| The
Journey Continues – Ophir to Don’s Cabin
April 2, 2007
The word is, the worst trail of the entire
race lies ahead of us. About 10 miles after Don’s Cabin there
is no snow, no defined trail, and three foot divots. I plan leave
about 8 PM, run to Don’s Cabin, spend the rest of the night,
and continue through the bad part in the daylight. My checkpoint routine
is suffering and it is after 9PM when I finally pull the hook for
Iditarod. Iditarod shows me out at 11:00 PM, but that is in error.
With the gnarly trail ahead I want my best leaders. I put Platinum
and Bass up front.
Initially, the trail follows a road, after about 10 miles it turns
off from the Irondog trail (Northern Route) and we start to see
new country. At first the trail is pretty good, then we come into
rolling open country with no trees. The snow vanishes and takes
the trail with it. Many of the trail markers have been knocked down
by previous dog teams. Nobody intends to, but the leaders go on
one side of the marker and either the team dogs or the sled wind
up on the other side. You always try to stop and reset the marker,
but sometimes the dogs disagree.
About mid-night I reach a point where I can’t see the next
marker. I look for tracks, but it is like looking for the trail
left by the last person to walk across your living room. I set the
snowhook into the tundra as best I can, pray that it holds the team,
and start to walk away looking for the next marker. After 20 feet
I see tracks in a little bit of snow between tussocks and start
to follow it. Pretty soon there is a little more snow and I see
more tracks, but they all go in different directions! I check on
the dogs – they are fine – and start to walk in a spiral
looking for markers. Pretty soon I see one way off in the distance
almost 90 degrees from where I found the tracks in the snow. I lead
the dogs back around (they are as confused as I am) and loose the
marker in a low spot. Back to the spiral search – there it
is, still 30 degrees off my direction of travel. I haw the dogs
over to the marker and stop to find the next one. Bass and Platinum
are doing an excellent job of following my commands across this
trackless land.
About 1 AM we loose the markers
again. I am following intermittent tracks when they end in a wall
of brush. The dogs go left, but I stop them until I see the next marker.
Maybe 10 minutes later I’ve found it, walk back to the dogs
and off we go again. We had lost the trail before the brush –
it went left and we went straight. The trail goes back to the brush,
but now there is an opening. The dogs stop and ball up. I walk up
and there is a small frozen stream (that is why the brush is there)
with a little overflow. There is no solution but to grab my leaders’
harnesses and walk them across. The water comes up over the rubber
base of my Northern Outfitters boots. My feet are wet. We cross the
overflow and I stop. The instructions with the boots say to take them
off, wring out the liners, pour out the water, and put them back on.
They should still keep you warm and dry out as you wear them. Luckily
I can sit on the sled seat and don’t have to stand barefoot
on this frozen ground. My thin socks are soaked and worthless, but
the boots are designed to be worn without socks. It is about -20 and
this should test them.
|
Trail
leaving Don's Cabin |
From here the trail is better defined
and the dogs gleefully pull me across the barren tundra, bouncing
from obstacle to obstacle. There are several times I can’t see
the next marker as we leave the last one, but within a minute a reflector
starts to show dimly ahead. One of the real advantages of running
at night is these reflectors show up much further than the stakes
in the daylight. We seem to be making good time, but have seen no
sign of Don’s Cabin yet.
It’s 6 AM and we are back
in thin snow with small trees. The sky is starting to get light. There
are lots of small tussocks in the trail – nothing like the burn,
but hard to handle. I’m riding with the balls of my feet on
the runners and the heels over the drag so I just shift weight to
slow the team. A tussock catches my right foot, twists it back and
then bends it underneath my leg. I hear a snap and the left runner
comes loose. The leg really hurts, the big toe on my right foot is
cold, and the left runner is broken. This has happened before in training
and I carry a patch kit. Some welding bar on one side, a wrench on
the other to splint the break, and 4 hose clamps to hold it all together.
I’ve lost the wrench, but have a wooden dowel that will work
instead. I take the drink cooler out of the sled so I don’t
spill it and start repairs. Last year in training I broke the runner
going into Luce’s on the Yentna River. I ran the last 9 miles
to Luce’s on the broken runner, patched it and ran 50 miles
back to Knik on the patch, so this is not the end of the world. About
an hour into the job Ellen Halverson come up and stops with me. She
is glad to see someone and know she is still on the trail. This is
big country if you get lost. Ellen and I gather wood and build a small
fire – then I melt snow and fix the dogs a meal. Afterwards
I take my boot off and the liner is frozen to my big toe on the right
foot. I thaw out some over the fire. The good news is that my leg
hurts enough the shoulder doesn’t bother my anymore.Neither
of us has seen Don’s Cabin. We can’t imagine that we haven’t
covered 35 miles yet, but just in case we fix the dogs a half meal,
saving some in case we have to stop again before Iditarod. I carry
another ½ meal (8 lbs of kibble) as emergency rations –
that is what the dogs get at home so it will work in a pinch.
|
Eric's
broken sled. The right runner just broke, the patch
on the left runner broke, and the stanchions are
still bent from earlier crashes |
Just before noon Heather Siirtola catches
us. I’m off, but Ellen will wait to go with Heather a little
later. Within an hour I pass Don’s cabin and for the first time
really know where I am. I took me almost 10 hours to make that 35
miles. Granted we lost 2 to 3 hours searching for the trail in the
dark, but that is much slower than I thought we were traveling. The
cabin looks even worse than I had expected. The door is missing; there
are straw and rodent droppings everywhere. Outside there are several
straw piles where earlier teams have rested, but everyone has a fire
pit nearby. It looks like they all chose to rest outside with their
dogs rather than inside the ramshackle cabin.
Back on the trail about 15 minutes later I catch my right foot again,
twist it back to the right and under the sled – Ouch! I also
broke the right runner just behind the stanchion and broke the splint
I had put of the left runner. I’m afraid this is the end of
my race. I lay there for a while trying to think. I have more hose
clamps and could try to patch the second runner using tree branches
as splints, but these are all evergreens and they are brittle. I look
at the patch on the first runner. Last year on snow I ran over 50
miles on a patch like this, but this year it is catching on the tussocks.
One of the hose clamps has pulled loose off the splint and another
is working that way. The bare ground is putting much more stress on
them. I’m afraid that if I cobble something together and keep
going that I’ll hit a bump that hurts the leg enough that I’ll
loose my team. Without a well defined trail who knows where they will
go. I watched them loose the trail and start to wander around last
night before I could stop them. This is awful big country to have
to look for a lost musher and dog team. I think about just staying
here and waiting for rescue, but that is just me feeling sorry for
myself. In Nikolai I told John Runkle that I had lost my money and
my mind. He said that you didn’t need either one to finish the
race, but if you lost your ambition you wouldn’t make it. Sitting
out there with my toe half froze, my leg hurting, and both runners
on the sled broken, I lost my ambition and decided to scratch.
As I sat and thought it made more sense to try to get back to Don’s
cabin. I knew the trail sweeps were a long way back. My leg hurt
too much to even consider leading the dogs back one-by-one. I had
some rope. What if I put the plastic back on the runners to give
it a surface to run on and help hold them together. Then if I jammed
the broken runners back together, and tied the foot pads tight to
the back stanchion would that hold well enough for a short trip?
Could I ride the seat back to Don’s? It took me almost two
hours, but it worked with only a couple of crashes.
I picked what looked like the best of the straw beds and parked
the team. A a couple of minutes later Ellen came by. I explained
what happened and said that I would wait at Don’s cabin for
rescue. Please tell the race judge at Iditarod. While talking to
Ellen, Heather pulled up. They expected to be in Iditarod the next
morning. I had food and fuel for myself and the dogs for two meals
– dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. I expected
to be rescued, or at least have the Iditarod Air Force drop supplies
by late the next afternoon.
Ellen and Heather left just as Don Smidt pulled in. I explained
to Don what had happened and he tried to talk me out of scratching.
He suggested I take my drag and flip it over so the smooth side
was down and ride that into Iditarod. Or I could take the stanchions,
move them forward to shorten the sled and remount the foot pads
on the back of the broken runners. Then throw out everything but
the mandatory gear and drive that into Iditarod. Once there Ellen
said she had a small sled in McGrath that I could use. Don assured
me that Mark Nordman could work wonders to help get that sled to
Iditarod. I thought about it, but I had lost my sled took kit and
my ambition. If I hit a bump hard enough to hurt that leg again
I could loose the whole team. At Don’s cabin I had some shelter,
trees to cut and burn for heat, snow to melt for water, and straw
for the dogs. Much of the trail from here is above timberline (no
trees to burn), with no snow to melt and no shelter from the wind.
I thanked Don, but like the song about the gambler, I figured I
needed to know when to fold ‘em.
Keep ‘em Northbound
Eric
© 2007 All rights reserved
|
