Bookends

John Baker, 2011 Iditarod Champion with a record elapsed time of 8 days, 18 hours, and 46 minutes.  Ellen Halverson, 2011 Iditarod Red Lantern with an elapsed time of 13 days, 19 hours, and 24 minutes.  Halverson crossed the finish line here in Nome at 10:45 on a windy snowy Sunday morning.  Yesterday, in White Mountain, Halverson said everyone remembers the winner and the last team; you get your name in the record books.   John Baker and Ellen Halverson, the bookends for this edition of “The Last Great Race”.  They both go in the record books, for more than just being the winner and the last team.  Baker set a record with his fast race, and Halverson sets a record for winning the Red Lantern for the second time.  No one has won this award twice.  I know she’d like to do better but I also think that Ellen is pretty pleased with her performance; she also must be pleased she made it to Nome for the Finisher’s Banquet.

At about 1:45 this morning, Halverson passed by the shelter cabin that I was camped at with the ITC Trail Sweeps.  It was about 40 miles from the finish line.  Halverson went by a couple of minutes before Heather Siirtola came by.  Halverson did not stop at the cabin, but she did stop a few hundred yards past the cabin.  She was waiting for Siirtola.  Halverson had the faster team; Siirtola had the team that needed tougher leaders.  Siirtola’s team wanted to stop, the leaders wanted to camp.  Siirtola was having none of it.  A determined musher, Siirtola’s team was on the edge and from where we were, from where Heather was you could almost smell Nome.  For a few minutes, I thought that Heather’s race might end a little bit short of the finish line.  She did move the reluctant team past the cabin and caught up to the waiting team of Halverson.  It was warm, it was windy but it was warm.

Saturday, Halverson said she wanted Siirtola to receive the Red Lantern Award; Siirtola was adamantly opposed to the idea.  But with a faster team, Halverson could walk away from Siirtola at any time.  But she waited.  She waited, not just so that Siirtola could get into Nome and avoid the Red Lantern.  She waited because she understood very clearly that Heather’s race was on the line.  Without Ellen helping, leading Heather and her dogs; Heather was either going to be walking in front of her team for the last 40 miles or she would have to scratch.  Only those two mushers know what all the conversations were about on the windy coast last night and early this morning.  But Ellen let Siirtola go in front of her, avoid the Red Lantern status, and Ellen Halverson is in the record books again.

The other night, actually it was Monday night, as John Baker and Ramey Smyth were putting on a show for the dog mushing world there was other communication between competitors.  Baker and Smyth were working over their teams in the quiet dark at the White Mountain.  The last run of the race would determine the champion.  Ramey walked over to Baker who was on his knees putting booties on his team for one last time.  Ramey just said to Baker “John you have a beautiful dog team there, looks like they could go another 1,000 miles.”  He was right; Baker did have a beautiful team.  Ramey did too.

Things you might want to know…

• The trail from White Mountain to Nome is listed as 77 miles; it’s actually just under 70 miles.
• Last night at the safety cabin at the base of Topkok, on the shore of the Bering Sea, a red fox was hanging out looking for scraps left by dog teams and other travelers.  The 6 of us at the cabin took lots of photos.  The fox came to within 3 feet of us at time.  We were a little wary but the fox seemed to behave normally.
• Baker traveled for less than 9 days in drop dead gorgeous weather.  Halverson was on that same trail in that same weather for 12 plus days.  The last day was totally different; high winds and blowing snow.  No sunshine, no blue sky, no horizon.  In places, the only thing to be seen was the reassuring markers that are on the side of the Iditarod Trail.