Mushers descend on Anchorage for Iditarod XXXV

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A gaggle of 2007 Iditarod mushers trickled into the Millennium Hotel on Thursday, sipping coffee and biting down on free doughnuts under the chandeliers of a large conference room, and the small talk inevitably turned to their dogs and the anticipation of a hard, fast trail ahead.

As always, that trail will play a large role in how this year’s heavily contested Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race plays out. The 35th running has the potential to be the fastest ever, perhaps busting into the eight-day range.

One of the competitors with one of the fastest athletes this year is Martin Buser, one of three four-time champions in this year’s race. Buser’s track record in races so far this winter has shown his dogs have not only speed, but also stamina. He won the Kuskokwim 300 and his son, Rohn, 17, finished fourth. With 28 dogs between those teams, Buser obviously has plenty to choose from when it comes to the 16 dogs that start out from Willow on Sunday afternoon.

With snow thin to absent over much of the route, the trick is going to be containing the dogs’ enthusiasm and persuading them to ease off the throttle for their own sake. Dogs that charge too fast early in this 1,000-mile race have a tendency to pound their wrists, tweak a shoulder or simply run out of steam. Low snow means easy going for the dogs: A hard trail speeds them up. Deep or unpacked snow is like sand – they have to work harder to move forward, and they travel slower. Slower travel usually means fewer injuries.

Without the snow to act as a buffer for the dogs, this has potential to be a race of attrition.

“Those of us who’ve learned how to care for our dogs will have an advantage,” Buser said.

Rick Swenson, the only five-time champion in the race, agreed. He and kennel partner Kelly Williams have tried to persuade their dogs to ease off a little bit, he said, but their home trails around Two Rivers have been hard and fast all year. Swenson said he is, indeed, motivated to win a sixth Iditarod, preventing anyone else (Buser, Jeff King or Doug Swingley) from joining the five-timers club. But the longtime veteran of dozens of Iditarods was relaxed on Thursday. If he is gunning for No. 6, he didn’t appear the least uptight about it.

Swenson has spent the past 10 years or so mixing short-haired pointers into his kennel, adding speed. That program seems to have matured well this year, he said. His dogs have just a sliver of that thin-coated bloodline mixed in with his traditional Alaskan husky background.

With temperatures dropping well below minus 30 throughout Interior Alaska in the days leading up to the start, dogs with thicker fur will be best suited to the conditions. Buser said his team has thick, tightly packed fur, but he’d be sending plenty of jackets up the trail. The jackets are most frequently wrapped around the dogs when they nap, so they don’t have to expend energy to stay warm while sleeping. In very cold but especially windy conditions, they also run in them.
Rick Swenson talks with Aliy Zirkle at the meeting in the Millenium Hotel.
Photo by Frank Ross.

Bucking that trend this year is Paul Gebhardt, who can be a maverick, willing to break with traditional thinking and often succeeding when he tries. Gebhardt said he’s not sending any dog jackets up, instead relying on fox-fur wraps that gird a dog’s midsection – about the only location in danger of frostbite.

Like Buser and Swenson, Gebhardt is profoundly confident, but he acknowledged he is losing sleep at nights. It isn’t because he’s worried, though. It’s because he believes he has a team that can win, if only he doesn’t make a misstep that will mess them up. Those late nights have been spent running various scenarios through his head. (More on that later when I write about strategies and potential winners.)

Buser joked that he’d leave plenty of dog jackets behind at checkpoints for Gebhardt to use if he needed one.

Another confident contender in the room Saturday was Doug Swingley, who says he’s back with another team of super athletes. Swingley was jovial and upbeat as always. It’s no wonder his dogs do their best for him.

The mushers meeting Thursday was full of small tasks and some rituals. Mushers took the time to sign packets of envelopes that they will carry up the trail, then they listened to small welcoming speeches by race officials and major sponsors. Then the media was kicked out of the room and the rest of the day was spent behind closed doors going over race rules and trail issues. Mushers took a small break at midday to pose with a small glass of Alaskan Amber beer (one of the race sponsors) for a group photo and met their Idita-Riders – the people who’ve bid hundreds of dollars to ride in a musher’s sled bag for the 11-mile ceremonial start.

For the mushers, Thursday was exhausting. They got an afternoon off, and they needed it, before heading back out into the limelight for the pre-race banquet, where they will pick their starting positions. Many mushers looked a little frazzled by midafternoon, and several rookies confessed to being nearly beside themselves with stress. One, Andy Angstman of Bethel, said he couldn’t wait to get the hoopla over with and be out on the trail.

Once again, that ceremonial start has been shortened due to thin snow. For the fifth year in a row, that leg stops at a Bureau of Land Management compound in Anchorage instead of going another 15 miles up to the traditional first checkpoint of Eagle River.