By Joe Runyan
Veteran mushers know that from now until the end of the race, sleep will be in the form of short naps. The race will begin to slip away from the competitors who cannot function on a few hours’ sleep and make sharp decisions, even if they have the winning team of swifts. This is non-contact combat and the winner is the one who wants it most and can avoid the discomforts of the weather, sleep deprivation, and who can do the right things to bring a little luck his or her way.
The racers have jousted for position for the last 200 miles on trails broken up only for the Iditarod race, and generally the trails have been soft and hard-pulling. All that changes in Shageluk. From this isolated village until the finish in Nome, the Iditarod race trail communicates between villages.
This does not guarantee that the trails will be broken and hard, but at least the steady traffic between relatives and friends in different villages puts a good bottom to the trail. Barring a huge dump of snow, the pulling should be easier and the dogs can cover more miles.
The veterans think about pulling out all the stops on their trail-hardened teams and distancing themselves from the pack. Wizened veterans, despite the elements’ battering, are still clearheaded. Friends meet for a minute as they feed their dogs or repack their sleds.
“We can’t let anybody go if we intend to win this thing. Osmar, Buser, Swingley, King, Butcher, they all made their play on the Yukon in years past and won. If they get away from us, we might never catch them.”
An informal, unspoken, agreement forms between cliques of mushers. It is the code of the trail. A musher lies down exhausted, body screaming for sleep. Suddenly, in the midst of some very heavy, deep sleep, he hears the voice of an old trail partner. “OK, buddy, time to go. They’re putting on their parkas and are booting up.” The front of the pack is making a move.
This is the moment of truth. “Is the team still strong, do I want it bad enough, am I still in the race?” The musher contemplates for a second. “Yeah, thanks, I’m right behind you,” he answers, and bolts up to go back to the outside cold and the team. The idea of sleep is abandoned. Farther ahead, or in another race in the future, this musher will return the favor to his trail mate.
Shageluk is only about 25 miles from the Yukon village of Anvik. The trail leaves the school yard and drops over a bank onto the frozen Innoko River, where it follows the river for several miles. Then the trail departs from the river and heads cross-country through swamps and scattered black spruce to the Yukon.
I have lived and trapped on the Yukon for years, and have assumed that I had an ordinary familiarity with the river. Yet I can remember being awed by the dominant immensity of this river as my team emerged from a narrow, brushed drainage and crossed more than a mile of frozen ice to the north bank and the village of Anvik. The mighty Yukon, like all great rivers, is a natural presence, almost a personality, that permeates the lives of all those who live on her meandering course.
The Yukon drains the interior of Alaska from the Brooks Range in the north to the Alaska Range in the south. It is a huge river, and the low point of an expansive basin.
Like the creeks, which flow into tributaries that feed the Yukon, cold air inexorably moves down the same watercourses and gathers into a river of air. Predictably, the wind on the Yukon in winter is down-river, varying from barely blowing to downright stiff. Until the trail leaves the Yukon at Kaltag, the wind will be in the musher’s face.
Strategically, Anvik is too close to Shageluk to shut the dogs down. The dogs do well with 6-hour runs, and it would upset the rhythm of running, resting, and feeding if the musher decided to stop in Anvik after a mere 25 miles on good trail. Instead, the mushers quickly sign in at the checkpoint and continue on to the Grayling checkpoint.
Attentive race fans will point out this is not always true. Iditarod winners Buser and Swenson have departed from accepted strategy and pushed past Shageluk and rested in Anvik. Still, the running formula is the same. Rarely will a musher boot up a team and then shut them down after only a 25-mile run. The goal is to get at least 40 or 50 miles or more down the trail.
Teams coming into Anvik pass spruce log cabins, and racks of dried salmon hung for dog food. Village dogs welcome the visitors. It must have been nearly the same for the early mail carriers.