Jeff King left Elim in 1994 with the feeling that he was being followed.  Sure enough a young husky not more that 4 months old was close behind.  For all of his short life, the Husky wanted to “play sports.”  What the puppy needed most was a coach who would work with him and train him.  The pup watched the mushers care for their dogs at Elim and decided he wanted Jeff King as his coach so he followed him out of the village and down the trail.  Jeff was worried that the little dog would get too cold or get hurt out on the trail so he tried to shoo him back home.  The little dog wasn’t going to give up his dream and kept on running with Jeff’s team.  The going wasn’t easy for such a little dog.  Jeff stopped briefly to fix some booties and when he came back to the sled, the puppy was sitting proudly on top of the sled bag.  By now, Jeff really liked the husky.  Being concerned for his well-being, Jeff carried him to the next checkpoint.  Jeff decided to contact the puppy’s owner and ask if he could be adopted.  A little further down the trail Jeff received a message from the owner telling Jeff the dog was his.  What do you suppose Jeff named the puppy?  If you guessed Elim, you’re right!  This story was reported in the Anchorage Daily News on March 28, 1994 – “King Says Pup Followed him to Nome, He Gets to Keep It.”   Joan Jackson tells the story in her book for young readers, Elim, The Determined Athlete.  Really, you ought to find a copy and read the story for yourself.

Looking at the map we have in the kennel, I expected that handler would be telling us about what goes on in the checkpoint of Golovin – but Golovin isn’t a checkpoint!  Golovin (GULL-uh-vin) was a checkpoint at one time but because the distance between Elim and White Mountain is only 46 miles, the trail committee decided it wasn’t necessary to have a three checkpoints such a short distance apart.  I was curious about the village along the trail that isn’t a checkpoint so I asked Handler a few question.  She said that Inupiaq Eskimos live in the village.  In the early 1800’s Russian Navy Vice-Admiral Vasily Golovnin explored the bay and lagoon that now hold his name.  Did you notice the difference in spelling?  The bay and lagoon are spelled exactly like the explorer’s name but the village uses the spelling “Golovin”.  If you’re interested, you can learn more about Golovin in Wikipedia.  Today there are 140 people who live there. Forty-nine are students who attend Martin L. Olson School for grades K-12.

When Jeff and the little dog left Elim, they headed along the shore to a spot called Walla Walla.  Here the trail crosses a peninsula and climbs over the Kwiktalik Mountains.  The highest point that the mushers reach as 1,000 feet above sea level at LIttle McKinley  Trail expert, Don Bowers, says this is the toughest climb on the last half of the trail.  With Elim in the sled, Jeff ran up one side and down the other side of the mountains to Golovnin Bay.  Today, as Golovin is no longer a race checkpoint, the trail runs by the village then follows the snowmachine route across Golovnin Lagoon and up the Fish river to White Mountain.  More than likely, it was at Golovin that Jeff tried to contact the pup’s family to ask about adoption.

White Mountain is the only village on the Seward Peninsula that is located inland from the Bering Sea.  Two Hundred and three people live in the Inupiag Eskimo village.  The culture has been influenced by neighboring Yupik Eskimos as well as the Klondike Gold Rush.  Present day White Mountain began as a fish camp named Nutchirviq which means “mountain look-up point.”  During the gold rush of 1900, a warehouse for mining supplies was the first non-Native built structure.  After that an orphanage that later became a school was built followed by the Covenant Church.  The post office opened in 1932.  The current grade school meets in the oldest operating school building in Alaska.  Fire destroyed the high school building in early 2006.  A new school was built on the southern edge of town for the White Mountain Wolves.  Forty-nine students go to school in White Mountain.

Some folks in White Mountain hold jobs with the school, native store, post office, city and airlines.  Some folks work seasonally in construction and firefighting.  There is one reindeer farm and some residents hold commercial fishing permits.  Ivory and bone carvings; knitting, crocheting and skin sewing also bring income to a few homes.  Depending on subsistence hunting and fishing, many people spend their whole summer at fish camp to harvest salmon and other fish.  Beluga whale, seal, moose, reindeer, caribou and brown bear are commonly eaten along with berries, greens and home grown vegetables.  About half of the homes in White Mountain are on water and sewer.  The other half have water but use honey buckets and outdoor toilets.

There are no roads to White Mountain so travel and deliveries are by boat and plane.  Locals travel by snowmachine or ATV depending on the season.  Average summer temperatures fall between 43 and 80 degrees.  Winter temperatures range from 7 below to 15 above. White Mountain receives about 15 inches of precipitation with about 5 feet of snow.  If you lived at White Mountain you could expect rain or snow 120 days of the year and sun on 150 days.

When mushers reach White Mountain, they are required to take an 8 hour rest before they make the final push to Nome, 77 miles away.  The checkpoint building is up the hill beyond the Native Store.  Teams park on the shore of the river.  School kids come down to collect autographs and talk to the mushers.  Villagers come down to the river to talk with their friends and enjoy what’s going on.  Everyone enjoys the view of nearby mountain for which the village is named.

Well there you have it – a summary of Don Bower’s trail description and compiled information about Golovin and White Mountain from Wikipedia, each village’s home page and Alaska’s Online Community Data Base.  About now the mushers are both excited to be so close to Nome and yet sad that their personal Iditarod Journey is nearly finished.  Stay tuned as Handler tells us about Topkok and Safety.  Remember, in everything do your best every day and alway have a plan.

Born to Run,
Sanka

The village of Shaktoolik (shak-TOO-lick) is located on a little spit of land that juts out into the Norton Sound.  There is one road that runs through town out to the air strip with houses, two stores, two churches, the school, the power plant, the city well, the clinic  and the Armory spread along its sides.  No cross roads, just one long main road!  Most of the residents are from Inupiaq family lines.  The name Shaktoolik means “scattered things.”  Early Shaktoolik settlers lived 6 miles up the river from the present village site.  Because of storms and high winds, the people relocated to the present site at the mouth of the Shaklootik River.  Another story has it that originally the villagers did live out on the spit but after their village burned they decided it was just to windy to rebuild there so they moved inland.  After spending one summer with the mosquitoes in the new sheltered area, they decided to move back out on the spit where there was wind to blow the mosquitoes away.

In the 1890’s there was a famine in the region.  It was thought that reindeer could provide a new source of food and clothing.  The government hired herders from Norway and brought them along with animal to Unalakleet and Shaktoolik to teach the Inupiaq Eskimos how to raise, tame, corral, lasso and drive reindeer.  The Norwegians even taught the Eskimos how to make cheese using reindeer milk and make clothing from reindeer skins.  Twenty years later, five hundred thousand reindeer grazed in western Alaska.  A reindeer transportation system was developed.  Reindeer were used to deliver mail and haul freight for the military and equipment for the gold miners.  Domestic herds used mostly for food exist even today.  Handler learned about the Reindeer Project at a Sami Exhibit in the museum at McGrath, Alaska.

From Wikipedia, I found out that residents of Shaktoolik live a subsistence life style.  They depend on fish, crab, moose, beluga whale, caribou, reindeer, seal, rabbit, geese, cranes ducks, ptarmigan, berries greens and roots for their primary food sources.  There are some part time jobs in commercial fishing, education, construction and reindeer herding.  The village has a piped water and sewer system that serves two-thirds of the homes.  People and cargo arrive in the village either by air or water transportation.  The Alex Sookiayak Memorial Airstrip is nearly two miles from the center of the village.  Daily flights arrive from Nome.  Pam’s Taxi service provides a shuttle between the village and the airstrip.  Local travel is by 4-wheeler, motorbike, snowmachine and boat.  Fifty students attend classes at the K-12 Shaktoolik School.  If asked what they like to do for fun, kids will say they love outdoor activities, hunting and fishing and they enjoy having big bonfires with their friends.

Iditarod teams follow the main snowmachine trail from UNK to Shak.  From sea level at UNK, the trail rises 1,000 feet to its highest point in the Blueberry Hills.  The teams will travel through woods, open areas, sloughs and dunes; over exposed ridge tops and along the barren coastline.  Don Bowers tells the mushers in his trail notes to be ready for the Shaktoolik winds.  He says if the wind is blowing from the north it can reach hurricane force.  That combined with below zero temperatures can drive the windchill to the bottom of the charts.

The weather of Shaktoolik is influenced by its location on the Bering Sea, especially during May through October when the sound is ice free.  Average summer temperatures range form 47 to 62 degrees.  Average winter temperatures range between 4 below to 11 above.  The coldest temperature ever recorded in Shaktoolik was 50 degrees BELOW zero.  The warmest temperature was 87 degrees.  Precipitation averages around 14 inches each with 43 inches of snow.

From Shaktoolik, the residents can keep and eye on Besboro Island.  Looking at a map, Besboro is the only island in Norton Sound.  It seems to be a magical landform.  Height, width, color, size and shape change minute to minute, hour to hour and day to day.  One of the explanations for these continuous changes is that cold air is trapped near the ice by warm air aloft.  The light’s rays are bent as they pass between the two layers of air and a mirage occurs.  Tired mushers don’t believe their eyes as Besboro rises, falls and shimmers while they run to the village of Shaktoolik.  If you’d like to do more research on mirages, try this website – http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/elements/supmrge.htm.

Well, there you have it – a snapshot of life in Shaktoolik, a peek at the magic Island of Besboro and a few words of warning about the trail.  Thanks to my friend, Diane Johnson, 2000 Teacher on the Trail and Iditarod Education Director for sharing her pictures of Besboro.  From Shaktoolik, the mushers run across Norton Bay to Koyuk, the northern most Iditarod checkpoint.  Stay tuned for that story and remember in everything do your best every day and always have a plan.

Born to Run,
Sanka

The easiest way to describe the trail between Eagle Island and Kaltag (CAL-tag) would be to do a copy and paste of the trail from Grayling to Eagle Island.  There’s nothing new, it’s just more of the same – islands, sandbars, sloughs, bluffs and river bends.  After passing Eight Mile Point on the river, the mushers must be thrilled to see Kaltag sitting high on the west bank of the Yukon.  Teams will make a short steep climb up the river bank and run down main street to the octagonal log community center in the middle of town.  After being in desolate Eagle Island, the mushers are delighted to find water and even a real toilet in the pump house just a short walk from the checkpoint.  It’s good to be thankful for ordinary things!

If you happen to have a map of the Iditarod Trail handy, check this out.  In Trail Notes, Don Bowers, Jr. says that the original Iditarod Trail never ran on the Yukon River except to cross at Kaltag.  The original mail and gold rush supply trail went directly from Iditarod to Kaltag across the marshy Innoko River Valley.  I asked Handler why Iditarod teams don’t follow the same trail today.  It’s because the ITC wants the trail to be at least 1,000 miles long.  The direct route between Iditarod and Kaltag would fall far short of that distance.  The area along the direct route is also extremely desolate so it’s nice for the racers to travel the northern or southern route that passes through populated villages.

Kaltag is an Athabascan village that sits on an old portage trail that went west from the Yukon through the mountains to Unalakleet (YOU-na-la-kleet).  Sadly, disease and death have played a great role in Kaltag’s history.  Originally, Kaltag was an area used as a cemetery for surrounding villages.  Athabascans had spring, summer fall and winter hunting and fishing camps in the area and moved according to where the game or their food source was.  Then in 1839 a small pox epidemic killed many of the natives and traders in the area.  In 1880 a trading post opened and then a few years later gold was discovered.  But then in 1900, a measles epidemic and food shortage wiped out nearly one-third of the area’s population.  It was then that the survivors from 3 nearby seasonal villages decided to move together and form a new village.  Kaltag was named for a Yukon Indian, Kaltaga.  Between 1919 and 1940, the Galena lead mines were prosperous.  Kaltag, 100 miles down river, grew as a transportation hub.  Over time as the mighty Yukon flooded and changed its course, land eroded and the old cemetery slid into the river in 1937.

Today the population of Kaltag is 207.  Forty-five students attend school in grades Pre-kindergarten thru 12.  Subsistence is an important part of the economy.  Folks hunt and fish for salmon, whitefish, waterfowl, moose and bear and pick berries from the abundant area crops.  Some people in the village have cash jobs with the school, tribe and local government.  Others work as fire fighters or in the commercial fishing industry.    Most of the village houses have both running water and sewer.  There are no roads connecting Kaltag to other villages but people travel locally by ATV, snowmachine or boat.  Kaltag has year-round air service and barges deliver heavy cargo three times a year.  Temperature extremes in Kaltag have been recorded from 55 degrees below zero up to 90 degrees.  Otherwise, highs in July will be in the 70’s and lows for January will range from 10 degrees to below zero.  Annual precipitation is 16 inches with just over 6 feet of snow.  The river is open from mid-May to mid-October.

Besides being the meeting point of the northern and southern Iditarod routes and serving as a checkpoint every year, Kaltag is known for its Stick Dance Festival.  Every two years, this week long festival of potlatches is organized by relatives of people who have recently passed away.  Handler and I went to Wikipedia and found that a Potlatch is a gathering with feasting, speeches, music, singing, acting, dancing, gifting and spiritual ceremonies. Sounds like quite a celebration!  Visitors from many neighboring villages come as the living express their appreciation to those who helped in their time of mourning.

Once there was a dog named Yukon who was described as a forlorn looking mutt.  Skagway Bill was his master.  Bill and Yukon landed in Skagway late in the fall of 1897 eager to find gold in the Yukon River basin.  To get to the gold, prospectors had to follow White Pass up through the Coastal Mountains.  In the winter of 1897, deep snow made the White Pass Trail hard to follow.  One day Skagway Bill and a few other men set out to mark the trail with tall flags.  Yukon remained in the village waiting for his master to return.  A huge blizzard blew over White Pass.  After 3 days and nights of intense snow and howling winds, the blizzard ended but Skagway Bill and the other trail markers did not return.  With Yukon in the lead, a search party set out to find the snow bound men.  Just a few miles from the summit, Yukon stopped dead in his tracks. With his nose pointing into the air and ears standing straight up, he sniffed the air and listened.  Then he let out a strange whine and began digging furiously.  The rest of the search party joined his efforts with shovels.  The rescuers dug and yelled for the buried men.  After a while they heard a faint response from deep in the snow.  Finally, they found all the missing men who had been buried for three days under five feet of snow.  Yukon was thrilled to see his master.  When everybody returned safely to Skagway, Yukon was welcomed as the hero of the rescue effort.  I read this story in a book called Gold Rush Dogs by Murphy and Haigh.  It’s one of my favorite books because of the great pictures.

Well, there you have it – Kaltag then and now, the Stick Dance Festival, and a story about a hero dog named Yukon.  Now we’re virtually headed to Unalakleet on the Bering Sea.  Stay tuned and remember – in everything do your best every day and have a plan.

Born to Run,
Sanka

Leaving Shageluk and mushing on toward Anvik, the teams will have fewer miles to go than they have covered.  No one would be so bold as to say that it’s downhill to Nome from Shageluk because the Yukon River and the Bering Sea Coast present many challenges for the mushers and dogs.  Anvik (AN-vik) is the first checkpoint of the southern route on the famous Yukon River.  Tradition has it that the church bell is rung to announce to all that the first team has reached the mighty Yukon.

Whether it be the northern or southern route, there is a special award for the musher reaching the Yukon River first.  The Millennium Hotel, race headquarters in Anchorage, sponsors the First to the Yukon Award.  After the dogs are fed and bedded down, the musher is treated to a delicious seven course meal prepared and served by the Millennium Executive Chef.  In the rustic checkpoint building, a formal dinner table is set complete with fresh flowers, crystal, fine china and silver candle sticks.  The chef prepares the meal on a two burner camp stove.  The dinner served last year in Ruby included chicken and mushroom terrine, potato bisque with shrimp ravioli for appetizers followed by the main course of halibut and a beef fillet stuffed with king crab, asparagus and blue cheese.  Raspberry crepes were served for dessert.  Just like eating in a fine restaurant, an after dinner mint is served – in 2008 the mint was 5,000 freshly minted one dollar bills presented in a gold pan.  Handler helped me find this description of the 2008 First Musher to the Yukon Meal on the Iditarod Website in the sponsor section.

Being a sled dog who eats only the best dog food, I’ve never tried any of the dishes served last year in Ruby.  Have you?  I don’t even know what terrine or bisque is.  Do you?  Would you like to try shrimp ravioli?  I think it would be fun to plan the menu for a festive dinner like this.  Why don’t you give it a try.  Keep checking the sponsor’s section of the Iditarod website to see what the menu will be for the First to the Yukon dinner in Anvik this year.

Over the years, Anvik has been known by different names – American Station, Anvic, Anvick, Anvig and Anwig.  These names more than likely came from Russian Explorers.  Way back in 1887, an Episcopal Mission/school and church was built near where the Anvik River flows into the Yukon.  Anvik’s first post office was built around 1900.  Sad to say that there were two flu epidemics back in 1918 and 1927.  Many children were orphaned and were taken in to live at the Anvik Mission.  At that time, the population of Anvik was around 700.  Today, there are 94 people, mostly Athabascan that live in the village.  Twenty-five students attend the K-12 Blackwell School.  Like other bush villages, there are no roads leading to Anvik but the Yukon River is a major water highway.  People and supplies travel by boat or bush plane to the village.

Living in Anvik, you’d experience 150 sunny days each year and a 100 days of precipitation.  Eighteen inches of rain falls on the village along with seventy-six inches of snow during the year.  Summer temperatures are pretty cool – the July high is 67 degrees.  The average January temperature in -7 degrees.  While that doesn’t sound as cold as some of the previous checkpoints, the Yukon River can be blasted by wind so on any given day, they windchill can be severe.

The trail from Shageluk to Anvik is a well used village to village snowmachine route.  Most of the trail runs over lakes, swamps, sloughs and a little tundra.  The trail is considered easy but there are a few steep climbs up banks of sloughs and some narrow trail in the heavy timber along the Yukon River.  Upon reaching the Yukon river, Anvik sits on the far side behind a high bluff.  At the crossing, the river is a mile wide.  Teams travel down the main street of Anvik to the community center where the checkpoint is located.  All of this information is courtesy of Don Bower’s  Trail Notes.  He also says that hospitality in Anvik is excellent but it’s only 18 miles north to Grayling so many teams continue on through.

Well, there you have it – information about the First to the Yukon Award, the history and climate of Anvik and the trail leading from Shageluk to the might Yukon.  Next Handler will tell us about the checkpoint of Grayling.  After hearing about all that great food prepared by the Millennium Chef, I’m getting hungry.  I can’t wait to see what’s for supper tonight!  Stay tuned and remember in everything do your best everyday and have a plan.

Born to Run,
Sanka