Say good-bye to climate change for a year and welcome back the real Alaska.
When conditions like this befell the so-called “Last Great Race” in the distant past, mushers teamed up to form a train of dog teams that took turns breaking out the trail. Sometimes, the dog drivers were even known to put on snowshoes and themselves take turns at the front of the train breaking trail for the dogs behind.
Those days, however, are long gone.
Iditarod mushers are still required to pack snowshoes as “mandatory gear” in their sleds, but some Iditarod old-timers have questioned how many of the new-age competitors even know how to put on their snowshoes.
It’s not as easy as you might think as a four and a half minute REI video tutorial explains:
“First things first, figuring out left versus right. Some snowshoes have a conveniently located L versus R on the base of the binding….the ball of your foot should be over the crampon…(but) “especially if you have larger boots, you want to make sure you have enough toe clearance.”
And then there are those “complicated strapping systems,” which vary from snowshoe to snowshoe.
Trailbreaking failure
In this particular case, however, Nordman blamed the problem on “the Iditarod trailbreaker crew,” a gang of volunteers on snowmachines, who have “had a challenging time breaking the trail open due to the sheer volume of accumulated snow and has been unable to dig out a safe, well-marked trail to allow teams to travel to Flat.”
The loop trail to Flat was to have run for about 20 miles which is a long distance to ask anyone to dig. Given that they couldn’t put in a trail, the current Iditarod plan is for racers to simply turn around at Iditarod and race back to where they began at Deshka Landing on the Susitna River near the community of Willow north of Anchorage.
Three-time Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race champ Brent Sass from Eureka is currently in the race lead, but that’s no guarantee of Iditarod success. Sass has a reputation for pushing his dogs a bit too hard. He famously blew up his team in the 2016 Iditarod.
After a mandatory, eight-hour rest in White Mountain, the penultimate checkpoint on the 1,000-mile trail to Nome, Sass’s dogs reluctantly left the checkpoint only to later stage a rebellion on down the trail. Sass was forced to return to the checkpoint and let them rest for 24 hours before trying again.
A year later, Sass was pushing his team to run down Quest leader Matt Hall when two of his dogs collapsed, leading him to summon a rescue. He later claimed the dogs were well-rested and shouldn’t have gone down.
No genetic problems were ever identified. What killed Basin was a dog fight. The dog died while Sass’s dog team was parked along the Denali Highway. The musher was there on a training run, had stopped at a lodge to rest, and had left the team staked down outside.
The musher who witnessed Basin’s death has wrestled with the same “delicate balance” described by Schnuelle. When dealing with dogs, bad things sometimes happen. Every day in the world outside of Alaska, dogs get loose from their owners only to be struck and killed by motor vehicles.
It has been estimated up to 6 million dogs per year die after being struck by motor vehicles. That a few dogs should die in fights in Alaska where dogs remaining working animals is to be expected. It could be that Sass is just cursed with bad luck.
Maybe it will change this year.
COVID-19 arrives
Then again, bad luck seems to be stalking the 2021 Iditarod. First there was the pandemic that almost killed the race, then the snow that shortened the pandemic-modified race route, and after yesterday’s announcement of too much snow came the announcement that a musher had come down with COVID-19.
Veteran Iditarod dog driver Gunnar Johnson from Duluth, Minn., was withdrawn from the race in McGrath, according to an Iditarod statement, and placed in isolation. He is reported to be asymptomatic. The Iditarod says he was twice again tested to make sure the first test wasn’t a false positive.
“Johnson did not come into close contact with race personnel or community members,
nor did he enter any buildings or community spaces in McGrath,” the Iditarod said. “However, he did park his team as he was planning to rest at the checkpoint.”
According to the Iditarod, Johnson is to be removed from the trail “using safe transport,” whatever that means. There was no word on how his dog team is to be handled, although a peer-reviewed study out of Spain has warned dogs could be carriers for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
They theorized that the dogs could be asymptomatic carriers off SARS-CoV-2, or their furry bodies could be magnets for pathogens encountered while they were exposed to people sick with COVID-19.