Previous Entry | Diary Index | Iditarod Home Page | Next Entry

Don Bowers’

The thermometer just outside my front door says it all--it's cold. We got about an inch of new snow last Thursday, but nothing since, and nothing is on the horizon (literally). There's not enough snow cover to protect our pipes around here, so everyone is worrying about septic systems and wells freezing up before the end of winter. This has never happened to me, but this is the earliest it's been this cold since I've been up here, and certainly the least snow for so late. I don't like the prospect of using a honeybucket or the outhouse and taking showers down at the local truck stop, much less hauling water for the dogs.

At least the oil heater I installed this fall is working like a champ, and my new diesel generator is chugging on like a trouper. In fact, neither one has been off (except to change the oil in the generator) since early October. My worst nightmare is waking up one morning at 40 below and discovering the generator has quit during the night or the oil stove has somehow flamed out. If all else fails I still have my trusty old woodstove ready to go, and the backup gasoline generator might start if I'm really nice to it.

It looks like this is going to be a hard winter up here. Last winter was bad enough--in late January the thermometer in the picture actually registered below minus 60 several times. When it finally warmed up to zero it was like a heat wave. Another way to look at it is that the difference between 60 below and zero is the same as from 30 above (pretty cool) to 90 above (rather hot). Believe me, there's a BIG difference between a nice toasty zero and 20 or 30 below, and below minus 50 it's like you're somewhere out beyond the orbit of Pluto.

The dogs adapt well to the cold, since they're bred for it. Most of them already have their heavy winter coats on and the cold doesn't bother them at all. It's easy to tell how well a dog is insulated by looking at the frost crystals on its fur--the more frost, the better the coat. Silvertip, my wolf, sometimes sleeps on top of his house at 40 below, curled into an efficient, energy-conserving ball with his nose tucked in behind his bushy tail. He'll be so completely covered with frost he looks like a big Samoyed until he gets up and shakes it all off.

I mentioned that my handler Barrie Raper arrived a couple of weeks ago. She's not really a handler, since she brought 32 of her own dogs and is training them to run an Iditarod qualifier or two so she can run to Nome in 2001. A better description might be that she's staying at my place while she trains and is helping me where she can. Barrie was up here in Alaska for a few years until 1996, and then went back to Wyoming, where she's built her own team and run the Wyoming Stage Race a couple of times. She works on a ranch during the summer as a riding, roping, working cowperson. Mushing dogs is sort of a natural follow-on for her. In fact, the trails she's been running on in Wyoming are probably better than a lot of the trails we have up here. Plus, she's been training at 7,000 to 12,000 feet above sea level. We're almost down at sea level here at Montana Creek, barely 300 feet, and our trails only go up to about 2,500 feet. This must be like swimming underwater for her dogs.

Her father in Wyoming built her dog truck, which is one of the nicer ones I've seen. She says it's been all over the Rocky Mountain West going to various races. She painted a motto on the back that gets a lot of attention wherever she goes:

Barrie will probably stay here until spring and then go back to Wyoming for the summer. She says she's probably going to stay in Alaska eventually, though. She has every chance of becoming a competitive musher (as if she's not already) and she's certainly got some good dogs already.

My own dogs are coming along nicely, although I'm still behind last year's schedule. I've got them up to 30 miles with lots of hills, with a 50-pound bag of rice in the sled and a big piece of snowmachine track dragging behind. My biggest headache at the moment is that most of my females are, shall we say, at their most provocative toward the males, and I can't run them together. The females are all cross and jealous of each other, so when I run them together with Maybelline in front it's like herding cats, and we spend a lot of time bickering on the trail. On the other hand, the males are all excited because so many females are so attractive, and when I hook up a bunch of them I have to watch out for fights and other typical macho behavior.

Tonight I took out nine dogs with Cutter and Rondy (the token "normal" female) in lead, and a total of eight males. We had just passed the four-mile point at about a hundred miles an hour when Cutter stopped abruptly to investigate a trail-side shrub, causing the team to turn instantly into a canine accordion. As I tried to sort everything out with my heavy mittens hanging at my side, Zack and Nepo decided to go at each other and I tried to intervene. I thought I had Nepo pulled well clear when Zack tried to get in one last lick. Nepo saw him coming and bit the nearest thing he could find, which happened to be my left hand. He was immediately sorry, and I significantly reinforced his guilt, but the damage was done. (It wasn't really his fault, though--I should never have stuck my hand in the middle of the fight to begin with.) CAUTION!! The following picture contains graphic evidence of what happens when a musher gets careless and does something stupid like put his unprotected hand in the middle of a dog fight between two 60-pound males!!

I wasn't about to cut the run short--the dogs needed the training, and I can always get my hand fixed (I hope). Anyway, I spent the next two and a half hours hanging on to the sled mainly with my right hand while trying to ignore my left. All of the fingers seemed to be mobile, so I assumed Nepo had managed to miss any tendons or bones. He didn't miss everything, though, and the pain was more than enough to keep me awake (as if the 20-below breeze blowing in my face wasn't). When I got back to the house I wasn't even mad at him any more. I did remember to choke down a couple of green amoxycillin pills (the same ones we give the dogs) just in case something sinister was lurking in Nepo's mouth.

I have to go into Anchorage tomorrow, so I'll stop at the emergency room and get it looked at, and maybe get an x-ray and a tetanus booster and a bunch of antibiotics. The folks there are getting used to my winter visits in conjunction with my mushing. Last year I gave them a copy of my book for their staff reading room and some of them know me on sight by now. In any case, this isn't anything I haven't experienced before. After all, I broke my hand halfway through the 1996 race and badly sprained my thumb just before the 1999 race. I guess that's a fundamental truth of mushing--the musher is expendable, but the dogs aren't.

A final note: I've got the first page up in the Iditarod Photo Gallery. I'll be adding pages as I find the time. I've certainly got plenty of photos--hundreds and hundreds at last count, going back to my very first days of flying for the Iditarod Air Force. I'll try to select the best and most representative. I'll start posting the 2000 Trail Notes (with photos where feasible) within a few weeks.

Previous Entry | Diary Index | Iditarod Home Page | Next Entry