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Hardcore Huskies Newsletter 08 Race Edition.pdf [ Archive ] |
| Alaska Cold? Not Right Now | Wed, Mar. 5th, 2008 | |
Mother Nature is getting into the race. Nikolai, Alaska is the first checkpoint that is on the north side of the Alaska Range and warmer temperatures are in the forecast. At mid-day on Wednesday, the temperature is hovering near 40 degrees under a cloudy sky.
McGrath is reporting a cloudy sky with a temperature in the mid-30`s. Snow is also in the forecast. Unseasonably warmer temperatures look like the norm along the Kuskokwim River until a to cool down begins hopefully tomorrow. Even Unalakleet on the Bering Coast is reporting an unseasonable warm temp of 37 degrees.
Nome is also a warm 18 degrees under a sunny sky. Race marshalls there tell us there is lots of snow on the ground in and around Nome, over 67" on the ground and lots more to come.
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| What Do Trail Vets Do? | Wed, Mar. 5th, 2008 | |
We have received some questions as to what happens when the mushers arrive at the various checkpoints.
The answwer is a lot. There is a checker there to look for the required gear and have the musher sign the race log. Mushers also have food and other supplies staged at various checkpoints.
Then there are the veternarians, who probably have the most important job, helping to maintain the dogs health. They are located at each checkpoint on the trail to answer dog questions, check over the dogs and care for dogs.
The vets use the acronym HAW&L as they check the dogs over at the checkpoints. “H” stands for Heart & Hydration. Vets listen to the heart and then check hydration by doing a skin fold or a gum test. “A” stands for Attitude and Appetite. The vets watch the dogs as they come into a checkpoint to see that all the tug lines are tight and they will ask the mushers about how the dogs are eating and drinking. “W” stands for weight. Vet’s and mushers monitor the weight of the dogs by checking the hips and ribs of the dogs. Dogs that are losing weight are often dropped from the team. “L” stands for lungs. Vets listen carefully to the lungs to make sure they are clear.
If a dog is dropped it is sent to either Anchorage or Nome, depending on where the drop occurs. Mushers and everyone associated with the Iditarod take the heath of the dogs very seriously.
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| Next Stop, Nikolai | Wed, Mar. 5th, 2008 | |
After resting in Rohn for just under 6 hours, Heather and the Hardcore Team left Rohn at 9:27 PM AKST (1:27 AM EST March 5) on their way to the next checkpoint in Nikolai. The Hardcore Team is still showing they are 13 dogs strong.
This leg isn’t as long as it’s alleged to be. Some people say it actually runs only 75 miles, but the real distance is probably closer to 80. It’s still quite a pull, but not as bad as it could be. (The published figure probably comes from the old trail routing over to Farewell Station and then to Nikolai.) On the other hand, there are some truly bad spots on this stretch, mostly within the first 20 miles. Expect Heather and the Team to take a total of 10 to 15 hours for this leg; she’ll want to rest the dogs for several hours somewhere, or else take a lot of shorter breaks.
This run breaks into three natural sections: 20 miles along the south side of the South Fork of the Kuskokwim from Rohn to Farewell Lakes and up onto the Farewell Burn, 35 miles across the Burn itself to Sullivan Creek, and then 20 miles north from Sullivan Creek past Salmon River to Nikolai.
At the finish line in Nome after last years race Heather was asked what her favorite part of the trail was and she said she loved the Burn.
The first 20 miles out of Rohn has some of the consistently worst trail on the whole race.
From Rohn, the trail immediately breaks out onto the windblown gravel and sandbars of the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River have about a mile of really lousy going over bare spots, through driftwood tangles, across large stretches of slippery ice, and maybe even through some overflow and shallow open water.
This area is a natural wind tunnel and is a perennial Excedrin headache for the Iditarod Air Force pilots. The wind is often blowing hard out on the open riverbed, 40 miles per hour or more; it always blows from the east, or down the river. Heather might have some trouble keeping the team going in the correct direction on the ice if the wind is strong enough. She’ll need to be prepared to grab her leaders and help them if the wind is really strong.
Five miles out of Rohn on an otherwise straight trail, the Team will make a sudden swing to the right and then slowly start bending back around to the left. The entire side of the mountain overlooking the south side of the valley collapsed in the winter of 1997-8 and obliterated about half a mile of the trail, burying it under 30 to 50 feet of mud, rocks, and entire uprooted trees. The bypass trail may be a bit rough in places, but it shouldn’t be any trouble.
About ten miles out Heather will come to the Post River. This is a major river flowing in from the south and you’ll have a hundred yards or more of gently sloping ice to cross, probably without much snow cover. It may have a light covering of water in places, making it Really Slick. On the far side she’ll have a quick left turn back up the bank and into the trees again; slow the dogs down as you leave the ice and don’t miss the turn up the steep bank.
Half a mile later she’ll come to what most people call the Post River Glacier, but which is really a separate, smaller stream. This little stretch is about a quarter-mile of pure nightmare even under good conditions, followed by some merely terrible trail for another quarter-mile or so.
Then she’ll come to the crest of a hill and will see a hundred-yard expanse of ice in the canyon below, with a side ravine feeding in from the other side. The side ravine will look like a sloping cascade of ice perhaps 30 yards wide with rocky sides. The hill down to the ice is short but steep. At the bottom the Team will make a sharp right turn.
The trail turns uphill on the ice for about fifty yards, bending right around a sharp rock outcropping (keep your sled clear of this) and continues up to the end of the ravine through a field of rocks the size of softballs (usually with no snow cover) then come into a short open tundra area that is often bare of snow before regaining the trees and a semblance of normalcy.
Once you are back in the trees the trail will begin to climb slowly up to a saddle on the south side of Egypt Mountain. This area is called the Buffalo Chutes because the local herd of several hundred wild bison wanders through here and grazes in some of the small pothole marshes and lakes in the woods. Heather may or may not see the buffalo; they have not been known to bother anyone.
For the next ten miles through the Buffalo Chutes she will probably see stretches of bare dirt, rock, and ice, some very narrow trails through the woods, and a couple of areas of frozen overflow that can be bad enough to obliterate the trail.
One of the potentially worst stretches of overflow is after Egypt Mountain, only a couple of miles before the lake. The trail will enter an area of several acres of swamp and trees that may be flooded with ice. The trail exits up the hill to the left, although in some years it is entirely possible to miss it and continue on down the icy swamp, ultimately coming to the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River. In 1997 six teams were tangled up in this mess for an hour and a later musher missed the turn completely, got lost, and ultimately took almost two days to get to Nikolai. Let’s hope Heather doesn’t miss the turn!
The first large lake you reach will be Farewell Lake. For the next five miles the Team will run from lake to lake with some excursions through the forest.
After Farewell Lake, Heather will see one more “Dangerous Trail Conditions” sign just before a short, steep downhill onto another lake. Also somewhere after Farewell Lake, just after she crosses a creek in an open area, she’ll duck back into a treeline and pass the old Pioneer Roadhouse, one of the original stops on the old Iditarod. It’s a good place to take a break and explore for a few minutes; ruins of a couple of the old cabins are still there.
If my memory serves me right this is where one of the musher’s held up last year for many hours until they were rescued and then scratched.
After leaving the lakes, the trail will start to work up a series of low wooded hills and ridges. Heather will crest one last forested ridge and suddenly be in the Farewell Burn. This was the site of Alaska’s largest forest fire, a million and a half acres in the summer of 1978 be running through it for the next 40 miles.
The trail through the Burn was almost impassable for several years after the fire, with snags and all manner of obstructions, but it has been cleaned up by the Bureau of Land Management and isn’t usually much of a problem. The visibility from the tops of these ridges is forever because there are no trees; at night you can sometimes see the lights of other musher’s for 20 miles in either direction. At night you can also see a single light on top of a mountain far to the west. This is the light at the military radar site on top of Tatalina Mountain, 15 miles southwest of McGrath pass right under it on your way from McGrath to Takotna in a couple of days.
During the day musher’s can easily see the hills west of McGrath, and Mounts McKinley and Foraker looming above the Alaska Range far to the northeast. (At sunset or dawn the view from the Burn can be positively breathtaking as the sun ignites the lofty summits of Denali and Foraker above the dark landscape below.)
When the Hardcore Team comes down into a sheltered gulch with a tent camp on your left (people may be there on snowmachines) she will be 41 miles from Nikolai. This is called the Buffalo Camp (for obvious reasons). Musher’s are usually welcome to stop here for awhile if you wish; the owner lives in Nikolai and is a friend of the race.
If the wind isn’t blowing and there has been sufficient snow, this level stretch of the trail is a speedway and you can make superb time all the way to Nikolai. However, if the wind is blowing (from the north, like it was in 1997) the trail will probably be drifted in as soon as you drop off of the ridges.
Once you reach Nikolai, Heather and the Hardcore Team is through a lot of the bad trail on the race (although anything can happen on down the line, and often does). The Hardcore team will be bedded down in the area surrounding the school and village public works building. Cold water will be available in the village public works building, and maybe in the school or in the in the municipal building. In some years hot water may also be available. A snack bar is sometimes set up in the school gym and there’s a small restaurant upstairs in the game room of the municipal building. Heather will be able to catch a nap upstairs in the village public works building and dry her soaked gear in the boiler room. As a rule, if musher’s make it to Nikolai, they’re through the toughest trail and you—and more importantly your dogs—have managed to make the mental transition to the long-haul trail mode. Many veterans say if you can get to Nikolai with your team and your wits intact, you’ve got a good chance to finish the race.
When she arrives in Nikolai Heather and the Team will have completed 347 miles and have 765 left to get to Nome.
NOTE: There have been several inquires as to which two dogs were dropped in Finger Lake area and the answer is at this point we do not know. We have been told it is snowing enough in the Finger Lake area that the small planes used to transport the dogs from the checkpoints to Anchorage are grounded. Until the weather breaks and the Hardcore Dog Handler is able to get to Anchorage pick up the dogs we won’t know which two were dropped.
Also we were told that because of all of the snow, mushers like Heather in the middle to back of the pack were having a hard time. There are folks in snowmachines that groom the trail ahead of the mushers. However, by the time the first twenty o so go through, ruts begin to form. This is especially true when new snow is falling. We have been told by some mushers that the ruts were so deep t seemed like they were traveling through a tunnel with the walls of snow so high on either side of they it was over their heads. Also, for every inch of fresh snow on the trail mushers are slowed by about 2 miles per hour.
Heather and the Team is not entering an area where it is just the opposite….little or no snow!
Finally, Heather is now more that 36 hours ahead of last year.In 2007 she did not leave the Rohn checkpoint until Thursdy at 9:06 AM AKST and arrived in Nikolai on Friday at 2:06 AM AKST. Heather is also currently being shown in 69th place out of the 93 mushers still on the trail.
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| Heather Arrives in Rohn | Tue, Mar. 4th, 2008 | |
Heather and the 13 member Hardcore team arrived at the Rohn checkpoint at 3:39 PM AKST (7:39 EST) after 7 hours and 7 minutes on the trail.
Rohn is the gateway to the interior and marks the transition point where mushers start to venture into the flatlands, along with dropping temperatures. Some mushers will take their required 24-hour layover here before heading across the bleak but treacherous Farewell Burn area.
From here Heather and the Team will head to the next checkpoint at Nikolai. The run 80 mile to Nikolai is taking others anywhere from 8 to 16 hours.
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| Heather 24 Hours Ahead of Last Year | Tue, Mar. 4th, 2008 | |
Heather and the Hardcore Team left Rainy Pass at 8:32 AM AKST this morning (12:32 PM EST) for the 48 mile trip to the next checkpoint at Rohn. This means Heather and the Team are just over 24 hours ahead of last years pace.
Race records also show her leaving Rainy Pass with 13 dogs which means she dropped two more. As soon as we have information on which dogs they were we will pass it along.
The Hardcore Team rested in Rainy Pass for just over 7 hours before taking off on this next leg which should take three and a half to five hours. It has some very tough trail, including the notorious Dalzell Gorge. Given a choice, most mushers prefer to do this during the day, which is why Heather probably rested as long as she did.
On leaving Puntilla Lake the trail climbs immediately up out of the treeline then dives down into one ravine very quickly and makes a steep climb back up onto the tundra. From here to the mouth of Rainy Pass itself Heather and her Team be running westward up a low ridge in the middle of the two-mile- wide valley. The view can be spectacular, but the trail is often blown in or just not visible and the snow is never very deep.
Out in the open expanse Heather will be looking for Iditarod trail stakes or, more importantly, six-foot-high wooden tripods spaced every few hundred yards. If the wind is blowing like it was in 2007, you can be in a ground blizzard that can obscure the ground but may leave you perfect visibility from the back of the sled. If the wind is strong enough Heather may not be able to see her dogs part of the time, even though she may see the mountains and the trail tripods with no trouble.
After ten miles Heather and the Hardcore Team will leave the open main valley (which is properly called Ptarmigan Pass) and work toward a smaller valley opening to the right. This is the actual entrance to Rainy Pass. From there she will cross the upper reaches of Happy River as the team approaches the side of the valley; there is often some minor overflow here.
Then Heather will begin to work northwest and north up the narrow Pass Creek valley leading to Rainy Pass, weaving across the frozen creek and in and out of clumps of willow bushes, steadily climbing. The only trail markers here are regular trail stakes. Heather will need to watch for some steep rocky sidehill pitches that may not have much snow cover. There may be a few caribou on the sides of the valley; if the dogs notice them, they’ll go a little faster. When she reaches a small alpine lake (Rainy Pass Lake) she’ll be a mile and a half from the summit. From the lake she’ll start a steep climb up to the summit, which is the highest point on the trail at 3,160 feet above sea level.
From the top it’s sharply downhill into the Pass Fork Valley on a long snowfield. Shortly after entering the timberline the trail will become narrow and twisting, running mainly along the creek, sometimes in narrow rocky ravines. After a couple of hard-fought miles the trail will open up a bit, but the team will still be going in and out of willow bushes. At one point the trail will make a sharp diversion uphill and run along the high right bank of the creek before dropping back down. A lot of musher’s will probably spill the sled more than once on the stretch down Pass Fork, so hold on tight. This part of the trail is often in pretty bad shape, with pits and ruts and bumps.
Five miles after the summit Heather and the Hardcore Team will come into the wooded valley of Dalzell Creek for a couple of miles of fairly easy running. Then she’ll swing across to the south side of the valley and make a sharp climb up to a forested shelf that runs along the valley side. The trail gets very narrow and winding with big trees on either side. Heather will easily see that the terrain is beginning to drop off sharply on her right.
After half a mile she’ll see a “Watch Your Ass” sign; immediately beyond is a steep 200-foot hill down into Dalzell Gorge. Depending on conditions, the Gorge can be nothing more than a very scenic exercise in sled driving, or it can be your worst nightmare come true.
Once Heather is down into the canyon, the trail will start jumping from side to side, crossing the creek (which always has open, running water) on sometimes-narrow ice and snow bridges, some of which may be collapsed. Even under good conditions, musher’s need to keep up enough speed to cross these bridges cleanly—if your dogs cut you across them or slow down at the wrong time you can find yourself in big trouble quickly, sliding down ice ledges into the water. (The water isn’t much more than a foot or two deep in most places, but it’s usually at the bottom of a nightmare of sloping ice.) At some points the canyon is barely wide enough for the trail and the creek. There are also lots of very big trees down in the gorge; the trail wraps tightly around a few of them.
The Gorge is only about two miles long (it seems like twenty) and then you’re suddenly out of it and onto the Tatina River. From the end of the Gorge it’s only five miles down the river to the checkpoint at Rohn Roadhouse. There is always some minor overflow and shallow open water along the river on the way to Rohn. The river surface can be very icy and slippery and there may be some rough ice. The trail will shortly turn down the right side of the runway; the checkpoint cabin is back in the trees at the far (south) end of the runway. Rohn is a good place to get some quality rest for you and your dogs. The checkpoint area is sheltered from the wind in big spruce trees.
Historical Note: In a few of the early years, the Iditarod didn’t use Rainy Pass. Instead, the trail made a long, 70-mile run past the mouth of Rainy Pass and south down Ptarmigan Pass to Hells Gate, a dramatic but reasonably wide and level-floored canyon through the spine of the Alaska Range cut by the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River. The trail then followed the river north back to Rohn. This route is still an option if Rainy Pass is unusable for some reason. The Iron Dog snowmachine race from Anchorage to Nome two weeks before the Iditarod always follows the Iditarod northern route, and tries to use the Hells Gate detour rather than risk the run down the Dalzell Gorge.
Dog teams can use trails that high-speed snowmachines cannot, and can even use some trails with very steep hills or drops or narrow side clearances that no snowmachine can traverse. Of course, Iditarod teams must follow the trailbreakers, who use powerful long-track snowmachines to set the trail, so the real dogs don’t get much chance to thumb their noses at the iron dogs on the race.
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