By Joe Runyan
At the start of the race, the musher must be aware of some man-made challenges. Snowmachiners regularly use the first part of the trail out of Knik, and have wallowed and hardened the trail into a series of snowmachine moguls. Furthermore, the trail is concrete-hard, and the sled slips and careens and slams from side to side. All this is disconcerting to the musher, who tries to slow the team into a steady trot so that none of the team members are jarred in their harness and possibly injured. Therefore, I look for well-trained teams that travel smoothly together, avoiding injury and overexertion on the first day of the event.
A fast team is not necessarily a good indication of a front running competitor. It may only indicate a team that has not found a rhythm for traveling 120 to 150 miles a day. At Flathorn Lake, about halfway to the Skwentna checkpoint, the trail occasionally leaves the protection of the birch and spruce forest and crosses expanses of treeless tundra. In the afternoon sun the hard-packed crust, forming the base to the trail, will disintegrate and the sled will descend from a mogul into a wallow of loose snow. Imagine trying to walk through a huge bowl of sugar. The dogs will flounder through these washes of loose snow, sometimes up to their chest, and then climb back onto the hard trail and follow the packed trail for a way until it again breaks up.
This is why mushers wish for a good draw at the start. It is an advantage to be at the front of the pack because the trail is harder. The mushers at the end of the pack must deal with a trail that has been broken and churned into loose snow, and this is a disadvantage. Interestingly, some dogs are gaited to cover ground very well on hardpack, but when confronted with loose snow, they are not effective pullers. The good teams have dogs that travel well on either kind of surface, which again is an indication of proper training and good judgment by the musher. Most mushers will rest their dogs in the late afternoon. Just as the sun goes down the teams begin moving again and in the cool air, cover ground at 12- to 14-miles-per-hour.
At night, this sudden improvement in trail conditions and the increased speed of the team is exciting and invigorating. Surprisingly, most teams will travel in relative silence and seclusion. Occasionally, a team may catch and pass another, or be passed, but in several turns of the trail, through a thicket of willows or a dense stand of trees, the team is again traveling in isolation. This will be the case for the rest of the race. At checkpoints, or at well-known rest stops, the mushers will see each other. But the different traveling speeds of the teams, and variations in strategies for running and resting, make encounters random. “Ships passing in the night” is an accurate cliche.