Halverson overcomes anxiety, claims 2007 Red Lantern Award
KASILOF, Alaska — Like most Iditarod mushers who wind up with the “honor” of claiming the infamous Red Lantern Award, Ellen Halverson never set out to be dead last. “My goal was to finish,” the Wasilla, Alaska, psychiatrist said.
Halverson, 46, was among a small pack of three rookies struggling for one reason or another to keep a pace that would prevent them from being disqualified for being too slow. They teamed up, looked after each other and kept each other moving. The others included Donald Smidt, 39, who piloted a team of 16 slow-moving registered Siberian huskies all the way to Nome. He didn’t drop a single dog. And there was also Heather Siirtola, nicknamed “hard-core Heather” by her friends in Talkeetna.
The trio took more than 16 days to complete the dry, bumpy, cold and wind-blown 35th running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, about a week slower than the winner, Lance Mackey of Fox, Alaska. Halverson crossed under the burled arch in 58th place at 2:56 a.m. March 21, the last musher to finish the 2007 Iditarod. She claimed the race’s final prize, the Red Lantern, which is awarded by Wells Fargo Bank each year to the last musher. It was a tough trail, and at least she finished. This year, 23 teams scratched, which could be a record.
The first musher to McGrath, very early in the race, was Martin Buser, who had been bruised, battered and chilled by the run through the Alaska Range just to reach the Interior Alaska hub along the Kuskokwim River. As Buser went about his chores in the twilight, he looked up and proclaimed vehemently that any rookie to complete this journey would have earned their belt buckle. Halverson, who has tried twice before only to have her team sit down and quit, said it was as difficult as Buser noted, but with a twist.
“The challenging parts I worried about were challenging and doable, but the parts I didn’t worry about were very difficult,” Halverson said. “I think the fellas who’ve done this for years would tell you the same thing; I mean, those tussocks were terrible.” Halverson was talking about the now infamous run from Ophir to the ghost town of Iditarod, where this year’s scant snow cover tailed off to nothing, leaving mushers in the middle of undulating hills with virtually no discernable trail to follow.
That lack of obvious trail was one of the factors in Halverson’s slow run. “Apparently I don’t see all that well,” she noted. “It was hard seeing the trail. I’d look out at night and see a smattering of reflectors, some of them old, some new and some permanent. And I couldn’t tell which was which. So I would park my sled and I’d go walking, then bring the team over there. I think that’s better than going the wrong way.”
Halverson leased one dog, a leader named Cosmo from Jerome Longo and Melanie Gould, and that dog saved her bacon, she said. She’d come back from one of her hikes, then tell Cosmo which direction to go, and he’d head there.
That difficulty determining which way the Iditarod trail was supposed to go continued right up to the last minute, when Halverson missed a major ramp off the Bering Sea ice at Nome that leads teams up to Front Street for the final half mile to the finish line. She kept going straight, as if she were going to bypass the city entirely, then saw the finish chute between buildings. Eventually, she turned her dogs up another snow ramp behind a well-known restaurant called Fat Freddies. “But y’know, this worked, we got here,” she said. “I parked on the sea ice, got Cosmo to turn up the ramp and said, ‘You need to save the day again,’” she said.
Besides having a hard time finding the trail, Halverson acknowledged she has anxiety issues leaving checkpoints. She dawdles before setting out. In the past, that tension may have been a critical factor in her teams’ quitting. Dogs pick up on bad attitudes, and good ones, and feed off whatever is being transmitted from the musher.
“I’m a psychiatrist by trade,” she pointed out, saying a client told her about a book called “The Secret,” which boils down to promoting a positive outlook. “I think that made a big difference, and the dogs picked up on that,” she said. “In previous attempts, I don’t remember appreciating the beauty of my surroundings. I really enjoyed passing through the hillsides and seeing the beauty I didn’t seem to appreciate the last time.”
Smidt, Siirtola and Halverson were together back at Grayling when Mackey and the front of the pack was finishing in Nome. They feared they were about to be yanked from the race for being too far behind. Then race marshal Mark Nordman called the checkpoint and asked to speak to Halverson, and she expected the bad news. “But he was supportive, and said I was doing a good job, and taking good care of my dogs,” Halverson said. “Even though at some checkpoints, there was some pressure to move, in general, they were supportive, and people wanted us to finish.”
Smidt knew he had a slow team, but he was on a mission to keep walking along. His goal was to see how many of the registered Siberians, half of which come from Troika Kennels out of Texas, would finish. Obviously, all of them were up to it. Smidt managed to accomplish a rare feat in Iditarod, finishing with all the 16 dogs he started with still in harness. Kelly Williams, finishing near the back of the pack this year, also kept her string of 16 intact. Previously, the last musher to do it was Jamie Nelson of Togo, Minn., who trotted under the burled arch with 16 dogs in the 2000 Iditarod.
Generally, only mushers willing to travel at an extremely slow pace manage to accomplish this. Most mushers drop four to eight dogs at checkpoints, completing the race with eight- to 12-dog teams.
While the race was run on steady cruise control for Smidt, Halverson had to overcome issues in addition to her anxiety and trail blindness. She broke a metal sled runner on the way to Elim, patched it, then broke it again over to White Mountain. “It was exciting going down Little McKinlety on one runner,” Halverson said. “It’s one of those things where I didn’t have another choice.” When she got to White Mountain, though, volunteers there radioed back to Nome about her situation, and one of the Nome mushers, Pat Owens, shipped one of her daughter, Melissa’s, old sleds out. The thing is, that sled was built for an 8-year-old girl, not a 46-year-old woman.
But Halverson was game. “I jettisoned all my gear except what was mandatory, and dropped two dogs to reduce power,” she said. “I ended up having a good time with that little sled and an easier time going over the Topkok hills. I felt like a giant on the sled, reaching down to the handlebar.”
Halverson wound up slaying at least one personal giant by the time the race was over: her chronic negative thoughts and anxiety. “I ended up enjoying this race much more than my previous two attempts,” she said. “The scenery, the dogs and people - feeling their support - it was a positive experience.”
G.B. Jones’ dog AAFES found safe
AAFES, a dog that was in the team of G.B. Jones, was found at Rohn Roadhouse late in the afternoon on March 20. AAFES slipped from her harness on March 8 in Ptarmigan Pass. Jones scratched from the Race on March 9 in order to begin searching for AAFES. He posted an e-mail message stating, “AAFES has been found alive and is doing well! She was airlifted off the Alaska Range and is currently being flown to Anchorage.” It turned out that two pilots parked at Rohn had planned to leave after not finding the dog, but were waiting for their engine to heat up before taking off. That’s when the dog walked up, still in harness and dog jacket. Jones later told the media that he never liked the name AAFES, which stands for Army and Air Force Exchange Service, and had renamed the dog “Rohn,” after her adventure.