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Don Bowers’

I thought we might be getting some snow today, but Anchorage got it instead--anywhere from 4 to 10 inches, depending on where in the sprawling municipality you happened to be. We only got an inch or so up here at Montana Creek and Talkeetna, which was a disappointment. At least it was fun watching the news about the hundreds of traffic accidents in Los Anchorage. It happens every year with the first snowfall in the Big City--you'd think none of the urban cave dwellers had ever seen snow before.

It just reinforces my long-held belief that a great many people who live in Anchorage would be surprised to wake up tomorrow morning and find out they're really not in Topeka or Dayton or Sacramento. Sometimes even I can't tell the difference between Anchorage and any other medium-sized city in the Lower 48 with strip malls, bad traffic, fast-food joints, and new subdivisions sprouting like weeds up every side street. I still like the old saying: The nice thing about Anchorage is that it's so close to Alaska. That's one reason I moved out of there as quickly as I could, and why I will probably move even farther into the Bush as the suburban sprawl oozes north to engulf the Susitna Valley.

I've been able to do some flying for Hudson's over the past several days. One of the flights was out to Collinsville, an old mine 50 miles west of Talkeetna in the foothills of the Alaska Range that's been producing gold off and on since 1904. We fly there periodically to take supplies out or take people in or out. The mine buildings date back to the 1920s and 1930s and there are more than a few ghosts reputed to be wandering the area. Last Thursday I took a pile of supplies out to the winter caretaker and brought back a couple of people who were out there to visit. It's still completely unspoiled and is likely to stay that way because of its isolation.

Today I took the mail up to Gold Creek in our Super Cub on skis. We have a mail contract to deliver the mail once a week to this tiny settlement about 40 miles up the Alaska Railroad track from Talkeetna. In the winter they only get one passenger train a week, so we provide the rest of their mail service. We do it during the summer as well, although they get mail several times a week from the trains during the tourist season. This is also our one scheduled flight--everything else we do is "you call, we haul". Theoretically we're in the official airline guide with our weekly 20-minute run, for which we're charging $25 a seat at the moment, although we rarely have any passengers. Once in awhile the short dirt airstrip is too muddy or the winds are too high or there's too much new snow, and we airdrop the mail (which I did last week).

If the weather is good we always have a fine view of Mt. McKinley on just about any flight in this part of Alaska. Locals just call it "the mountain" because it completely dominates the skyline up here. The most common Native name was Denali, which simply means "the high one". When the Russians owned Alaska (from the 1790s until 1867) they just called it Bolshaya Gora, or Big Mountain. In the 1880s it was called Densmore's Mountain, after a prospector named Frank Densmore who looked for gold along the north side of the Alaska Range.

Finally in 1896 a prospector named William Dickey came up the Susitna River past the future site of Talkeetna (the first American to do so) and explored toward Densmore's Mountain. Dickey estimated that the peak was more than 20,000 feet high (a pretty close guess), which would make it the tallest mountain in North America. Since it was an election year, and William McKinley of Ohio was in favor of the gold standard, Dickey decided he'd name the mountain for his favorite candidate to spite the supporters of William Jennings Bryan, who was for bimetallism, which wasn't popular with Alaska's gold miners.

Dickey wrote an article for a New York City newspaper about his exploration around what he called Mt. McKinley and his name stuck. So, the mountain has been known by the U.S. Government as Mt. McKinley ever since, although Mt. McKinley National Park was renamed Denali National Park in 1980. Of course, the State of Alaska officially calls the mountain Denali and doesn't recognize the name Mt. McKinley. Our congressional delegation periodically tries to get the Federal government to change the name to Denali as well, but the Ohio delegation routinely stops it. One of these years we'll slip it by them, though....

I've been running the dogs on the four-wheeler for several days and our snow cover actually helps cushion the sharp edges of the completely frozen ground. There's not enough snow to run sleds around here (at least not with any degree of control), so I'm sticking with the four-wheeler for another week or so, or until we get five or six inches of snow. Some mushers have been trucking over to Petersville Road west of Talkeetna where there's more than a foot and the trails are excellent. I just don't have the time right now, although I'd surely like to do it.

At least I'm going to be able to keep our local trails in good shape this winter once we get a bit of snow. I bought an old used Ski-Doo Alpine dual-track snowmachine (it's a 1973 model) and will take delivery by this weekend. These machines are not at all like other fast-moving snowmachines racing around the countryside these days. In fact, Alpines don't race at all--they're basically snow tractors and probably couldn't outrun a decent dog team. More than a few mushers up here have their own Alpines for maintaining trails because they're just about the best machines in the business for that purpose. They make a 30-inch-wide trail, which is perfect for dog teams, and they can pull heavy drags and groomers to keep the trail surfaces smooth. Alpines aren't made any more, so even the old ones are kept running up here. I was very lucky to find this one in such good shape for such a reasonable price.

Anyway, the dogs are doing fine on the four wheeler. I'm running nine at a time and letting them pull the machine against compression in gear with the engine running. I dont want to go with more than nine or ten because they'd go too fast on the little four-wheeler. I can just barely control nine as it is. We're only going about half an hour now, but I'll increase that time by about 30 minutes every three runs or so, or until they can do the whole time without slowing down too much.

All of the 20 or so dogs I'm training are veterans, which means they've already developed the musculature they'll need to go long distances on the sled. They get back in shape very quickly once we start running. Young dogs who haven't been trained need a much longer program to build the muscles they'll need. Most mushers start running yearlings in the spring on sleds after the Iditarod to lay a foundation, and then work them through the summer on four-wheelers so they'll be ready to run with the big dogs in the fall.

There's no doubt my dogs are eager to run. All I've got to do is pull the four-wheeler into the dog lot and start laying out the gangline and they're halfway into orbit. It's probably louder than a heavy-metal concert and it only gets worse. All of the neighbors (actually I've only got a few within half a mile) know exactly what's going on. Some of the dogs get so excited it's hard to get their harnesses on and I have to act like a rodeo wrangler and wrestle them down. Some of the older ones, though, practically harness themselves and will run right out to the team and wait for me to come hook them up. Running is the major social event for these guys (with the possible exception of feeding time) and none of them want to miss it.

It'll be a lot more fun once we can go to sleds. The four-wheeler is sort of a necessary evil, and I can never get used to hearing the engine rumbling beneath me while we're out on the trail. And sleds never run out of gas or have flat tires....

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