If a human being could win the Iditarod’s Golden Harness award for best lead dog, the honor this year would have been bestowed to Lance Mackey, hands down.

Mackey’s dog team was always at the front of the largest and most talented field in the history of the Iditarod, and he pulled out a nifty win, but the effort took every trick in his book to cajole, reassure and reprimand his usually smooth-running unit of rock solid veterans.

 

The race started off with bad vibes, not that the public knew it. Things began looking noticeably off key by Nikolai. Then reigning Iditarod champion got the pep back in his dogs at Takotna, but it wouldn’t last. They slowed back down by the Yukon River. If a single word could sum up the 2008 Iditarod for Mackey, that word would be “frustration.” He often complained he didn’t have leaders, and he was smoldering by Koyuk. Yet he took that negative energy — all the piled-up annoyances of the trail — and funneled the mess of emotions back into motivating his dogs for a last-minute push, spiced by a dash of trickery, that propelled him ahead of his main rival, Jeff King, to his second consecutive title.

Brilliant. Score another victory for one of the most gifted distance dog mushers I’ve ever seen. Period. It was impressive to witness.

While the race to win wound up between Mackey and King, and it was an incredible neck-and-neck duel from the halfway point on, there was certainly a lot more happening behind them. If the 2008 Iditarod frustrated the guy who won it, just imagine how it felt for those who thought they had a shot and found themselves foundering farther back in the top 20, or top 30, than they expected to be. The source of that frustration, or a major factor, was the usual adversary: Weather. The race started out hot and stayed that way for the next 10 days or so, until the first 20 teams or so had already finished. Though extremely well groomed, trails were soft, and snow was deeper than in recent memory. Runs that should take four hours would take six.

Hot for a dog team is anything above 15 Fahrenheit, and it was consistently above 30 and sometimes pushing the upper 30s for days on end. Somehow, the trail held up and creeks stayed frozen. There were no significant water issues. And while the conditions slowed down the dogs, it also seemed to preserve them. Teams this year stayed largely intact well past the halfway point of Cripple.

Jeff King, who nearly won, had a full string of 16 dogs all the way to White Mountain, finally dropping two as he hoped a burst of speed could reel in Mackey on the final run to Nome. Ken Anderson and Martin Buser, 4th and 5th place, had 13-dog strings at the finish. The race isn’t about who finishes with the most dogs — an eight-dog team can easily outperform a much larger group, just ask Ramey Smyth — but the high numbers in many teams indicates generally dog-friendly conditions this year.

The biggest complaint from mushers was that it was too warm, and dogs that usually wolf down meals were finicky. They would nibble, and they chose salmon or lean beef instead of pork fat, lamb fat or lard, which pack tons of calories per ounce.

The poster child for musher frustration was, unfortunately, Paul Gebhardt. Gebhardt has a very real shot at winning every year, but as he made a move to seize the lead by being first up the trail to Cripple, he was blind-sided by sopping wet conditions that slowed his team to a crawl. It took him 20 hours to get to Cripple from Takotna, which included a short campout along the way. He was beside himself with disappointment as he launched into his 24-hour layover, realizing his shot at a win was over. It wasn’t just Gebhardt feeling blue. Most of the mushers 24-ing at Cripple were in some kind of a funk over slow travel times.

Most got over it, with a little sleep. Once again, Gebhardt turned out to be a poster child, but this time, it was for resolve. He brushed himself off and resumed the race, and was a new man by Ruby. His dogs would power forward to an eighth-place finish.

Looking at the top 10 teams, it’s pretty much a who’s who of distance dog mushing, with a couple of the usual “surprise” performances that crop up every year. Dog teams just peak sometimes, and sometimes they don’t, as some of the great mushers who fell out of the top 20 could tell you.

• Mackey proved again that he has taken the art of distance sled dog racing to a new level. A couple of times he credited Team Norway’s Robert Sorlie for being a mentor, saying he studied interviews and video of Sorlie in action, and made him his model. Mushers need to study Mackey now, who has won six 1,000-mile races since 2005, including his back to back Iditarod victories. Everyone made a lot out of Mackey’s move to catch King napping at Elim, but the best team usually wins the Iditarod, and it was Mackey’s ability to convince his dogs to finally push hard that won the race.

• King is another genius of the sport, and was a charismatic lead-dog away from winning the race this year. King spent the last two years cross-training his dogs by swimming them in Goose Lake in the summer. He also used an oxygen chamber (a converted barn) for altitude conditioning. That, combined with aggressive long-distance training, provided King with a uniform team that started “slow” but maintained a loose, happy chemistry all the way. As Mackey was agonizing over dogs under-performing at Koyuk, King was the picture of contentment, gushing over his dogs’ energy. King could not quite pass Mackey, though, and eventually the two teams wound up running the same speed. King’s thoughtful care of his dogs earned him the humanitarian award.

• Ramey Smyth ran the race of his career, starting with a battered, spliced-up training sled and a 10.5-year-old lead dog named Babe. Starting on the conservative side as usual, Smyth began systematically picking off teams by the Yukon River. When I saw his team roll into Koyuk, keeping pace with Martin Buser despite skipping Shaktoolik, I thought he had a good shot at third place. His big dogs looked loose and ready for more. Before the race, Smyth had sung the praises of Babe, a dog that had lead him through multiple Iditarod finishes. I thought, maybe she’s a year too old for this. But she did it again, a steady influence next to one of Smyth’s powerful younger dogs as he seized third place. Smyth’s peers voted, and Babe won the Golden Harness this year.

• Ken Anderson made a statement without saying a word, by having a powerful team of speedy, houndy dogs that out-ran, barely, Martin Buser’s squad in a foot race for fourth place after 1,000 miles of racing. Anderson nearly beat Mackey in this year’s Yukon Quest, heightening speculation that not can a dog team handle twin 1,000-mile races with only a week and a half rest between them, but they can also benefit from it. This was Anderson’s highest finish yet; he was 5th in 2003. Buser shaved a few minutes off Anderson on the run over from White Mountain. For Buser, it was a different race this year. Starting at a more reserved pace, he not only got to travel for a while with his son, Rohn, an 18-year-old rookie, but he also felt the strategy might help him win. He watched Mackey come from behind last year, but Mackey and King got too far ahead this year for anyone to get close.

• Hans Gatt finally broke into the top 10 with a superb group of dogs, finishing 6th place, a big improvement over his previous best of 12th place a few years ago. His competitors marveled at the strength, speed and beauty of Gatt’s dog team. Most figured it was about time for the three-time Quest champion and stage racing expert to soar in the Iditarod. Gatt, also a renowned sled builder, trained all year with a tail-dragger (a seated sled), but started the race with a traditional model. Twice, he forgot what he was driving and sat back onto nothing, losing the team both times. Both times, though, the dogs stopped and waited for their master to jump up and jog up to them.

• Mitch Seavey, Gebhardt and Kjetil Backen wound up being the three amigos this year, by the time they reached the coast. They traveled together and took turns breaking trail. Seavey pushed forward to finish seventh, which is remarkable since he had concerns about his team back in Ruby. He’d considered taking a conservative approach up the Yukon but opted instead to trust in his smaller dog team, racing up river. The team, led by a young dog named Payton, didn’t let Seavey down. Gebhardt, who’s number one lead dog died last fall when it ate a rock (further proof that dogs are not like humans), proved his other lead dogs had plenty of toughness. And Backen showed discipline, taking his foot of the gas at Cripple when he was in the hunt to win. His team was the liveliest of the top 10, but he lacked strong leaders this year.

• Rounding out the top 10 was Sebastian Schnuelle, who surprised none of the other mushers but may have surprised some fans. He had a fantastic run, and is another musher who knows what he’s working with and isn’t afraid to make changes that best suit his particular dog team. Schnuelle had a lot of old-timers on his team, dogs that could run for hours tirelessly, but that refused to run fast. So that’s what he did. His team trotted for hours and eventually started gaining a little speed. Happy with a top 20 finish, Schnuelle managed to pass five or more teams on the coast, for 10th.

Among the top 20, Zack Steer only finished 11th by a few seconds, losing out to Schnuelle in a foot race along Front Street. He seemed almost relieved not to be in the top 5 this year. Steer was a surprise third place in 2007. Rick Swenson scared some of the front-runners when he came storming up the Yukon River and into Unalakleet. The five-time champion seemed on the verge of passing everyone up. Fans on the Yukon and up the coast were thrilled to see Swenson in the hunt again in 2008. Jessie Royer had yet another strong finish, proving she’s capable of putting together an Iditarod-winning team if all the pieces fall together. Many people may not know it, but Royer leads a double life: Musher by winter and cowboy by summer. The Montana native showed a video on a laptop after the race of her doing barrel riding while firing a black powder pistol at balloons in the off season. DeeDee Jonrowedidn’t make it into the very front of the pack in 2008 but she held to her guns and focus on her own race and finished with a strong team of dogs. That had been her mission all race, as it has for several years. Gerry Willomitzer surged to 16th place in only his second Iditarod. The Yukon Quest veteran made it clear that he’s interested in racing, not sightseeing. And Jim Lanier, the iron man of the Iditarod, had his second best finish, 20th. He was 18th in 2004. At 67, Lanier was as loose and active as anyone out there, and is perhaps the calmest, un-flustered guy in the sport. At Old Woman cabin, Buser complained to him about his standing in the race, to which Lanier merely said, “get over it” — advice Buser later said he took to heart.

There are many, many other mushers who had excellent races or are obviously will do so in the coming years. William Kleedehn claimed rookie of the year, almost without trying. The 11-year Quest veteran vowed not to make it a foot race for top rookie, but found himself in a position on the coast where the prize was right in front of him. Nome’s own Melissa Owens made a bid for the top rookie spot, fell short, but the 18-year-old learned valuable lessons this year. The best mushers are able to learn from others and from their mistakes. She has potential to be an incredible competitor. Another newcomer to watch is Sven Haltmann, one of Buser’s former handlers. He’s been building his own racing kennel and forcing himself to run conservatively. Keep an eye on Haltmann.

Other than some new faces on the trail this year, perhaps the biggest change in the Iditarod in 2008 was not one of new sled designs, like King in 2006, or strategies, like Sorlie in 2003. The big change this year was the media. There were at least three video crews up the trail, with cameras at checkpoints, in helicopters and on snowmobiles — they were everywhere. Some of the results have already been shown on the Versus network, and there are supposed to be two series on the Discovery Channel later in the year, in addition to the Iditarod’s own award-winning DVD. In addition, fans got hooked on the tracker — the two-pound units that combined GPS and satellite phone technology to pinpoint where a select 20 mushers were along the trail. It was a test run, but proved hugely popular. The Iditarod’s goal is to have every musher hooked into the tracker next year.

It’s anybody’s guess where all the intense competition, intense dog care and intense media coverage will lead. But one thing is for sure, the race is always evolving.

KASILOF — The 2008 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is officially over with the arrival of Red Lantern winner Deborah Bicknell.

The second time proved to be the charm for Bicknell, who returned to the Iditarod in 2008 after enduring a day-long adventure last year lost in a blizzard and drenched by a slip in the Kuskokwim River in the heart of the Alaska Range. This year, Bicknell helped a couple of other mushers — Liz Parrish and Molly Yazwinski — and wound up getting the honor of being last across the finish line when Yazwinski scratched and Parrish’s stronger team surged ahead.

Bicknells’ eight-dog team trotted under the burled arch about 8:30 p.m. Monday to an enthusiastic crowd of dignitaries and fans, where she blew out the widow’s lamp, which is left lit while there’s a team still on the trail. It took her 15 days, 5 hours and 36 minutes, almost six days slower than winner Lance Mackey.

“I was planning on not being last,” the 62-year-old daughter of a longtime mushing family said.”My dog team is better than that.”

This is an unusual event in that it doesn’t really have losers, whether you are first or 78th, as Bicknell was. Eighteen more teams started the race but couldn’t make it to Nome for one reason or another. It’s true that anyone who finishes the Iditarod has accomplished a feat in itself.

Even with outstanding snow conditions this year making for generally smooth trail, the Iditarod is rarely without it’s hair-raising moments, and it typically dishes out a little extra punishment for those who stay out on the trail longer. This year proved no exception. The infamous Solomon Blowhole, only 27 miles from the finish line, was silent for the front runners but roared to life and pummeled the very back of the pack with howling winds and blowing snow. It was the only place that pinned Bicknell down, and with Nome practically in sight.

Bicknell lost sight of the trail and spent three hours Monday afternoon sitting in the midst of a fierce winds and snow blowing so hard that it buried her curled up dogs. The blowhole is about a five-mile long stretch of innocent looking beach front, but it’s at the foot of some treeless hills that form a kind of air funnel from the interior to the shore. It can blow hurricane force from right to left across a trail marked with reflectors set on tripods and upright pieces of driftwood. The fact that it occurs just before the checkpoint called “Safety” is no coincidence.

Bicknell had come out of the Topkok Hills from White Mountain only about 45 minutes behind Parrish, who waited for her at an emergency cabin just before the blowhole. Parrish thought they should go across together; Bicknell wanted to rest her dogs for a few hours, which she did. In hindsight, she said, she should have teamed up.

Bicknells’ leaders had a tough time staying on the trail, which Parrish described as indistinguishable except for scratch marks on the ground at her feet. They drifted right, into the wind, then shot left on command, but crossed right over the trail and kept going up a little knoll, Bicknell said. Disoriented and wanting to calm her spooked dogs, she gathered them up in the lee of her overturned sled and waited. And waited.

She was already firmly in last place by that point. Parrish had long since crossed the finish line, so Bicknell waited patiently until a snowmobiler came along to point her way back to Nome. She caught sight of a trail marker in the direction he pointed, got her dogs lined out and continued on her way.

“It was all pretty easy in the end,” she said. “I felt like a drama queen, y’know: Last year, the river and this year the blow hole.”

Bicknell would spend the day Tuesday relaxing and then partake in the second finishers’ banquet in the evening, along with Parrish, Martin Koenig, Gene Smith and any of the other mushers still in Nome. The race always holds a banquet for any finisher, and a 15-day red lantern is very respectable. The fastest red lantern finish, David Straub in 2002, was 14 days and 5 hours.

There are many, many races within the race, and this year it became obvious there was a three-woman effort to make it up the trail. Bicknell helped Parrish, who had badly hurt her hip in a fall near Rohn; in turn, Parrish helped Molly Yazwinski, who’d had the bad luck to drop key lead dogs by the Yukon River. Yazwinski worked tirelessly to keep her leaderless team moving, and would trail after Parrish sometimes so the dogs would chase.

But Yazwinski couldn’t get her team to leave White Mountain and, unhappily, had to scratch there, a frustratingly short 77-miles from the end of the race. Bicknell said she told Yazwinski, who has veterinary school waiting in the wings, she’d have to return in 2009 to finish the job. If Yazwinski does, she’ll enter the Iditarod again as a “rookie,” since only those who reach Nome are officially considered finishers.

Of the three, Parrish had best ride. “I wanted to have fun and I wanted my dogs to have fun,” said the 49-year-old, bed-and-breakfast owner from Oregon. Parrish has medical issues, which include being on blood thinners, which prompt her to wear a snowboarding helmet while she’s running dogs. Parrish keeps a small team of Alaskan huskies and the musher said her goal was to run the Iditarod before age 50. Mission accomplished.

“Other than getting banged up in the buffalo tunnels, I enjoyed the heck out of my race,” Parrish said. The buffalo tunnels are a snowless stretch of trail beyond Rohn, where dirt hummocks punctuated by slippery frozen pools of water seem to have the perverse effect of exciting sled dogs. The dogs speed up, tossing sleds and mushers. Parrish came down hard with her hip on her snow hook, sending pain shooting through her wiry frame and a deep bruise down her leg. It hurt so much that tasks such as putting on dog booties took hours instead of minutes. Parrish fell way back in the standings, but her team never flagged. “My dogs did well. I was on a magic carpet ride as far as the dogs went. they were healthy, strong and cooperative,” she said. She’d had no idea what to expect since the longest her team had gone was 350 miles. “But every time I asked them to go, they said, ‘Sure, let’s go,’ ” Parrish said.

Yazwinski, 26, may have strong motivation to come back, but don’t expect Parrish or Bicknell in coming years. They have their brass belt buckles. “As far as I know, I only have one 50th birthday,” Parrish said. “Man, am I glad I did it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Bicknell, who now lives in Juneau, has run several major sprint races since the 1970s as well as the 1,000 mile Yukon Quest a few years ago. She’s put off knee surgery to make way for her Iditarod dream, but said she felt good most of the way, physically.

Bicknell said she always has a long “to do” list, and the Iditarod was on it. “This is what I did, I checked it off yesterday.”

(I am back home in Kasilof, Alaska, and reached Bicknell and Parrish by phone.)

NOME — DeeDee Jonrowe summed up the mood at this year’s finisher’s banquet before a packed crowd inside this city’s convention center.

“I love my competition. They’re awesome. They’re a lot of fun to be around,” she said. “March is family reunion time.”

If the pre-race banquet in Anchorage is an in introduction of the year’s cast of characters, the finishers’ banquet on March 16 is a party, a chance to blow off steam; and that cast of characters is more grizzled, scarred and definitely relaxed than they were when this thing began on March 1.

 

And it appears the race-long competition that began right out of Willow on day one between Lance Mackey and Jeff King continued right through the banquet. The pair finished first and second. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got a couple more left in me, so don’t get relaxed,” King said, glancing at Mackey.

“I’m very much looking forward to seeing Jeff on the trail again,” Mackey said later, referring to his hopes to win his third major long-distance race this year, the All-Alaska Sweepstakes on March 26. Mackey, of course, has accomplished something that may not be repeated any time soon: winning both the Yukon Quest and Iditarod two years in a row. Why not three in a row?, he asked, also saying he hoped to win his fifth Quest in a row next year. “I honestly believe we’re just getting going,” he said.

King made some fun of himself for his now infamous 30 minute nap at Elim while Mackey snuck out and padded his lead. He talked about a phone call with his wife, Donna, from Unalakleet in which he said of Mackey, ” ‘I wish he’d just go away.’ Well , eventually he did. However, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

King just published a book called “Cold Hands, Warm Heart,” and he said a race fan had the audacity to ask him to autograph it with the words, “You snooze, you lose.” He obliged.

Mackey was presented with a check for $69,000 from Wells Fargo, and the keys to a 2008 Dodge Ram Laramie “HEMI” 4-x-4 quad-cab pickup truck.

Mushers voted on five coveted awards at a meeting Saturday morning of the Iditarod Official Finishers’ Club.

This year’s Fred Meyer sportsmanship award went to Ray Redington Jr., who helped various mushers all along the trail. He gave Silvia Willis assistance at Shaktoolik, and was seen picking up trail markers that had been knocked down and jabbing them back into the snow so mushers behind him could see them. He helped William Kleedehn negotiate a tough spot in the Dalzell Gorge. Radington received a trophy and a $500 gift certificate from Fred Meyer.

The Chevron most inspirational musher award was given to Jennifer Freking of Finland, Minn. Freking started the race with a hand that was still healing from a bad break suffered a month before the Iditarod in another race. Her team suffered tragedy this year when a snowmobiler struck her dogs while she was parked on the trail on the way to Nulato. The collision killed one dog and seriously hurt another. It devastated Freking and her husband, Blake, but the couple decided to continue on, and they wound up not only finishing, but Blake posted the fastest-ever time for a team of purebred Siberian huskies. Freking got an engraved crystal bowl and $1,000 in Chevron fuel cards.

The Golden Clipboard award, given to a special checkpoint each year by the mushers, went to Nulato. That village had to relocate the checkpoint location to the village school due to a conflict with the usual community hall, and did an excellent job making the move, mushers said. The spot was easier to reach than it has been in the past, and mushers appreciated the hot water and friendly reception. Checkpoints up and down the trail impressed mushers this year. Aside from the always hospitable Takotna, they also voiced thanks to Galena, Cripple and Nikolai.

The Golden Stethoscope award, voted on by the mushers, went to Dr. Paul Nader, who showed some real investigative skills and determination to save a sick dog at Kaltag. The dog had been dropped and was laying inside the checkpoint to warm up when one of the race judges noticed it seemed unusually lethargic. It was sick. Nader and the other veterinarians there first treated it with IV fluids and antibiotics, but they feared it had a bacterial infection. Nader is not a specialist, so he placed a call to veterinary internist he knows in Pennsylvania, who mentioned the symptoms may indicate hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Nader and the team of veterinarians there then had the idea to check with the Kaltag village clinic, and found a resident who is a diabetic; the vet borrowed a blood testing unit from him. Sure enough, the dog’s blood suger was low. He went back to the clinic, got sugar water for an IV to bring the dog’s sugar back up. The dog pulled through just fine. The other veterinarians there who helped out got an honorable mention: Vince Gresham, Vern Otte and Michael Lindeen.

The city of Nome Lolly Medley Golden Harness award went to Ramey Smyth’s lead dog Babe, an amazing specimen of a sled dog who is just about to turn 11 years old. The award often goes to a leader on the winning team, for obvious reasons, but sometimes goes to a dog not on the winning team that shows real toughness and determination. (Paul Gebhardt’s leader Red Dog once got the award when Gebhardt finished second.) Babe has lead for Smyth in nine Iditarods, finishing in lead eight times, including this year’s impressive third-place finish just behind Lance Mackey and Jeff King. Racing sled dogs are typically in their prime between ages 3 and 7, and rarely does a dog pushing 11 have the speed or intensity to help an aggressive, competitive team in the top five. Sled dogs, like all dogs, have a life span of 10 to 15 years on average. Her accomplishments would be tough for any dog to match. Smyth has said Babe has a gentle side as well, spending lots of time in the house, where she is motherly to Smyth’s one-year-old daughter, Ava.

The Big Lake musher was unable to say any of that at the banquet, however. He couldn’t utter a word, he was so full of emotion, and walked off the stage to a huge round of applause. Smyth’s mother, the late Lolly Medley, came up with the award, and used to sew a gold-colored harness for the winner.

In addition to the awards voted on by mushers, there are two other very important and valued awards:

The Northern Air Cargo Herbie Nayokpuk memorial award went to William Kleedehn. The award is voted on by checkers up the trail along the Bering Sea coast, and is given to the person who most exemplifies Nayokpuk’s attitude on the trail. Nayokpuk, the Shishmaref Cannonball, was a tough and innovative competitor who valued traditional ways. The recipient got a trophy and a free freight allotment on Northern Air Cargo, not to mention a new Carhartt jacket with a NAC logo, with pockets crammed with stacks of dollar bills.

The coveted Alaska Airlines Leonhard Seppela Humanitarian award was given to Jeff King. King maintained a cheerful squad of 16 dogs all the way to White Mountain, while still vying for that elusive fifth Iditarod win. He finished second to Lance Mackey, who tapped a well of speed on the second-to-last run and was able to maintain an hour-long lead. Veterinarians praised King’s 14-dog team at the finish for having good weight, hydration and attitude. King used the platform to remind mushers that “care of dogs occurs more between checkpoints in how you run them than at the checkpoints.” The award comes with two free tickets anywhere Alaska Airlines flies. “I’ve got a hunch I’m going to Mexico!,” King said.

Of the 10 or 12 awards given to mushers in Nome, three are mathematical or require no voting to figure out. They are the fastest from Safety to Nome, rookie of the year and most improved musher:

Cim Smyth won the Nome Kennel Club’s fastest from Safety to Nome award, by posting a run time o f2 hours and 11 minutes to make it 22 miles from the Safety Roadhouse. Smyth, or his brother, Ramey, typically win the award and this year was no exception. His run time was significantly faster than anyone else in the top 20. Smyth gets $500.

The rookie of the year in 2008 is William Kleedehn, for being the fastest first-time Iditarod racer to make it to the finish line. He’ll get a check for $1,500 and a trophy from Iditarod racing legend Jerry Austin of St. Michael.

The GCI Satellite Communications most improved musher award goes to Warren Palfrey of Yellowknife, Northwest Territory, who gets a trophy and a year’s use of a satellite phone and 500 minutes. The improvement is based on simple math, comparing his last finish, 60th in 2006, to this year’s results, 26th. He made the biggest leap up in the standings.

In addition, mushers were presented with awards they earned on the trail:

• The PenAir Spirit of Alaska Award was presented to Lance Mackey, the first musher to reach McGrath. Mackey got a spirit mask created each year by Bristol Bay artist, Orville Lind for the award and a $500 credit on PenAir. At the time, Mackey was being chased by Jeff King and Kjetil Backen over to Takotna.

• The Dorothy G. Page Halfway award was formally given to DeeDee Jonrowe, the first musher to reach the halfway point of Cripple this year. Jonrowe got a trophy and $3,000 in gold nuggets, which she said she’d be giving to her husband, Mike, who celebrated his birthday on the day Jonrowe reached Cripple.

• Mackey plainly enjoyed the Millenium Hotel first to the Yukon award, which includes a seven-course meal prepared by the hotel’s head chef along with an “after dinner mint” of $5,000. Mackey inhaled the meal in Ruby, where it was awarded. He’ll get a second chance to enjoy it at a slower pace. The hotel serves the same meal to the winner at a later date.

• King won the Wells Fargo Gold Coast award, presented to the first musher to reach Unalakleet and the Bering Sea. It’s the second year in a row King has received the award; each time he’s been there just ahead of Mackey, who’s gone on to win the race. King received a trophy and $2,500 in gold nuggets.

“This may have been the last Iditarod with Joe,” he said. It had been a physically tough race, but Runyan, 59, said he felt a lot better after a full night’s sleep in Nome. The real reason he won’t be back is simple: He doesn’t have a dog team.

 

Runyan stepped on the runners of Tim Osmar’s team in early January, taking over Osmar’s role as visual interpreter for Rachael Scdoris, who is legally blind and enters races with cooperation from another musher. The pair travel together, with the seeing musher up front and calling back about hazards. Osmar successfully helped Scdoris achieve her dream in 2006, but he broke his leg (shattered would be a more accurate word) while fighting a wildfire that threatened his home in the Kenai Peninsula’s Caribou Hills last summer. That break has been slow to heal, so Runyan came out of retirement.

The Scdoris and Runyan race has been the subject of a documentary planned for the Discovery Channel, and you might think the project would be a failure once Scdoris scratched at Koyuk. But Runyan said Scdoris made the right decision for her dogs and the footage will show that once the program airs. They agreed that Runyan would continue, and Joe’s team of young Osmar dogs cruised on to Elim, then White Mountain and the final 77-mile push to Nome.

The last leg gave Runyan plenty of time to reminisce. Runyan was an innovator in the late 1980s and alry ’90s when he and a newcomer named Doug Swingley first made the bold move to run their teams all the way to Ruby before taking a 24-hour layover. The plan didn’t work for them that year, but it paved the way for other mushers who’ve tried the same tack over the years since.

At the finish line, Runyan said he learned more from Rachael than she learned from him.

Right up to the final 500 yards, the dogs moved like little pistons, which had been Runyan’s goal all along. His mission was to keep them trotting, not loping, at a steady, easy pace. The approach really helped Osmar, who flew to Nome and got to watch many of his younger stars at the finish line. “It’s very nice to watch them come in like a freight train,” he said. “Now if a guy could do it in nine days, it would be wonderful.”

Runyan finished in 13 days and 52 minutes, good for 61st place in this year’s Iditarod. Lance Mackey’s winning time was 9 days, 11 hours and 46 minutes.

He did it this year by camping his way to Nome, avoiding all but five checkpoints all the way to the Bering Sea Coast. “My ideal race, I wouldn’t stay at any checkpoints,” he said. “The reason I run the Iditarod is I love traveling with the dogs. The people you meet and the villages you see are fascinating, but if I wanted to see people or villages, I would do it by airplane. I love running dogs, and camping with dogs. If I’m away from checkpoints, there’s no distractions, I’m focused on them and, more importantly, they’re focused on me.”

It worked out well for Stielstra this year, with temperatures rarely dipping below 10 degrees Fahrenheit and mostly staying around 30. His biggest risk was getting wet, not cold. “Camping” is a word mushers use that can easily be misunderstood. It’s generally a prolonged pit stop. They just pull off the trail so other teams can get by, put down straw and fire up their cookers with alcohol fuel to melt snow into water. They take the booties off their dogs, and give them dog food, water and meat. Then they allow the team to sleep for a couple of hours. The mushers typically lay right on top of their sled bags and snooze; they’re exhausted and can sleep on any surface. Then it’s time to bootie the dogs and go again. The campout can take as little as three hours, but is usually four to six hours long.

“I bet they sleep twice as much when they’re away from checkpoints,” Stielstra said. “I think I have a pretty well-trained dog team, and even so, watching them sleep at checkpoints, a good number will wake up when a team comes in and parks next to you, if they hear a cooler or a cooker, or when a team leaves.”

He added that his long camping trip ended on the coast, where he went checkpoint to checkpoint. By that point, it was a good idea to allow veterinarians plenty of time to look over the dogs.

Stielstra is excited by his finish in the top 30 and looking to improve. “I’m not just running it to run it. I’m running it to learn it, to win it. Winning it is many years away.” He is amazed at the schedules run by Lance Mackey and Jeff King. “To keep that big of a dog team running on that schedule was phenomenal.”

NOME — Twelve days seems to be a magical dividing line — this year, at least — between mushers who were in the race to compete and those who were here to experience an adventure.

Almost to a person, the mushers finishing the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 53rd place and down are describing their time on the trail as a “life-changing experience,” as Zoya Denure put it, or a right of passage for younger mushers, such as 19-year-old Jeff Deeter.

 

Sam Deltour, a young Belgian man with a love for the outdoors and a passion for the north and travel by dog team, could not express the powerful feelings rocking his world in the finish chute. He’d run his dream, and now it was over. He’d completed it, but now came a sense of loss and even mourning for having to walk away from the wilderness, back into the noise and clutter of civilized life. Deltour’s eyes were red and wet with tears as he praised a single dog in his team that he’d had to carry in his sled early on because it worked too hard, but that matured on the trail and eventually became one of his best little leaders. His story ended in sobs that echoed through the PA system set up on Front Street.

Deltour, by the way, is the only musher this year to finish with a complete string of 16 dogs. He said it wasn’t on purpose; just the way it turned out. A handler for Mitch Seavey’s racing kennel, Deltour, along with fellow Belgian Dries Jacobs, was on physical a mission to pilot a young group of dogs to Nome on a steady schedule to teach them the trail. They will have a chance to graduate to Seavey’s racing team next year. But running the 2008 race with young Seavey dogs meant more to Deltour than fulfilling a job.

With the interview obviously over, the choked up musher silently drove his team to a parking area about a block a way, and Mitch Seavey’s wife, Janine, commented, “I think this race does it. They accomplish something that takes it down to raw material.”

Denure, eating two different desserts and a coffee at a beloved Nome eatery and brew pub called Airport Pizza, still hadn’t gotten any sleep about 9 p.m. Friday night after crossing the finish line at 5 o’clock. She was energized and excited, pumped up, saying the Iditarod was so much more than a dog race, and that she was definitely coming back.

For those who wonder why mushers run the race sometimes five, 10, 15 or 20 years in a row, it’s not just because they want to move up in the standings, although that’s a big part of the draw as well. The compulsion runs deeper.

“This is like a bar mitvah. This is like a vision quest,” said Jeff Deeter’s father, Eric, who was on hand at the raw hour of 4:11 a.m. to greet his son to a 59th place finish in his rookie Iditarod. “For Jeff, it’s really a coming of age. He’s earned this. Because of this, he’s no longer a boy. He’s a young man.”

Deeter, 19, raised all the money and bought his own dogs and financed his own race, which is not easy. Adults three times his age often withdraw well before the starting line because they can’t line up the dogs and money and time necessary to run a race that is right by the dogs.

Fans, or mushers, who focus solely on what’s going on as the front of the pack jukes and jockeys for a higher finish miss what’s going on among the last 30 teams on the trail, the younger Deeter said. “They don’t understand what the Iditarod represents to other people.”

Veterans of the race who fight to win feel the same powerful emotions, but they don’t always express them. And the experience is rarely so raw and intense as it is on that unforgettable rookie run.

Kim Franklin, the British musher who scratched early in Rohn after two of her leaders got loose on the trail, also flew in to Nome to see the finish. Franklin, whose previous experience has been limited to dry-land races on wheeled carts, has worked with 1984 champion Dean Osmar for the last two years to learn about distance sled dog racing in Alaska.

Franklin learned a lot getting through the Alaska Range, where her race ended in a snafu. Her two lead dogs got loose when a dog behind them chewed their tuglines as Franklin fixed a minor tangle near an open creek on the way to Rohn. Being inexperienced, she didn’t wait long enough for the friendly but momentarily spooked dogs to come back to her. (The best plan would have been to pull over and park, for as long as it took, calming the situation.) After a few minutes, she continued down to Rohn to report the missing dogs.

With her gone, the two dogs, attached collar to collar by a single short neckline, trotted together back they way they had come, somehow slinking in to the Rainy Pass checkpoint unnoticed. The pair of leaders were loaded into an airplane headed back to Anchorage because checkers there assumed they were dropped dogs.

Franklin’s missing dogs were “found” among dropped dogs in Anchorage, but by that point, about a day behind the next-to-last musher because of the delays, she had to withdraw from the race. Rules say mushers have to account for all the dogs they had leaving one checkpoint when they reach the next checkpoint, and Franklin had left Rainy Pass with 15 dogs, arriving at Rohn with 13.

He and wife, Jennifer, ran the race together from the start, and the pair passed fellow Siberian dog driver Karen Ramstead in the last few runs along the Bering Sea coast. “We had some great run times, actually from Shaktoolik on,” he said.

 

While they were proud of the achievement, the couple was grateful simply to be at the finish line and the joy was tempered with grief over the loss of a dog earlier in the race. It was killed when a snowmobiler lost control at high speed and crashed into Jennifer Freking’s team.

While it was Jennifer who pulled in nine seconds ahead of her husband, she did not get credit for having the fastest all-Siberian squad in the Iditarod. Her team had a mix of dogs; five of her 10 dogs were Sibes, and the other five were Alaskan huskies — the standard racing huskies found in most teams.

Siberians are registered by the American Kennel Club as a distinct breed, like golden retrievers, beagles and chows. But the Alaskan husky is a different animal. Bred strictly for performance and not appearance, Alaskans are not deeply inbred so they come in all shapes and sizes. The Frekings dogs’ go back to lines developed by Earl and Natalie Norris.

The couple was all smiles at the finish line, but it’s been anything but an easy ride, especially for Jennifer, 27. She broke her pinkie finger on her left hand in a hard crash right at the start of the John Beargrease sled dog marathon on Jan. 27, and only had pins removed from her hand on the Friday before the race start. Then, as the couple was literally in the middle of this year’s run down the Yukon River, tragedy struck. They were stopped on the trail to snack their dogs, when a snowmobiler lost control as he tried to scoot by. His machine bounced off the side of the trail and careened into the middle of Jennifer’s team, killing one dog and injuring another.

“When it happened, I thought we were done,” she said. But the team of 11 dogs she had left all wanted to continue on. “As long as they were ready to go, I was ready to go,” she said. “I felt the accident had already taken a lot from me already, and I didn’t want it to take everything.”

This was Blake Freking’s second Iditarod. His first was in 2000. Jennifer was a rookie this year.

The Frekings also won the race for fastest Siberians in this year’s Iditarod. Karen Ramstead was on the trail from White Mountain, taking more time than usual, but there was no immediate word of trouble from race officials.

Runyan was out of Elim before 1 p.m. and due into the penultimate checkpoint of White Mountain by roughly 7 p.m. He only has one 77-mile leg to the finish, which is taking about 10 hours to complete. It’s a frustratingly late time for Scdoris to scratch.

She has started the race three times, finishing in 2006.

Most mushers are grinning ear to ear when they pull up to the burled arch, regardless of their position in the race. But Sven Haltmann was downright pumped when his sharp, energetic team trotted neatly up the finish chute in 36th place Thursday night.

Mushers want their dogs to be crisp right up to the end, and Haltmann was obviously happy with his self-discipline to stick to a conservative schedule instead of busting loose with short rest or super long runs in order to move up in the standings. “The further we went, the better we got,” he said. As a rookie, his mission was to introduce his young team to the race and gain experience. Haltmann, an apprentice of Martin Buser with dogs from the bloodlines of Buser and Jeff King, obviously is a musher to watch in the future.

 

“We’re just warming up,” he told spectators with a grin. “We’ll be back next year, and the next year, and the next year, and the next year…” As his team was led out of the chute, Haltmann showed some leaping ability, jumping up to slap the beam of the burled arch with the palm of his hand.

The younger Buser, 18, was running on a pace that just about matched his father’s through the first 400 miles of the race. He had to drop a few dogs, however, and by the coast he was working with a team of seven; he shortened his runs and lengthened his rests “and got all seven of them here,” he said.

As the beaming family posed for photos at the finish line, Nikolai joked, “I have to admit, I’m jealous.”

“He’s one crazy guy,” he said of Lance. “He seems to pull magic tricks out of his hat.”

If Lance was dealing with all kinds of issues at the front of the pack, so was Jason Mackey. He said his second Iditarod was an up and down ride. It started from the beginning, when a key leader was left home. Mackey realized this team would need TLC right from the start and he scrapped any intentions of a top 20 finish. He used his printed run-rest schedule to light his first campfire on the trail.

He would feel the dogs speed up, then slow down, and if they flagged, he’d rest them.

Mackey said he does indeed have aspirations to be the fourth Mackey to win the Iditarod someday, following his father, Dick, and brothers Rick and Lance. “I won’t give up until I do win this thing,” he said. First, though, Jason Mackey wants to run the Yukon Quest next year, returning to the Iditarod in 2010.

Owens lives in Nome, growing up here in a dog mushing family. Her father, Mike, ran the race twice when Melissa was still in diapers and has been involved with the race since, whether it’s helping coordinate support in Nome or, currently, as a board member. “She is an Iditarod kid,” Mike Owens said.

 

“It is an emotional time for me because this truly is a dream come true,” he added, a faraway look in his eye as he sat on the snow with his back against a support beam of the burled arch. “She has lived a dream. She probably wishes the finish line was in Teller.” (Teller is about 75 miles away.)

Owens was the 30th musher out of a record field of 95 who started this year’s race, putting her in the last paying position. She’ll get a trophy in addition to the coveted finisher’s belt buckle and a little over $1,000 in prize money.

The Iditarod has been a dream of Owens since she was a little girl. She couldn’t wait until her 14th birthday so that she could run the Junior Iditarod, a race she won two years ago. Owens, known for being unflappable and determined (like a lot of Nome’s children), needed all of her character to deal with the journey that led her from Willow across 1,000 miles of remote Alaska back to her home town.

She grabbed her lead dogs’ tug lines the final half mile through town because the dogs were a little bewildered by the cars, people and buildings after going for weeks seeing only country. “They saw vehicles and thought, ‘Oh we’ll sleep,’ or ‘maybe they have food,’ ” she said at the finish line.

Asked if this will be an annual event for her, Owens, replied, “We’ll see.” It usually takes a little recovery time before mushers find themselves unconsciously planning for the next year’s race.

The 11-year veteran of the Yukon Quest, which he’s come as close as eight minutes from winning, said the biggest surprise thrown at him by the Iditarod was its hills. Everyone always says the Iditarod is flat and the Quest has hills, a notion Kleedehn described as bull manure. The photos of the race always show mushers running over the flat sea ice or along the Yukon River, or some other flat surface, which is because most photos are taken near checkpoints.

“Nobody talked to me about those Topkok Hills,” Kleedehn said, referring to some of the last hills near White Mountain in the final 77-mile stretch to the finish. “There’s just as many climbs in the Topkok Hills as in the Black Hills,” which is a section of the Quest trail between Scroggie Creek and Dawson City.

“The Quest is just as flat as the Iditarod, if you ask me,” he said, indicating that neither race is flat, as he sat down for a burger and coffee at Fat Freddie’s, joining fellow Yukoners Hans Gatt, Sebastian Schnuelle and Gerry Willomitzer. “The Iditarod’s a lot tougher than it gets credit for,” Gatt chimed in.

For example, Little McKinley is a hill mushers must climb near the tail end of the race, when their teams are tired. It’s just one of several exposed knobs along the coast, which were thankfully tame this year due to calm winds. The Quest has its big hills with nasty, windy conditions, like Eagle Summit, but they’re typically up and over with quickly. He said he was grateful for being lucky enough to avoid high winds along the coast in his rookie Iditarod. “With a storm (on the Bering Sea), it could be 250 miles of Eagle Summit, thank you very much!,” he said, getting a big laugh from the veterans sitting around the table.

Kleedehn said he used to scoff at the Iditarod’s nickname as the “Last Great Race,” but has changed his mind, citing the way the trail covers such varied terrain and cultures such as the Athabaskan villages along the Yukon and Upik villages up the coast.

“I don’t think I finished a race. I think I finished a journey,” he said.

The two had traveled together since Elim and decided that whoever got to Front Street first would wait for the second, and they would sprint to the finish, which is about half a mile. Schnuelle, the steady moving musher from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, was the first up on the road. He waited and said “Let’s go!” when Steer pulled up close.

 

Schnuelle wound up first in the chute anyway. “He got me, my dogs made a wrong turn,” Steer said after the footrace, which was a lot less stressful than the pitched battle between Ken Anderson and Martin Buser for fourth and fifth earlier in the day. Still, it was a race for a spot in the top 10, which is always an honor.

Schnuelle is from the slow and steady distance racing school of thought. He ran slow for the first half of the Iditarod, cruising the team for hours and hours before parking. At some point, his team either sped up, or simply maintained its steady pace while the others slowed down. He had 14 dogs in harness at the end of the race, only the second musher behind Jeff King to have that many dogs in his team the whole way.

Cim Smyth posts fastest time to Nome, so far
Cim Smyth usually makes the 22-mile run from Safety to Nome in about two hours, roughly 10 miles an hour, and 2008 was no different. Smyth’s team of nine dogs did it in two hour and 11 minutes, but his mission wasn’t so much the Nome Kennel Club fastest to Nome award, but sheer old-fashioned racing. He could just about smell the teams ahead of him and hoped he could reel them in. “Oh, I was trying to catch these guys and we ust didn’t make it,” Smyth said as he ran up to pet his leaders.

Smyth fell about nine minutes shy of Steer and Schnuelle. He was fastest among the top 13 teams, but the fastest Safety-to-Nome award is given to the fastest in the top 20. More teams were coming.

Smyth, who made a little news last year when he donned sneakers in pretty cold weather for the long haul from White Mountain to Nome. He said then that he’d intended to run a lot to gain time on the last leg. The sneakers would assure that he did, because he’d freeze if he didn’t keep moving.

This year, Smyth wore military surplus mukluks towards the end of the race. The zippers on the canvas boots worke when the race started, but failed at some point. At every checkpoint, Smyth went hunting for duct tape to wrap around the legs of his mukluks, lacing them tight around his leg.

Gatt had perhaps the most surreal run of the top 10 overnight Wednesday. He lost at least an hour on the 50-mile leg from White Mountain to Safety by simply dallying, enjoying the view and falling asleep on the runners. He felt his team didn’t have the energy to chase Rayme Smyth, Ken Anderson and Martin Buser for third place, and he assumed he had enough padding behind him so that nobody could pass. “I was asleep so many times, I didn’t think of anyone catching up,” he said. “I was sight-seeing a lot. I just about blew it.”

 

Gatt was literally startled awake at the Safety checkpoint, his team at full stop, when he looked behind him and saw a headlamp bearing down. It was Seavey. Gatt switched into race mode and darted for Cape Nome, the last hill in the race. “I was on top of Cape Nome and he was at the bottom. That’s how close it was,” he said.

Mitch Seavey finishes seventh
The thing is, Seavey had no idea, either. He never saw Gatt up ahead, but if he had, the 2004 champion said he certainly would have made a bid for sixth place. Convinced Gatt was long gone, Seavey snacked his dogs and changed booties.

He praised a thee-year-old dog who finished the race in single lead, named Payton, who matured and drove his team forward this year after some key leaders were dropped during the race. Payton gets the job done and stays happy, a real special quality, Seavey said.

Gebhardt bounces back to eighth; Backen is ninth
Paul Gebhardt finished with a strong, happy dog team about 40 minutes behind Seavey, managing to pull ahead of Kjetil Backen by a few minutes. Seavey, Gebhardt and Backen traveled together all the way up the coast, taking turns breaking trail while on the move, and joking around a lot in checkpoints while parked. Seavey was working with young leader Payton and a relatively small team of nine dogs; Gebhardt was trying to claw back into the front of the pack after a disastrous run to Cripple knocked him several hours off the pace; and Backen had switched to training mode around Cripple, focusing on getting younger dogs to Nome in a happy state of mind.

For Gebhardt, the race could have ended early. “I can honestly say the first thing that crossed my mind at Cripple was call an airplane and go home,” he said.”But I slept on it, got up, got a new game plan, talked to the dogs, they ate like crazy and I took it from there.”

Backen’s successfully happy team roared into the finish chute about 10 minutes behind Gebhardt. The Team Norway musher said it was mission accomplished and the team, several of which are two years old, has a bright future with whoever races it next year.

After both mushers took a few seconds to catch their breath and snack their dogs with small pieces of beef and pork fat, they shook hands. “Those sprinters, those stage-stop dogs, are hard to beat in the home stretch,” Buser told Anderson as the two smiled.

 

Anderson’s previous personal best was 5th in 2003. He’s been steadily finishing in the top 20, and lately, top 10, since then. But never has he had to work so hard in the final miles.

“This is my closest finish, and I don’t want to ever do any more of those,” he said as steam rose from his head and shoulders at the finish line.

Anderson was never sure how things would pan out, since the field was so deep with good dog teams, but he figured he might have a chance at a high finish at Koyuk. But he added, “You never know when they’re going to take off and have a great run or a poor run. I try not to think of placement. It worked out well.”

All of the 14 dogs in Anderson’s team ran the Yukon Quest this year; many with him and several with Julie Estey, who scratched at Slaven’s cabin. Anderson, who enjoys a fast-moving dog team, changed his approach this year in training to more closely mirror the regimen of his neighbor in Fox, Alaska, a certain Lance Mackey. He even ran the Yukon Quest this year, nearly beating Mackey. The net result was a slower-traveling dog team. “They’re just kind of a ‘git-r-done’ outfit,” he said. “Maybe that’s what it takes.”

Buser joked about the trouble he had “getting air” to his 50-year-old lungs. “I got out-dogged and out trained, and I didn’t have responsible leaders out front,” he said, mentioning that is something he intends to work on next year. And, personally, Buser said he was “moping” at one of the checkpoints — he’s accustomed to fighting for first place and sees anything else as subpar — when he talked to Iditarod ironman, 67-year-old Jim Lanier. “He said, ‘Get over it,’ ” Buser recalled. “Y’know, that’s exactly what I needed to do. It’s what Rohn (his son in this race) would tell me to do. It is all relative. Fifth? Some people would be elated,” the four-time Iditarod winner said.

He barely avoided becoming part of one of the most exciting finishes in Iditarod history, between Ken Anderson and Martin Buser, who finished gasping and sweaty, a mere 44 seconds apart under the burled arch.

Smyth, who described himself and the others as “animals” when it comes to finishing hard, crossed the finish line shortly before 10 a.m. with a run time of 9 days, 18 hours and 52 minutes, just about six hours behind Jeff King, who finished an hour and change behind Lance Mackey.

Smyth battled three other mushers well-known for their talent in finishing races — Anderson, who’s a skilled stage racer; Buser, the four-time Iditarod champion known for racing some of the fastest sled dogs in distance mushing; and Hans Gatt, a stage racing legend before dominating the Yukon Quest in recent years. All four mushers are “animals,” in the best sense of the word.

But Smyth was able to pull away and maintain a 20 minute edge on Anderson and Buser, despite packing one of his nine dogs part of the way from Safety, with 22 miles to go. Smyth typically posts one of the fastest run times from Safety to Nome, dominating the Nome Kennel Club prize to the top 20 musher who does it the fastest. He’s been known to do it in roughly two hours, but it took three this year, no doubt because he had the extra weight of one dog in the sled.

Smyth had few words at the finish, except to say the race this year was a slog through soft snow and, in order to finish this high, he had to just keep working no matter how hard it got. “It was a long, hard trudge,” he said.

Smyth keeps a small kennel and runs on a tight budget, using older sleds and no frills equipment, but he has a lifetime of experience, as does his brother Cim, sons of early Iditarod mushers Bud Smyth and Lolly Medley.

His main lead dog, Babe, who is 10 years old and going on 11, finished yet another Iditarod in lead. That could be a record for oldest lead dog in a top five dog team. Dogs that age typically are slowing down and heading up puppy teams at this stage of their career.