Ekran shines in CB300, but misses critical turn
Sigrid Ekran should have won the 2008 Copper Basin 300, but a wrong turn in the final stretch proved that mushers should never quit racing. Hot on her heels, Allan Moore managed to sort his way in the right direction and went on to win his third Copper Basin. Ekran was on her way to a decisive win over some very talented competition. Her team was performing at a high level. She’d posted the fastest times consistently throughout the grueling 300 mile race. Then the bottom fell out. She overlooked a turn, and it cost her three positions.
The problem was a “Y” in the trail that confused several mushers. Teams had been following a well-groomed snowmobile trail for miles, which curved left where a narrow minor trail veered right. Teams were supposed to go right, but it was blown over and wasn’t marked clearly, so Ekran and her dogs continued down the most obvious trail.
“I missed it,” she said later.
“You had to really pay attention to the markers, and there were no markers for quite a ways,” said her good friend, Brent Sass, who finished a strong 5th in the Copper Basin this year.
Moore, running 40 minutes behind Ekran and an hour ahead of Lance Mackey, first went the correct way because he saw two markers, then he doubted himself, and thought he must be wrong because he was on a snowed-over snowmobile track that looked like it hadn’t been traveled in a week. He doubled back and followed Ekran, but Moore showed his smarts and experience when he realized that trail was taking him AWAY from town and the finish line. He doubled back again. Knowing he had a half hour to play with if he wanted to keep ahead of Mackey, Moore quickly realized he probably was going to win after all.
He’d been hanging with Ekran most of the race, never able to reel her in. “We’d been running about the same speed except for the run from Chistochina to Paxson, where she got ahead of me a little bit,” Moore said. “I knew something would have to happen (in order for him to catch her). We were both going just about the same speed.”
Ekran wound up heading 10 miles down a major trail, which petered out at a lake. You can only imagine what went through her mind at that moment. “I felt really bad for my dogs, and was pretty much crying,” she said. “They were doing so good, and hated to turn it around. I got bummed, and they got bummed.”
By the time Ekran retraced her path, Moore, Lance Mackey and Linwood Fiedler had been by. She lost a good two hours with that mistake.
“It’s too bad for her. I’ll bet she’ll never do that again,” Moore said. (She will never forget it. I lost last year’s Knik 200 with a mile to go when I turned my team left down a wrong turn into another musher’s dog yard. It still leaves a raw feeling in my gut.)
Every musher at the banquet knew Ekran had the team to beat that weekend, Sass noted.
She said her “raggedy” team just happened to peak that weekend. “You know, I think I hit a little peak. They thought it was great to get to a new place, see new teams, new new people, new trail. They got into this really nice pace, which they kept till got to the lake.”
Ekran doesn’t blow her own trumpet, letting the dogs do the talking for her, but Sass – who trains with Ekran in Fairbanks – said he’s impressed with her team. “She’s going to do better than she did last year in the Iditarod, that’s for sure,” he said, referring to Ekran’s 20th place, rookie-of-the-year showing.
Ekran is remarkable for coming on so strong so fast. She got into dogs just a couple of years ago after helping Robert Sorlie, Kjetil Backen and Bjornar Andersen – known as Team Norway – pack their food drops for Iditarod. An exchange student studying at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ekran cobbled together some dogs from Team Norway, Sonny Lindner, Mike Jayne and Bill Cotter.
While dogs from those kennels are undoubtedly sound, the key to her success, according to Sass, is, “she reads dogs really well.” That is, she builds strong relationships with them, and works with them. She’s also about “110 pounds and tougher than anybody out there,” Sass said. When Ekran broke her nose in a crash down the Dalzell Gorge last year, she didn’t complain but kept racing, with a big smile on her bruised face.
While losing a race in the final stretch hurts worse than a broken nose, Ekran, 27, should have plenty of chances to make good. No doubt, she’s motivated.
Same coverage, new format
When Cabela’s first launched www.cabelasiditarod.com, the web site broke ground in it’s coverage of the Last Great Race. For the first time, fans could track the race through frequent stories and photos posted, often via satellite phone, from along the roadless 1,100 miles of trail. But times change and the web is constantly growing. The Iditarod Trail Committee would later revamp its own web presence, adding award-winning video segments through the Iditarod Insider.
The question soon arose, how could Cabela’s best continue its support for the Iditarod? Rather than have two sites essentially competing with each other, the answer, as announced recently by Cabela’s and the ITC, was a melding of the coverage. Starting this year, you will be able to find my written reports included here at the ITC web site along with the usual race updates and video. This column is the first of the season.
The new web location isn’t the only change. My stories are also now being posted in a blog format, which is new to me. My reports go live the moment I post them.
I’ll be hitching rides this year with the Iditarod Air Force and will still work hard to get stories as I find them from up and down the trail. I look forward to following the mushers, their dogs and firing off my take from the perspective of a veteran distance musher on what’s going on as the race unfolds.