KASILOF, Alaska — Whiteouts are the norm along the largely treeless Bering Sea Coast, where cold, heavy air roars out of the hills in an urgent rush for the low-lying shore. But one particular storm in 1991 - a nasty, howling tempest - did more than simply sculpt new drifts across the landscape that year, it carved its way into the souls of the people who lived through it.
That storm ended a number of careers and boosted others, caused some people to lose hope while refining the hearts of a few. It forever changed the history of the sport, marking Rick Swenson - one of two who trudged blindly ahead into the storm’s maw - as the race’s only five-time champion, an honor he has held for the past 15 years.
Yet one of the dog drivers who endured the blistering winds gusting to 50 mph uses words like “quiet” and “warm” to describe his memory of the storm. Alone in the middle of it, Joe Garnie, an Inupiat from the village of Teller, purposely buried himself under a drift for 18 hours, waiting, waiting and waiting some more for the winds to finally subside. The technique passed down among the people who live in that region kept Garnie warm and free of frostbite even as fellow competitors damaged eyes, cheeks, fingers and toes.
I checked in with Garnie in June. He was stirring a pot of spaghetti at home in Teller between checking his subsistence gillnets for whitefish. The 53-year-old, raising two girls, ages 9 and 10, alongside their mother, Mary, joked that he didn’t want to tell me how he survived that storm in one piece. He said, why give the secret away? It might actually help someone. Then Garnie, who admits his memory is terrible, went on to describe in as much detail as he could, just how he emerged from the snowpack, took care of his dog team and continued on to a 23rd-place finish.
“I was never in any danger of freezing to death or anything, but it was definitely a test of your training, you know what I mean?” he said. “I was brought up here; this is my field. This is where I grew up. This happens quite often. It has happened to me in real-life situations living here before, so it wasn’t anything new – but you don’t get many chances for a mistake. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.
“Once you get that little crust over you, you get quite a bit of insulation.”
Garnie was gunning for one of the top positions in that year’s race. He’d finished 9th the year before and second, third and fourth in the mid-1980s.
He was on his way from Koyuk to Elim, just three checkpoints from the finish line, when the storm descended in force.
“It seemed like it came out of nowhere,” he recalled, and it gradually got worse. Garnie was heading out of the hills outside Koyuk, toward the mouth of a slough where there is a well-known shelter cabin built just for this purpose. The winds there often are brutal. His mission was to reach the cabin and hold out. But the trail was long gone and the drifts kept piling higher and higher.
He stopped his team by a trail marker and marched forward with his headlamp shining in the gloom, even though it was technically still daytime. He wanted to scout out the next marker.
His mistake was leaving the team without first setting his snowhook, a fundamental error. He staggered out away from the team, searching for that next marker.
“I was within a frickin’ mile of that cabin - I know where that cabin was, I’d been there quite a few times,” he said. “The next thing I knew, my dogs were walking down the trail. Not fast. But I couldn’t catch ‘em.” Their shadowy shapes quickly trotted out of sight.
Blown by the incessant wind and stinging snow, the dogs wandered off the Iditarod route, and so did Garnie. He couldn’t even see his own feet as he walked, alone, in the howling gale. “So I had to stop dead there. It was drifting over so bad, the next thing I realized, I was on a skimpy little snowmachine track. I realized I had to look for a place to wait this thing out.” Here’s where Garnie’s experience with coastal snow kicked in. “It just was not a good place,” he said. “I had to get on to a proper type of terrain and snow to survive such a storm.”
Most mushers from outside Eskimo country would have wandered on, as some did that year; or they might have considered curling up in their sled bags. Garnie didn’t have that option, since the dogs dragged his sled away. But he says it still would have been a bad idea. The Cordura bag would be too airy, cold and damp. A musher in there would risk getting cold and wet. Garnie’s goal was to find the right spot to literally burrow down into the snow so he could snuggle in for the long haul in a pocket of ice, insulated and warmed by human body heat – sort of a one-man igloo.
“You have to find a proper place where it’s drifting clean, and not piling up,” he explained. “You need snow with a hard crust, so I could break it by slugging it.” He found that proper place and lay face-down, head-first into the wind. He broke a piece of crusted, hard-packed snow about 2 inches thick, and broke it into a piece a little taller than his body as it lay, flattened out on the snow. He held it out in front of his head by about 6 inches and let the wind do the rest. It piled a shallow, hard-packed drift right over the top of his prone body.
Garnie interrupted his account to say, “You’re getting a blow-by-blow of what an Eskimo has done for thousands of years.
“That’s step one,” he said, repeating himself. “You break a piece of snow off a little deeper than you are. Where I cut that piece off, I scooped that down pretty good, just the size of my ruff, so you go face down into the hole you’ve dug, for oxygen. And the ruff will make an O-ring gasket right there. Then you stomp your knees in, and get yourself fixed for a few-hour lay-down.” Since he didn’t know how many hours he’d be there, the point was to get comfortable.
“Within half an hour, you’ve got a crust over you and you’re in dead calm,” he said. “The temperature instantly rises. And the only thing you’ve got to do is wiggle your shoulders a little bit, to make sure it’s not drifting too much over you. You do that for safety’s sake every few hours.”
Every few hours? How many people who aren’t trained to live in those conditions would be able to keep the panic down even a few minutes? That brings up the other key to surviving a whiteout without getting hurt: Keep calm. Garnie entered a state of semi-hibernation. That may have been made easier since he was near the tail-end of what would be a 15-day sled dog race.
Garnie said he just slowed his thinking down inside the warm, dark, calm little cocoon he’d created. “Food and water are not that big an issue at that point,” he said. “Just slow your metabolism down. I just kind of zoned out. I dropped all that stuff and got into deep relaxation.” He doesn’t remember dreaming, just being semiconscious, just alert enough to know once in while he had to wiggle his shoulders. “I took all the proper steps without getting excited.”
He was wearing standard pac boots, insulated bib overalls, a good parka and a pair of serious northern overmitts. It was standard dog-mushing gear, nothing more, nothing less.
Garnie has no idea how long he stayed there under the snow, but it may have been about 18 hours or as many as 24 hours. He wound up nearly two days off Swenson’s winning pace.
When he emerged, a passing snowmobiler scouting the trail for dog teams offered to give Garnie a lift to Elim. That would have eliminated Garnie from competition, so the musher declined. He quickly found his dog team, which had run toward the sea ice and curled up to nap, covered in snow just like Garnie.
“They were all rested up,” he recalled. “They got a lot of sleep, and by then they were ready to roll. I had food in the sled, so I fired up my cooker, fed the dogs and, man, they were roaring.”
And that cabin? It was right up ahead, less than a mile, as he had thought.
The biggest lesson Garnie learned that year was, “I should never have walked too far in front of ‘em, and I definitely should have put my snowhook in.”
Garnie hopes to be back to race a 17th time in 2007 if he can find enough sponsors, and he is building up a team from his kennel of “old-time huskies.” Don’t be fooled. Garnie’s “old-time huskies” are capable of great things, which is why his last finish, 32nd in 2004, rubs him the wrong way.
“I’d like to run it twice,” he said, meaning the first time back would be to show them the trail, with the goal being to race harder the second year. “It’s a real nice long-distance team. I want to see if I can’t be competitive,” he said, mentioning that 32nd-place finish a couple of years ago like it left a bad taste in his mouth, before adding, “I can’t go to my grave like that.”