By Jlona Richey
The dogs all barked a welcome when I arrived at Arctic kennel in the old township of Knik, near Wasilla.
There, a tall, lanky musher makes his home. He has no running water, just electricity. His camping conditions there are rugged at best. He hauls water in the summer, melts snow in the winter.
“Mushing is a life style, you see, “ he grins and pushes his baseball cap back. “You don’t just run the race and go home, resting on your laurels. No, it is a total commitment to the dogs, the athletes, the wheels, so to speak, on the long trek to Nome via dog sled at the 'last great race."
Training starts from puppy hood. The dogs learn to pull by pulling small objects, like an empty milk jug, and they learn from the older dogs, as well.
GB cradles one of the pups and holds it, I ask him to stand by the harness post for a photo, to give folks an idea of where these dog-halters are stored.
Socializing the pups, having them handled by many people makes them happy to be around people and fearless of them.
We walk down the trail a bit, where he has a dog cart ready to hitch up. This is a means to give rides to tourists and earn a few dollars, but also a good way to teach the dogs to pull and work as a team. Between the cart, the four-wheeler and the sled, the dogs build the muscles they need to become the true athletes these huskies are, the dogs of the Iditarod. GB has thirty- five dogs. They are his friends, comrades, canine companions.
He picks the dogs he wants to comprise the team and lays out his gang line. He harnesses his dogs and positions them where they either work best or need more training. The largest dogs are placed in the wheel position, closest to the cart, then come the team dogs, the second pair in line are the swing dogs and the first ones, the lead dogs.
The enthusiasm in the kennel is incredible: every dog wants to be chosen, the by-passed ones howl in protest.
As he works with deft fingers and quiet confidence, the musher talks about his journey to Nome. He has completed the northern route, the start from Fairbanks, the start from Wasilla, the start from Willow. All he has left to do to accomplish his goal is to complete the southern route through the ghost town of Iditarod. He has a lot of training ahead of him. He lost his beloved lead dog and soul mate, Cymba, and Shifter is getting too old to make the trip to Nome, he has no good leaders raised at the moment and the puppies are still too small to consider for the 2006 race. The southern route comes up again in 2007, and that is where he focuses on.
A small kennel with no big name sponsors, a grass roots mushing outfit running on mostly heart and hope, but a dream can be realized. The man from Utah was raised to be a hard worker, his Mormon upbringing saw to that, and he is a man of discipline and routine, of forging ahead and going strong into the face of adversity. There is no such thing as failure. It is all a learning experience. Life throws you lemons, make lemonade, mush on.
He did. His sled was stolen in Fairbanks too close to the race to make, build or buy another one. He used a modified sprint sled but after reaching Skwentna, he knew this sled would not get him to Nome, so he procrastinated at this checkpoint for the longest time. He did not want to let his sponsors down, he did not want to let the dogs down. He had to let himself down and admit that he had given it his best shot. It took courage to quit. He did not like it one bit, his pride, his ego wanted him to go on, to do it anyway, but it was not an option, the little sled would never make it through the Dalzell gorge, after the trouble he encountered just up to the Yentna and into Skwentna.
He returned to Knik, just a few steps backwards, before making the leap again, plunging ahead.
The world encroaches, bills need to be paid, the routine of every day living must go on.
The war in Iraq, meth labs practically in the back yard, gang activity, violence, senseless killings abound even in this once tranquil corner of the world. Progress rushes on with giant steps. The Knik area, sleepy, half-forgotten for decades, suddenly became a major target of population boost. The cause for this?
A bridge is being considered, a ferry route established between Anchorage and Point Mc.Kenzie. Major development is enveloping the only mushing community in the northern part of south central Alaska. Mushers from Eagle River to Willow are impacted by the encroachment of civilization. Traffic will become more of a hazard to dog teams crossing roads, many trails are no longer usable, because subdivisions are built on them, people complain about the dogs barking.
Joe Redington SR and Dorothy Page, the founders of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race wanted to bring back what was lost with the advance of the motorized sled, the snow machine, dog teams going by the wayside, facing the fate of carriage and draft horses, to slowly slide into oblivion, relegated to a curio thing, a tourist thing, a quaint antiquity.
The interest in the sport of mushing was rekindled in 1972, with Joe in the vanguard, beating the drum, as you will. Mushing made a come back. The Iditarod is now an internationally accredited race, sporting fields of 80 mushers and more.
Only, it has now become a sheer race for speed, no longer just the enjoyment of the trail, the visiting in the villages, the achievement of successfully mastering the many-faceted aspects of the 1000 mile trail to Nome. Dogs are downsized, bred for speed and endurance, stream lined. Gone are the freight dogs of winter, the Inuit Dogs, the Siberians, there were only two teams in a field of eighty and only one of them pure bred Siberian in a Canadian team. The heavy dogs are not speedy dogs. They will get you there, but at a lesser pace.
The Alaskan huskies of Arctic kennel are all in harness, the musher is in place to pull the stop and off we go at breakneck speed, the dogs pull us effortlessly across the rough terrain, we bounce and wobble inside the cart, the musher in back giving quiet commands to his leaders, who obey without hesitation. It is a sheer joy to see a well trained team in action.
Just being out there, on this historical trail, passing by an Indian cemetery with Russian Orthodox crosses as grave markers, the silence is deafening. The clicking of the dog’s nails, softly rustling leaves, the rolling of the rubber tires, a creak in the cart, but overall, the quiet. A lifestyle, a mode of transportation without the guzzling of gasoline and fossil fuels, passing by a serene lake, where the fish are jumping with a giant splash, birds singing, bees buzzing and the whine of a lone mosquito trying to get her measure of blood.
Our circuit does not take us far into the wilds, but enough to get the taste of it, to waken the hunger to see more, explore more, learn more about the dogs, their musher and their way of life.
Mushing will go on in the Greatland, but the ‘back of the pack mushers will go by the way side, the sheer enjoyment of the sport will be railroaded to recreational mushers, it will not be long before the running of the race for the sake of completing it, not running to win it will cease to exist, and what a shame.
The dependence upon the dogs will always be there, so will the bonding, but the leisure aspect of it will disappear and Iditarod become strictly a business like the Indy 500.
The musher did not say it in so many words, but he seemed to agree with my thinking.
Back of the pack mushers are a breed of their own, like the old sourdoughs out of Robert Service poems, the shoe string crowd and the novice crowd of mushing will not cease to exist will not cease to exist. They will still make the race their own, face the adversities, fight for their trails, work on issues like the better regulation of snow machines, have advocates, become advocates, or in the instance of our musher from Knik, write a book.
He penned ‘Winning the Iditarod’, although he has never one the race or probably ever win it by crossing the finish line first. He has won the Iditarod by winning his own race, by making it on his own pace, by achieving a goal.
The message here is clear. Any undertaking to be done well requires sacrifices and a degree of failure with the grit to allow for adversity and carry on in spite of it.
Another back of the pack musher advocates a Boy Scout Merit Badge for mushing and as an iditarod finisher from the state of Georgia, he and his sled dogs are a bit of a novelty down south where snow is scarce.
Dog mushing teaches courage, teamwork, innovation, survival and endurance. No wonder there is now a Teacher on the Trail, bringing the Iditarod to class rooms nation wide.
Mushing will not die out. There are many young people still getting into the sport and watching them compete at the Junior Iditarod is terrific.
Ellie Claus from Wrangell won the Junior Race a while back and she has run the big race. She used her scholarship money from her mushing win to pay for her pilot’s license and in 2006 she took the challenge for Nome.
We need to go back to the basics, back to simple values, away from the circuit overload of technology, away from the stresses. We need to slow down once in a while, get away from the crowds, the noise, the civilized world and experience the one with nature, the one with earth, the belonging as ourselves, alone, without the umbilical cord plugged into the machine…we need this oneness with nature to stay spiritually and mentally fit and maintain our humanity.
Back at the kennel, the dogs are content, the musher works swiftly to water his charges, free them of the harness and give them a bit of time to run without their tethers. After all, dogs are people, too.
About Jlona
Born and raised in Europe. Jlona grew up in the upper Rhine River Valley and the mountains of Austria. She helped out at her grandfather's photo studio, shooting her first wedding when she was twelve. She also learned all about wildflowers and their preservation from the Bergoma, her mountain granny, who sold pressed flower art in Innshruck, in the summer months.
Jlona has always managed to capture the spirit of the moment in her people photography and has produced some world class images. But coming to Alaska, she put people behind her, although she will occassionally "shoot" people for album covers and model portfolios.
In 1997, Tracks decided to shoot "the Iditarod" because of Jlona's love for sled dogs and the husband-wife teams great respect for the dog drivers. In 1998, they managed to get a photo of everyone of the 64 mushers setting out for Nome.
Jlona is purbreed Mongolian and as such closely related to the ancestors of Alaska's Eskimo. Her grandmother's philosophy reflects the ideals of native elders in the great land. It also explains the great many native friends Jlona has accross the nation, always learning from them about the land she makes her home. She admires Marie Louise Defender Wilson, an Ogellalah Sioux elder, who is still an activist at the age of 85, and who also was the very first Miss Native America and congressional worker for the late Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota, and a good friend of the "Trax Gang."
Her great loves are Alaska's scenery and critters great and small and she and Philip make a great team.