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It's been quite an eventful couple of weeks, to say the least. I finally decided to go ahead with the Serum Run, with the result that I spent all of last week frantically getting the food drop together. That also meant not running the dogs for awhile longer, but I didn't have many other options.

The food drop for the Serum Run actually was almost as complex as for the Iditarod, and I put my five years of Iditarod experience to good effect. We're going to be 18 days on the trail, and food for the dogs and for me and other supplies like batteries and handwarmers for every day had to be figured out, bought, cut up if needed, re-bagged, organized, and finally put into 20 bags for six different locations along the trail.

Some things were different from the Iditarod. The Iditarod food drop requires a checkpoint-by-checkpoint analysis, plus figuring in different distances as well as strategies such as where the musher will take the mandatory 24-hour break. The Serum Run isn't a race and we're only going 25 to 60 miles a day, so we can plan for every day to be the same. We're also only making food drops every three days, so we can combine our non-dog-food stuff into a single bag to cover the following three days.

Since we'll have snowmachines with big freight sleds to haul our extra stuff, we have a lot more leeway on what we ship and what we can carry along. For instance, the snowmachines will be carrying all of our Heet for our alcohol cookers all the way from the start, about 64 bottles per musher. We're even taking airline kennels in case we have to ship a dog back, since we don't have the Iditarod's dropped-dog network.

The airline kennels will also be nice to put dogs in if they're tired or injured so they don't have to run to the next village. In my case, I've got three females (including Maybelline) just coming into heat, so I'll be able to park them in the airline kennels overnight in the villages to keep them from getting bred by roaming village dogs. I may also need to put one or two of them in the kennels for a free snowmachine ride to the next village if they get to be too disruptive. But they'll all be out of heat by the time we get too far down the trail, so I can put them back into the team without worrying about a repeat of my 1995 debacle on the Iditarod.

Our schedule for the Serum Run is fairly rigid because there are events and potlatches planned in some of the villages. Colonel Vaughan is going to speak to a lot of the schoolkids (as are some of the mushers) and we're all acting as ambassadors of the run sponsors, the biggest of which is Providence Hospital in Anchorage. One of our mushers is a public health nurse with the Indian Health Service. She's a Navajo and is now stationed in Alaska. She should have lots of interesting things to tell the kids--and the mushers as well.

The Serum Run start should be interesting as well. The Alaska Railroad plans to send a train with a conductor in old-time costume to Nenana. He will give the ceremonial serum package to a gentleman from Nenana who watched the original serum transfer as a kid in 1925, and who will then carry it over to Colonel Vaughan (presumably waiting on a sled). Then the whole procession of ten dog teams and about 15 snowmachiners will head off down the Tanana River just like the original Serum Run relay musher in 1925.

Assuming we stay on schedule, here is where we'll be on each of our 18 days on the trail:

Sunday, Feb 27 -- depart Nenana for Old Minto (28 miles, all on the Tanana River)

Monday, Feb 28 -- Old Minto to Tolovana Roadhouse (25 miles, still on the Tanana River)

Tuesday, Feb 29 -- Tolovana to Manley Hot Springs (32 miles, on the Tanana River)

Wednesday, Mar 1 -- Manley to Tanana (57 miles, overland via summer road to old mining town of Tofty, then over Woodchopper Summit to Fish Lake, then Tanana and Yukon Rivers to Tanana)

Thursday, Mar 2 -- Tanana to Bone Yard Cabin (42 miles, all on the Yukon River)

Friday, Mar 3 -- Bone Yard Cabin to Big Bend Trapper Cabin (42 miles on the Yukon)

Saturday, Mar 4 (Iditarod Ceremonial Start) -- Big Bend Cabin to Ruby (35 miles on the Yukon, Serum Run Ruby checkpoint same as Iditarod)

Sunday, Mar 5 (Iditarod Restart) -- Ruby to Galena (52 miles. Serum Run checkpoint at Galena in new community center 2 miles upriver from Iditarod checkpoint.) NOTE: From Ruby to Nome the Serum Run 2000 route is exactly the same as the Iditarod Northern Route. Monday, Mar 6 -- Galena to Nulato (48 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in school)

Tuesday, Mar 7 -- Nulato to Kaltag (36 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in school)

Wednesday, Mar 8 -- Kaltag to Old Woman Cabin (50 miles)

Thursday, Mar 9 -- Old Woman to Unalakleet (32 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in armory)

Friday, Mar 10 -- Unalakleet to Shaktoolik (40 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in school)

Saturday, Mar 11 -- Shaktoolik to Koyuk (43 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in school)

Sunday, Mar 12 -- Koyuk to Elim (48 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in armory)

Monday, Mar 13 -- Elim to White Mountain (46 miles, Serum Run checkpoint in school or armory, possibly same as Iditarod) NOTE: Iditarod leaders should catch the Serum Run at White Mountain, but probably won't pass until on the trail to Safety.

Tuesday, Mar 14 -- White Mountain to Safety Roadhouse (55 miles, same checkpoint as Iditarod) NOTE: Iditarod front-runners may be passing Serum Run teams by this point)

Wednesday, Mar 15 -- Safety to Nome (22 miles).

The finish to the Serum Run should also be interesting. We're all supposed to leave Safety fairly close together and then assemble on the trail a couple of miles short of Front Street. Then whenever there's a break in the stream of Iditarod teams racing for the Big Money, we're all supposed to head up over the seawall and into Nome in a big convoy of dog teams and snowmachiners with Colonel Vaughan in the lead. At the end of Front Street we may or may not pass under the new Iditarod arch, but in any case there will be a ceremony somewhere in the neighborhood in which Colonel Vaughan gives the serum package to (I think) Mayor Leo Rasmussen of Nome.

Then we'll all drive our teams about halfway across Nome to our dog lot, which isn't the same as the Iditarod dog lot. Although the Serum Run is running pretty much parallel to the Iditarod, it is definitely not part of the race and the ITC isn't providing much more than minimal help, if any at all--they've got their own big pile of headaches and we're mainly trying to stay out of the way of the race. In any event, I'd certainly feel bad if we messed up somebody's top-ten finish in Nome.

At least I'll be there to see some of my friends who will almost certainly finish in the top money this year, like John Barron. He and my friend Doug Grilliot (who hopes to run the Idiatrod next year) went down to Minnesota and finished one-two in the John Beargrease 400. It was John's second straight win, and he hopes to go back next year to try for three in a row. In the meantime, he has a team that will definitely turn some heads in the Iditarod in a few weeks.

It's a shame Doug isn't going to Nome this year--his team is very nearly as good as John's (he bought them all from John over the past two years) and they trained together step-for-step all winter. My game plan for 2001 is to train as much as I can with John and Doug and then we're all going to go out and see what we can do on the Big Race. I know my dogs are on a par with Doug's, especially since most of them came from John Barron's lot just like Doug's (even Maybelline). I owe John a small fortune for some really superb dogs I've bought from him in the past year or two--all potential leaders and capable of running on anyone's top-20 Iditarod team. Of course, they're the ones I'm taking on the Serum Run this year, which I view as a 700-mile training run for 2001. It's taken awhile to build a good team, but just once I want to see if I can actually race to Nome, and 2001 is my target year.

I'd have tried some of the dogs out this year on the mid-distance races but I've been sadly remiss in training the dogs so far for a number of reasons. Most recently the problem has been no trails due to icy conditions and moose. I'm finally running again, 6 dogs at a time to make sure I've got good control going through the worst spots, but we should be back up to 20 and 30 miles by the middle of next week, which is what we'll need to start the Serum Run. Luckily, the first three days on the Serum Run are intentionally only 25 to 30 miles each, which will allow the dogs to get into the swing of the trail much more easily.

I finally got my snowmachine working again (it took a new motor and some major modifications) and I put in some new trails to get out onto what's left of our trail system up here. On my first day of trailbreaking last week, though, I didn't get half a mile before I whizzed around a corner and came face to face with a huge moose, at least a thousand pounds. He was about 30 feet away when I got the snowmachine stopped, and he took one look at me, snorted, raised his hackles, and charged.

I'd left my gun on the sled while I checked out the trail or I'd have started shooting then and there. My only choice was to back up since I couldn't get around him, and I barely got the snowmachine in reverse before he got to me. As it was, he chased me for at least fifty yards and came within about two feet of the front of the machine--I could even smell his breath. Luckily he stopped and huffed off in the opposite direction, punching mammoth holes in the trail as he went.

That's been our major problem up here--moose holes in the trail and often moose to go along with them. Because the snow is so deep and the crust is so hard, some of the moose holes in the trails have been like three-foot-deep postholes, guaranteed to break the leg or at least wrench the shoulder of any dog stepping in one. In some places the moose holes are so big and so numerous it's even difficult to get a snowmachine across them.

In fact, we have a huge moose problem in our area right now, since there are way too many moose and the deep, crusty snowpack is forcing them onto the trails. Now they've eaten everything they can easily reach and they're getting downright ornery. They're hanging around roads and highways and the railroad and and won't move and the carnage is becoming horrendous. They've also started getting into people's yards and even stomping cars--we had a car reduced to rubble up the road a couple of weeks ago by an angry cow. My neighbors across the swamp have had to shoot two of them in the past week, and the number of defense-of-life-and-property shootings is climbing steadily. We've put in alternate trails for them and for the dogs, but they still manage to ruin everything and stay where they shouldn't be. I've got a good friend who is the local wildlife protection trooper and he just shakes his head as he goes out to investigate each case of a self-defense shooting. He agrees that people have no choice but to blast away in almost every instance he looks into.

I have very little sympathy for the moose because I know the population has been artificially inflated for hunters from Anchorage. In fact, I probably hate moose more than just about any other animal on the planet at the moment. I have seen what moose can do to dog teams and anything else that gets in their way, and I will be blasting on sight if one gets too close to me or my team. They're just too dangerous and unpredictable at this time of year to take any chances. In my sled I'm now carrying my old .44 magnum pistol as well as my 12-gauge pump shotgun loaded with one-ounce rifled slugs. I have no intention of letting a moose get near enough to hurt my dogs.

The only thing that hasn't been frantic up here has been the weather, which settled into a reasonably stable pattern of sunny to partly cloudy days, with overnight lows getting down as low as five or ten below zero and the daytime highs reaching up into the 20s and even the 30s. It's a lot like we just skipped January and February and went straight to late March, but nobody's complaining. This time last year we were shivering through the second week of what turned into a three-week, record-setting cold snap with temperatures down to 60 below here at Montana Creek.

We may get a light dusting of snow in the next few days, which will be nice to cover up the icy trails, but there's no big change likely in the near future. Anchorage is expecting temperatures almost in the 40s this weekend, and we'll certainly be in the 30s. It might turn out to be a very mild Iditarod--which can be either good or bad, depending on how the storms roll in. I do know that there is a near-record amount of snow out on the west coast, and there are 8-foot drifts near Nome. If this snow begins to blow around in the usual blowhole breezes, there can be some truly awesome ground blizzards. We'll see....

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