience, that I also need A LOT of calories in order to maintain my impressive physique . Having made a meal for myself, and eaten it, when preparing the dogs’ meal, then having bedded the dogs down and repacked the sled I decided I needed to make another meal for myself – just in case I was getting too waif-like. Unfortunately by this point my cooker had now just died down and gone out so if I was going to melt snow and heat water to boil a bag of food I was going to have to get the cooker going again. Relighting a warm alcohol cooker is always an ‘interesting’ evolution. If the alcohol pan in the bottom of the cooker is still warm, the fuel being sprayed in can ignite immediately with the very really threat that the stream of fuel from the bottle to the stove can also ignite, blowing up the fuel bottle and causing serious injury to the musher. Having finished a difficult Yukon Quest only two weeks before, and having had no sleep the previous night, I was absolutely exhausted and so really not thinking properly. Very carefully I poured the fuel into the alcohol pan, keeping my head clear of the cooker and ready to jump back if the fuel self-ignited; all was good – now I just needed to relight the alcohol. I have found that the best way to do this is to use weather proof matches to light a piece of tissue paper that I keep in my fire lighting pack, drop the tissue into alcohol pan and start melting snow. In order to make sure the match lit the paper I leaned over and into the cooker for shelter from the wind. Although the fuel had not relight when I poured in the fuel, hot gases must have been circulating around the top of the cooker because as soon as I struck the match the cooker blew up into my face. In what must have been microseconds I realised a) I was in serious trouble and b) my hair and possibly my clothes were on fire; although totally blind I immediately dived into where I thought the snow bank was and started covering myself in snow. As I lifted myself up and gingerly opened my eyes I realised that I could still not see, slowly however some light and dim vision returned. I could still smell burning and looking around as best I could; I could see that the back of my parka was on fire, it must have caught a spark off my mid-layer jacket as I dived into the snow. I threw snow on my parka and made sure my hair and other clothes had gone out. My eyes and face felt extremely sore and my vision was still so dim and blurred that I figured that alone, ten miles from a checkpoint and with 16 dogs to try to look after, I was in very deep trouble. I wandered onto the main trail hoping that salvation would come along and sure enough a few minutes later a dog team appeared around the corner. I stopped the bemused musher and asked if they could check my eyes and face and let me know how bad things were. Fortunately the musher was Matt Failor, one of the nicest and most professional mushers you could ever meet. Matt and I had run large parts of our rookie Quests together in 2013 so knew each other well. Initially Matt was confused as to why I would stop him and ask him to check out my suntan but eventually he ascertained what had happened and assured me that things did not look too bad. Still I was now exhausted, in some degree of pain and feeling like a complete idiot -oh and I had a massive hole in my new parka and my mid layer jacket was severely melted- this was not going to be a fun race and we were still less than 24 hours into it. But then again every circus needs a clown and I did have a bright red nose!
