By Joe Runyan
The old-timers say that the wind blows upriver in the summer and it’s just common sense that all that air has to blow back down in the winter. At first, that comment is good for a laugh, but think about it a while and you can appreciate why they are usually right. The Yukon is the lowest point in a huge drainage. Cold air descends off the slopes, gathers in tributaries, and flows inexorably down the Yukon. Even when the temperature is 50 or 60 below and the air is absolutely still in the woods, a wind always blows on the Yukon. On the northern route, the mushers are glad to have the wind at their backs for the 50-mile run to Galena, another village of about 400 people.
People on the Yukon can cover a lot of ground with their snow machines and regularly travel back and forth, so there is an excellent trail. After a snowstorm or even a freezing rain, the worst the Yukon can get is not too bad. The trail tries to follow a straight line, even though the Yukon is a mile wide in places and meanders like a snake. The trail cuts off the big bends and goes back and forth across the river, and sometimes follows big oxbow sloughs. The trail is rarely slick because the snowmachine tracks chew up the surface into a granular fluff, but the trail always has a good bottom. Technically, the mushing is straightforward compared to the wild rides through the mountains. Mostly, the mushers are preoccupied with the condition of their team and making good strategy decisions about how long to drive and how long to rest. But the potential for making some first-class boners is there for the inattentive.
The river is big and wide, and is regularly used by trappers and hunters. Especially at night, when the musher is sleep-deprived and blurry-eyed, teams have wandered off the trail marked by reflective Iditarod lathe. Suddenly the musher awakes at some trapper’s cabin on the banks of the Yukon. In this case, daydreaming turns into a genuine racer’s nightmare, because not only is the team thoroughly discouraged and bummed out when they are turned around on the wrong trail, but the team loses valuable time. In addition, the stupidity of missing the trail can haunt a musher for the rest of the race. After working that hard to get to the Yukon, it takes a strong personality to ignore such an error in navigation. Recall that the first leg of the race out of Knik favored the teams who trained in warm weather. The teams from the Interior were at a clear disadvantage because they were accustomed to colder weather. For some teams and mushers, the monotony of traveling on the river, where a bend in the trail seems to take hours to complete, followed by the featureless river trail, is mentally fatiguing. But the teams and mushers from the Yukon and the Bering Sea coast seem to do well on the long, quiet runs.
A run to Galena may take six hours, but the difference in time between the competitors may be only 10 minutes. This seems trivial to some observers, but at this stage of the race minutes are critical. Remember, if a team has gained 10 minutes to the next checkpoint, it also means they can rest 10 minutes longer. Little advantages, imperceptible at first, will become more pronounced as the teams move down the Yukon. The hard-core fan keeps close track of travel times from now until the end of the race.
A lot of the old-timers in Galena are good dog men and have made reliable assessments of the teams in the past. I look forward to hearing their opinions.