By Joe Runyan
The run from Ophir to Iditarod is possibly the least-frequented section of trail of the entire 1,200 miles to Nome. If it weren’t for the efforts of the trailbreakers to put in the route, this remote trail could go unbroken, forgotten, and unappreciated all winter.
In addition, this part of the trail just has the feeling of being uniquely primitive and seldom-visited. The cavalry just has not been here for a while, and nobody is going to take care of you, except yourself. The mushers know that once they leave the warmth of the checkpoint cabin at Ophir, it is a long 90-mile haul to the old, abandoned gold mining town of Iditarod, the namesake of the race.
All accommodations are temporary, except for one old building that is usually resurrected well enough by a trapper to keep the communication official, the race veterinarians, and race officials comfortably warm. To be fair to all the racers, the officials require that no competitor can sleep inside the already crowded officials’ quarters.
Iditarod has been known to be a real cold hole, with temperatures of 40 or 50 below very possible in March. Even inside a warm sleeping bag, a tired musher sleeping on the snow would swear it’s even colder.
For that reason, most mushers are tentative about going on to Iditarod with a tired dog team. With few exceptions, the competitive mushers stay in Takotna or Ophir and take a mandatory 24-hour rest as required by the rules. With rejuvenated teams, the equally rested mushers feel a lot sunnier about the long trip to Iditarod.
One notable departure from this strategy was Doug Swingley’s solo trip to Iditarod in 1995. While the rest of the field rested in Takotna, Doug forged on ahead to Iditarod and forgot about the comforts of a warm building he could have had in Ophir or Takotna.
I was following the race at the time in a DeHavilland Beaver piloted by a friend of mine, Paul Claus, who specializes in bush flying, sometimes as a stunt pilot for movies. We landed alongside the trail and watched Doug go by. He hollered at us, “I just went through a big herd of caribou, you can’t believe how well these dogs are traveling.” Doug was pumped about driving a team of animated huskies and went on to win the race.
Once the mushers leave the Ophir checkpoint, the trail follows a Cat trail (a remnant of mining efforts) along the Innoko River for about 6 miles until the trail forks. One fork goes to Ruby and the Northern Route, which is followed on even years, and the fork to the west goes to Iditarod and the Southern Route, which is run on odd years.
Normally, this fork is very well marked, making it almost impossible to screw up, but it looms very large in the minds of mushers, particularly rookies, who do not want, above all else, to find themselves going on the wrong trail. Even 15 minutes in the wrong direction is enough to ruin a competitive race effort. It doesn’t happen very often, but you think about it.
From here the going can be rough, because the trail is in thick woods of spruce and birch. If any snow has fallen, it seems to settle in thick blankets, making the trail soft, slow and punchy. After about 10 miles, the country opens up again into windblown tundra.
The trail is harder, but except for a couple of sparse creek bottoms, there is no place to get out of the wind that seems to always sweep across the barren flats. Caribou are common in this type of habitat. A dog team loves to chase caribou, so the lucky musher can get a good ride through this section.
About halfway to Iditarod, the country once again becomes forested and thick with brush. An old cabin used to provide shelter here, but it was burned up in a forest fire. Rick Swenson and Sonny Lindner, veteran Iditarod mushers, built another shelter cabin to replace it, and to them many a chilled musher owes a thank-you.
The original name still sticks, so everyone knows it as Don’s Cabin. It is small, but crowded or not, many mushers appreciate the heat and the opportunity to sleep while they give their dogs a 4-hour blow.
The trail leaves Don’s Cabin through forest and negotiates a few creek crossings, then crosses the Dishna River. In a short time it climbs out of a series of rolling hills to First Chance Creek and then parallels the creek. A musher on the back of a dogsled, perusing trail notes, can wonder, “Who in the heck named this creek First Chance, and why?” A good guess is that this creek afforded some good camping out of the wind and a safe place to wait out a storm.
Finally, the trail leads to the more open country of the Iditarod River Valley. Instead of thick woods with spruce trees big enough for good cabin logs, the landscape is dominated by sparse stands of scrubby black spruce, low brush, and tundra.
Even the mushers who have done the race many times start looking for landmarks. They know they are close to the midway point of the race, but is difficult to say for sure that the old town of Iditarod and the checkpoint are just around the corner. The landscape of rolling hills and stunted spruce is deceptively the same. It’s like an old movie where Gene Autry seems to be riding his horse past the same sagebrush and cactus over and over again. Usually, the musher can get a good fix on the location of the Iditarod checkpoint by noting the circling patterns of airplanes landing on a slough just in front of the checkpoint.
Watching airplanes is not traditional mushing, but even the dogs are savvy by now, and realize that a low-flying airplane with snow skis equals checkpoint, food and some rest. The sound of engines breaks the wilderness reverie, and the musher says “another day” to the miners and trappers who first developed the trail to Iditarod.
A cash prize is offered by one of the race sponsors for the musher who comes into Iditarod first. More or less, Iditarod is the halfway point of the race, so the press makes a story out of the leader into Iditarod.
The only problem is, it usually signifies nothing but a team that is going too fast to sustain the pace to the finish. Historically, the leader into Iditarod is rarely the winner, which has helped establish the myth that it is bad luck and a jinx to come into Iditarod first. On the other hand, no leader at Iditarod has complained about putting a prize of $3,000 into the personal exchequer.
Not much is left of the old town of Iditarod. A few half-standing buildings and some rubble piles are all that remain of the gold diggers’ efforts. A few mushers like to find an old floor, blown free of snow, to spread out their mat and sleeping bag.
This is a checkpoint to take a good rest, maybe as long as 8 hours, because the next push to Shageluk is a tough 65-mile grunt up long hills on windblown trails.