Dogsled Racing. February 1, 2018

Copyright © 2018                                                         John F. Oyler

February 1, 2018

Dogsled Racing

Late January and early February is always a depressing time for sports fans. The Steelers’ unexpected implosion made it even worse this year. Hockey is an option, but knowing someone will still be playing hockey in early June suggests it is still too early to get interested.

We enthusiastically followed Pitt basketball during the Jamie Dixon era, but can’t get work up much enthusiasm about the current team. We do check the box scores however to see if Zach Smith gets into the game. Zach is a Senior and one of the best students in our Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

He transferred to the Oakland campus from the Pitt undergraduate center in Bradford, where he had a successful career. We had hoped he would get a chance to play regularly this year, but the current coach is more interested in getting playing time experience for the nine Freshmen he recruited. That is probably an appropriate strategy for a team in the rebuilding phase, but we suspect Zach’s maturity would also have a positive influence on these new players.

Fortunately, we have dogsled racing in Alaska and the Yukon to pick up the slack. The bad news is that the local media – radio, television, and newspapers – ignore it completely. They are much more interested in the ethics of an NFL player coming late to practice than in reporting on the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod.

The good news is that there is excellent Internet coverage of the Iditarod and fairly good coverage of the Yukon Quest. It is possible for the dedicated fan to get nearly real-time information on what is happening at each checkpoint and to then extrapolate what is occurring out on the trail. My first act each morning and last act each night is to check the Internet to see how the standings have changed.

The Yukon Quest will begin in Anchorage on February 3 and follow the old Yukon Gold Rush route through Eagle and into Canada, generally following the Yukon River upstream to Whitehorse, a distance of about 1000 miles. It usually takes between nine and fourteen days, depending on conditions. Mushers are required to take mandatory four- or eight-hour rest stops at certain checkpoints. This year twenty-six teams are registered for the race.

A short version of the Yukon Quest is the YQ300. It starts four hours after the Quest and runs three hundred miles to Central City following the same route. Twenty-four teams will compete in it, mainly as a qualifier for next year’s Quest.

The Iditarod starts on March 3 in Anchorage and follows the route of the 1925 Serum Run to Nome when a series of dog sled teams carried serum one thousand miles to Nome to avert a diphtheria epidemic. Sixty-nine teams are entered this year.

A dozen years ago my wife and I had a memorable vacation trip to Alaska in the summer. My wife was a passionate dog person and enjoyed the visits we made to establishments where sled dogs were bred.

A “Discovery” riverboat cruise on the Tanana River made a stop at Susan Butcher’s ranch where we had a chance to meet her and her dogs. On the same cruise we met another young woman with a team of working sled dogs, a woman whom I have since determined was Jessie Royer, a current highly competitive musher.

A particularly memorable day was spent at Jeff King’s “Husky Haven”, a ranch on the edge of Denali National Park where he was training about sixty huskies. We have a wonderful photograph of my wife holding a six-day old puppy. King is a four-time Iditarod winner.

When our cruise ship stopped at Skagway we spent a day on the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad which included a bus ride into the Yukon as far as Tagish Lake. There I met a musher whom I have later learned was named Ed Hopkins and had a very pleasant conversation with him about his life and his dogs. His wife, Michelle Phillips, has run the Iditarod eight times; her highest finish is thirteenth, last year. Ed’s competition is focused on the Yukon Quest, where his highest finish was third, in 2015.

I will be rooting for Ed in this year’s Quest, with Hugh Neff, Alan Moore, and Jason Campeau, all Iditarod competitors as well, as secondary favorites. My YQ300 choice is a little more complicated. How about fifty-eight year-old rookie, Ala Dunn, originally from Kittaning? Or Cody Strathe, using the race as a warmup for the Iditarod? Aliy Zirkle has run the Iditarod seventeen times, with three second place finishes. She, too, will warm up her team a month before her eighteenth Iditarod run. Alan Moore is her husband; apparently his team needs a longer warmup.

As long as he continues to compete, Jeff King will always be my favorite in the Iditarod, if only because he let my wife fondle one of his puppies. Now sixty-two years old, this will be his twenty-eighth time. He has four victories and was well on his way to number five in 2014 with less than thirty miles to go when a massive wind off the Bering Sea blew him and his team into a tangle of downed trees, destroying the sled and injuring several dogs.

A betting man would have to put his stake on last year’s winner, Mitch Seavey, especially since his son, Dallas, has withdrawn because of accusations that four of his dogs in last year’s race had tested positive for the opioid pain reliever Tramadol. Mitch will be seeking his fourth title in twenty-three attempts. Fifty eight years old, his time last year was the fastest ever.

After Jeff King, I think I will be rooting for Aliy Zirkle next. Her close finishes in recent years have all been exciting. I can’t overlook Jessie Royer or Michelle Phillips; after all they seem like old friends. Then there is the “Mushin’Mortician”, Scott Janssen. He finished twice in six attempts; it appears that mushing is his hobby, financed by being a funeral director. I think he warrants a little bit of rooting.

So, what is it about this sport that enthuses me so much? It certainly is partly the challenge which ends up falling on one individual. A thousand miles, almost all of it in wilderness, frequently in weather conditions an order of magnitude worse than we can imagine. Then there are the dogs, a special breed that likes it best when the conditions are the worst.

And of course, the location. Years of Robert Service, and Jack London, and Farley Mowat have romanticized the Far North to the point of seeming like something out of mythology. One would not be surprised to encounter Gandalf atop Shadowfax or Frodo Baggins with his sidekicks, Sam and Merry. Just imagine a musher on the trail at 3:00 am some morning, with the Northern Lights performing pyrotechnics overhead, and the temperature twenty below! Sure beats an NFL gridiron in an indoor stadium.

Dogsled racing doesn’t lack for drama, either. Extremely young women compete on an equal footing with men who would be considered elderly in a different environment. Strategy – When do I take my mandated twenty-four hour rest break? Early in the race so my team is strong at the end? Or later on, after making a big push early in the race?

I find the whole experience intriguing and am eagerly anticipating firing up my laptop and taking advantage of the updates every morning and evening.