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Don Bowers’

The first person who says "I told you so" is going to get a FedEx snowball, complete with fastball delivery. Yeah, we finally got our snow, and then some.

For the past couple of months we've been whining loudly for some snow here in southcentral Alaska, maybe a foot or so, if you please. Saturday night the satellite picture showed the storm track had drastically changed and was coming straight at us from as far south as Hawaii, what we call the "Pineapple Express". Sunday we got a nice inch and a half, but things tapered off by evening. Monday morning it started to snow for real, and we got a beautiful 8-inch dump of light, fluffy stuff before it stopped at sunset. I got the Yellow Peril fired up and went out to set trails for a couple of hours as it got dark. (It was so much fun I might even get to enjoy snowmachining if I don't control myself.) I even cranked up the snowblower after dinner and did the first ceremonial driveway blowout of the season. All in all, just about what we'd hoped for.

When I went to bed last night after midnight I was looking forward to getting out with the dogs today. The forecast was for more snow, but I didn't give it much thought. I woke up about four o'clock for a drink of water and noticed it was snowing again, but didn't think anything of it. By the time I finally got organized and went outside at ten, I thought I'd been beamed down on one of Saturn's moons. In barely six hours we'd gotten another foot and a half of snow and it was coming down so thickly I could barely see past my generator shed. This is the kind of dump they get in Valdez or Buffalo, not here in the interior of Alaska. Anyway, I immediately went out and got the snowblower going again and tried to blast my way down the driveway, but the snow was so wet and heavy and was falling so fast it took me three hours for what is normally a 30-minute job. By the time I'd make one pass out to the road and back (about 400 feet) there would be another two inches where I'd been on the previous pass.

The dog lot was a disaster. My sled was nothing more than a featureless mound of snow about five feet high. I'll try to get it out tomorrow. At least I had a tarp over it. Every doghouse was buried. Some of the dogs were running around on their chains on level circles of snow with no sign of their houses. Others were still in their houses with just a hole for their muzzles to poke out. I started to have visions of the west coast out on the Bering and Chukchi Seas, where blowing snow can pack into doghouses so tightly that dogs can suffocate (which is why some coastal mushers don't keep their dogs in houses). I quickly made certain all of the dogs were alive and well, although old Weasel gave me a start--she was the only one I couldn't see and she didn't come out when I called. I floundered all the way across the dog lot to her through hip-deep snow, and then she popped out and jumped on me. She's a total sweetheart and a six-time Iditarod veteran, but she's also a past master at finding new ways to get attention from me I'm sure she knew I'd come looking for her and she just wanted a little quality time with me.

After Barrie and I got the driveway somewhat opened up (and after both of my snowblowers had bitten the dust with worn drive belts) we started pulling up the dog houses. This is a time-honored ritual for mushers after every big snow. All of the houses must be broken loose from the snow or ice and set on top of the new snow. Some houses are easy, some take 15 minutes with a shovel and a heavy-duty ice-chipper bar. Some of the houses just wouldn't come up and I had to dig a foot-deep trench in front of them so their occupants could get in and out. Of course, most of the dog dishes are now lost under the snow until breakup.

The puppy pen, in which I've been keeping the most alluring females until they're a bit less alluring, was creaking dangerously from its overload of snow on the roof. I decided to move Bonnie and Rondy back out to their houses. I figured getting them inadvertently bred was a much more acceptable risk than having them crushed when the pen finally collapses. The dog lot itself is completely cut off from the road and will stay that way until I can hire a front-end loader to come in and move the snow. This isn't so bad, considering there are still hundreds if not thousands of people cut off back in remote homesteads and subdivisions all over southcentral Alaska--at least we can get out to the highway if we're very careful and the four-wheel drive works.

As if this wasn't enough, the snow turned to rain about five this afternoon. Not just a little rain, but a good soaking. It's been raining since last night down on the Kenai Peninsula and they're calling for flooding in small streams down there. In Wasilla the rain came after a foot of snow had fallen, and the Parks Highway was closed at various times throughout the day with accidents, mainly as a result of the inch or two of ice on the pavement with water on top. Power has been out all over the valley for various periods throughout the day, although I didn't notice it because my trusty diesel generator kept chugging along, oblivious to everything.

At the moment I'm trying to dry out after getting completely soaked outside. Barrie was smart and had dug out her yellow rain slicker and wide-brimmed cowboy hat (which is waterproof), but I was still wearing my normal musher hat and heavy coat.. I'll learn one of these days. A bit of wind has come in with the rain and the trees are dumping their loads of snow on my roof with an unending series of thuds and bumps. All of the trees are overloaded with snow. Every bush, shrub, and sapling, as well as many full-grown aspens and birches, is bending almost double. The top of one young 40-foot birch beside my driveway is touching the ground under its burden of ice and snow. Our brushed-in trails will be a face-whipping obstacle course of snow-laden branches for weeks. We'll almost certainly find entire trees down across some of the trails. Even big trees can't take five or ten tons of super-dense snow and ice snow in their branches.

I'm just glad I'm not out on the trail tonight, trying to get from, say, Cripple to Ruby. This would be the mother of all miserable trips. The weather is supposed to taper off by the weekend, but there are reports the rain will turn back to snow and we'll get another foot. It's entirely possible. There's so much moisture being pumped in over us right now it's like living at the bottom of a swimming pool. And the temperatures are more like April than the beginning of winter--parts of Anchorage were in the mid-40s today. And then it's supposed to be back below zero by Sunday. Typical Alaska weather, I guess, although this kind of storm is definitely not normal for our relatively dry part of the state.

The bright side is that the snow is now so wet it packs down if you just look at it. It's like the whole region has been covered with two or three feet of fast-drying concrete, because that's what it will turn into once it gets cold. We'll be able to go anywhere we want on sleds and snowmachines. Our trails will be extraordinarily good once this is all sorted out and they'll almost certainly stay that way until breakup, or maybe until July if this keeps up much longer.

On another enlightening note, today is the winter solstice, which means we're gaining daylight from now on. By Iditarod time there will be almost 12 hours of daylight every day. Tonight is also the full moon, which we can't see, naturally. If we could, we'd be oohing and aahing about how big and bright it looks, because it actually is bigger and brighter than in many years. Through a series of coincidences, the moon is at its closest point to earth (called perigee) and is also full. This means it will appear about 20 percent larger and maybe 25 percent brighter than normal. On any normal winter night up here, those of us out running our dogs would certainly notice this. Even a winter half moon up here is usually bright enough to read a newspaper outside without a light. With this much light we'd probably need sunglasses (or would they be moonglasses?).

Anyway, our training is completely at a halt until things get more normal and we can dig out, and until we can get some trails set again. It's probably just as well I'd decided to skip the Copper Basin 300 in two and a half weeks, because now there's no way my guys could be ready for it. I don't know what they're getting down at Knik and Big Lake for the Knik 200 and the Klondike 300, but I hear it's an unholy mess in that area with small lakes of standing water on top of the frozen ground and slushy snow. At least here in the upper Susitna Valley we've got more than enough snow to absorb all of the rain, and we're almost guaranteed superb trails for our Willow-Su Valley 300 race at the end of January.

And I'm looking ever more closely at going to Nome with Col. Vaughan on the Serum Run. As I mentioned last week, I'll make a decision sometime in January. If I do opt for the Serum Run, I'll still put up the Iditarod Trail Notes and keep my web site going, hopefully with a link from the Iditarod web page. After all, it wouldn't be as if I were abandoning the Iditarod, since I'm still going to Nome and I'm going to run the Iditarod in 2001. We'll see….

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