Solo and Buttercup, two of the latest victims of a snowmachine collision on the Denali Highway/Mike Parker via Facebook
Machines are our friends until….
Outrage has followed the deaths of three more Alaska sled dogs hit by a motorized vehicle on the Denali Highway, but in many ways, the tragic collision is just a 49th state twist on a national trend.
All across the country there has been an uptick in animals, and people, being rundown and killed by motor vehicles, and the only real difference here is that in the 49th state, the vehicle involved in the latest tragedy happened to be a snowmachine – the motorized convenience of choice for winter travelers in the modern north – rather than a car or truck.
And as is often the case in these deadly collisions, speed appears to have played a major role in the deaths. Sled-dog driver Mike Parker, who is dealing with the trauma of witnessing the dogs in his team being smashed to death, said he doesn’t know specifically how fast the snowmachine that ran into his team was traveling, but said it could be fairly described as “hauling ass,” which in Alaska terms is somewhere well north of 30 mph and often well north of 50 mph.
With dogs as with people, the higher the speed at impact the greater the risk of death. For humans, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), “the average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10 percent at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25 percent at 32 mph, 50 percent at 42 mph, 75 percent at 50 mph, and 90 percent at 58 mph.”
Dogs appear somewhat more durable than humans, so they are likely to suffer slightly less mortality at higher speeds than people. But the general relationship between higher speeds and greater odds of death is a simple matter of physics: energy equals one-half mass times velocity squared ( 1/2 m v2).
Or, put simply, increasing the speed at which an object is moving has a far greater influence on its force at impact than the weight of the object, and thus, for instance, a 450-pound Polaris Khaos Slash with a 200-pound rider traveling at 80 mph could generate as much force at impact as a 3,000-pound Ford Focus at about 40 mph.
What happened
Parker said he is baffled as to how his team got hit. He clearly remembers seeing four snowmachines hurtling down the unmaintained in winter Denali Highway toward his team, and “I was wildly trying to signal with my headlight” by swinging the beam back and forth across the road, he said.
The machines he’d seen before, he added, and on those occasions, they had safely passed.
This time, he said, “the first guy saw me” and veered away. So, too, the second.
But a third, driven by a test rider employed by Minnesota-based Polaris Inc., according to Alaska State Troopers, slammed into the dogs. The driver is unavailable for comment.
Troopers have so far refused to identify him, citing a section of the Alaska public records law saying they are required to provide “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of the law enforcement records or information interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
How exactly identifying the driver in a deadly collision would “interfere with enforcement proceedings” is unclear, but Alaska law enforcement in general has a long history of protecting motor vehicle operators involved in deadly collisions.
Polaris, a Minnesota-based manufacturer of snowmobiles and off-road vehicles, also has a long history of testing its machinery in the 49th state and has been a trooper equipment provider.
Alaska Wildlife Troopers on their Polaris snowmobiles/Department of Public Safety photo
Parker said the Polaris group reported to have been testing new machines on the Denail should have been well aware of his dog team as well as other dog teams and other snowmachine traffic on the Denali.
“They knew I was out there,” he said. “They passed me a bunch of times in daylight and in darkness.”
Parker said he cannot understand how one of the snowmachines could have run into his well-lit team shining in the dark, but snowmachines running at high speeds can sometimes kick up a significant plume of loose snow. That can limit the visibility of riders following a leading sled.
During the 2008 Irondog – a 1,000-mile snowmachine race along the Iditarod Trial from Big Lake to Nome – Todd Palin, once the husband of former Gov. Sarah Palin – was riding with limited visibility in the spindrift snow kicked up by the sled of partner Scott Palin when he hit a barrel buried in the snow along the trail and suffered a crash that ripped a ski of his sled and sent him flying. He broke his arm in that crash although that was not revealed until he suffered serious injuries in a 2016 crash when his now ex-wife, a former Republican candidate for vice-president, was on the campaign trail in support of then-presidential candidate and now former President Donald Trump.
Parker said he has no way of knowing if the snow kicked up by the Polaris group hampered visibility, but being unable to see what is ahead is generally considered a good reason to slow down.
Parker said he can say none of the machines slowed to any noticeable degree, and the third driver in the group was “haulin’ ass” as fast as the others when his sled hit the dogs, Parker said
The rider, who was wearing a helmet and body armor, was not injured in the collision. Two of the dogs were killed almost instantly, and two were seriously injured. One of the latter died on the way to a veterinary hospital; the other is still hanging on.
A trooper dispatch said the “snowmachine operator stopped to render aid,” but Parker said that is not exactly what happened. The dog driver admitted he was in shock and angry in the wake of the collision, and told the snowmachine driver who hit the dogs to get help, at which point the man and the rest of the Polaris group quickly took off.
Parker said he was still dealing with the dead dogs when the group came past again “hauling ass back toward Paxson.” The near ghost town of Paxson is at the east end of the 135-mile-long Denali with the tiny community Cantwell at the west end, where Parker had based his dog truck.
The latest collision, coming in the wake of a collision that killed two dogs owned by well-known Iditarod Trail Sled Dog musher Dallas Seavey, has sparked such widespread anger that some on social media have gone so far as to suggest the desire to “go vigilante” on speeding snow-machine drivers.
Ironically different
The vehemence of the social media reactions to the death of the dogs is strangely different from the national acceptance of the rising toll of animals, and people, killed on U.S. roads.
The deaths of U.S. pedestrians hit by motor vehicles has risen 77 percent from 4,302 in 2010 to 7,264 in 2021 which had the New York Times on Monday pondering why after decades of declines in pedestrian deaths before 2010 “American roads started to become deadlier for pedestrians, particularly at night.”
The Times, somewhat predictably, blamed the increase in the number of oversized, fuel-guzzling, carbon-dioxide-producing trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) now on American roads, an increase in homelessness which has left more poor people walking on or near roads full of fast-moving traffic, and smartphones that now distract so many drivers.
But the newspaper pretty much glossed over the steady march of technology that has made all motorized vehicles steadily more convenient to use and easier to drive, which has in turn encouraged people to drive them at higher rates of speed
Not to mention the social acceptance of bad driving.
After bicycle riding, National Football League (NFL) coach Greg Knapp was run down and killed by an inattentive driver who drove into a bike lane in San Ramon, Calif., local authorities decided to do nothing.
Why drivers “need to be attentive” when there are no consequences for being inattentive was not explained, but the view reflected by the Contra Costa DA is widespread. When South Dakota Public Broadcasting investigated the deaths of pedestrians run down and killed in that state, it found that of 31 drivers who struck and killed pedestrians from 2016 through 2020, “none…served jail or prison time, and none paid a fine close to the $1,000 imposed on the (state’s former) attorney general” who hit a man walking along a South Dakota road and left him to die.
South Dakota Public Media has been one of the few mainstream news organizations with the courage to delve into this issue. It has largely been ignored elsewhere though the behavior in South Dakota appears to represent a national norm.
These sorts of attitudes have helped spawn a machine takeover of travel on and along the streets of America as well as on the winter trails of Alaska. The thinking when non-motorized users are rundown and killed is that it was largely their fault because they shouldn’t have been on or near the road or trail.
“And that vicious cycle isn’t just about walkers being scared off of sidewalks by near-miss crashes and clouds of vehicle smog. It’s about transportation leaders claiming there’s ‘just no demand’ for safe walking infrastructure when they see so few walkers around; it’s about developers building homes further and further out on the fringe for customers who simply ‘prefer’ to drive an hour to work every day; it’s about public transit budgets being slashed to make space on the balance sheet for more ‘popular’ highway projects.
“And in time, Levinson argues, the cycle of unwalkability sinks in even deeper. Eventually, many residents of unwalkable places become unable to walk because of sedentary lifestyle diseases that can all too easily set in when they don’t have the time, resources, or motivation to drive to a gym or a park. Meanwhile, others come to authentically love their cars and the culture that surrounds them, and to believe that walking is inherently undesirable, undignified, or even emasculating.”
The latter phenomenon overtook rural Alaska long ago, although in Alaska villages the vehicles of choice are usually four-wheelers and snowmachines rather than cars. It’s common, however, to be offered a ride on one or the other and to have the owner give you a bewildered look if told, “Thanks, but I’m not going that far. I’m happy to walk.”
America, including Alaska, has long been a nation of drivers, but it is becoming evermore a nation of drivers, and the resulting collisions and deaths are inevitable, especially in places like the Denali where there are no motor vehicle rules.
Haul ass
According to a trooper spokesman, the agency doesn’t care about winter speeds on the highway because “the Alaska State Troopers view public roadways that are in a non-maintained state as public land or public trails. We do not enforce speed limits, stop sign violations, etc when a road is not being maintained. We do enforce laws that apply to motor vehicles regardless of where they are being operated such as DUI (driving under the influence) reckless driving, negligent driving.”
Alaska attorneys say it is hard to make a charge of reckless driving, or even the lesser charge of negligent driving, stick in a case where there are no traffic laws, and it can be hard to make a case for reckless driving in Alaska even when such laws do exist.
The Alaska Court of Appeals last year overturned a state jury’s opinion that Keith Gilbert Ambacher was driving recklessly because the video in a trooper’s patrol car showed him driving down the Seward Highway at speeds up to 80 mph in a 55 mph zone with the wheels of his vehicle briefly crossing “the double yellow lines” at the start of an S-curve, “and on the subsequent righthand curve…(crossing) the fog line.”
“Although Ambacher was clearly speeding,” the justices wrote in their opinion, “nothing in the video or the trooper’s testimony indicated that Ambacher did not have full control of his vehicle, or that he endangered other people or property.
Alaska law defines reckless driving as driving “in a manner that creates a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to a person or to property,” and it would appear the Alaska court system has a pretty high bar for what meets the standard of not just “substantial” but also “unjustifiable risk.”
One might consider this thinking part of the “motonormativity” that has helped to drive up the death toll of both humans and animals on the country’s roadways. It is estimated a million animals per year now become road kill in the U.S. usually because drivers are going so fast they can’t stop in time when an animal steps into the roadway.
And it’s not because animals are stupid.
“The deadliest highways tend to be moderately trafficked ones. Something like 8,000 cars a day, which is not a huge volume at all, prevents animals from even trying to cross them,” David Zipper, the author of ” Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Planet, ” told Bloomberg in September.
“I’m fascinated by this idea of ‘gap acceptance,’ which is also a very human issue for pedestrians. You and I have this threshold where the cars are coming pretty quickly, but not too quickly, and we can still scamper across the city street – albeit with some risk. Animals are doing the same thing, looking for gaps between vehicles that are wide enough to move through. They really get into trouble when those gaps are wide enough to be enticing but narrow enough to still be dangerous.”
Or when the next motor vehicle coming down the road is traveling so fast it throws off their estimate as to how big the gap in the traffic. And then they die, as do pedestrians, in ever greater numbers.
Wilson at StreetsBlog noted that while pedestrian deaths overall have gone up 77 percent, night-time deaths have risen by 96 percent and “hit-and-run deaths increased 153 percent, with at least 86 percent of those deaths occurring after the sun went down.
“In 2009, 17 percent of walkers who died in America were abandoned in the street by the drivers who struck them, often delaying access to critical medical care that might have saved their lives,” she added. “In 2021, it was 24 percent. And with no one around to witness their violence, personal injury lawyers claim that fewer than 10 percent of hit-and-run drivers are ever caught.”
But then law enforcement agencies often put little or no effort into investigating hit-and-run collisions involving cyclists or pedestrians.
Four years earlier, when 38-year-old Kasey Turner was run down and killed on the same road, police blamed him. An APD spokeswoman at the time said “visibility and road conditions” were bad and explained that “Turner was partially in the roadway and not on a sidewalk, and he was wearing dark clothing.
“Pedestrians should always utilize sidewalks or keep as far away from the main road as possible,” she said, failing to note that there are no sidewalks along Brayton as is the case with many streets in Anchorage or that drivers should also have some obligation to slow down and drive carefully when the roads are slippery and visibility is bad.
Her comments did, however, well reflect a pervasive view that America’s streets are for motor vehicles and, if the worst happens, any non-motorized travelers who’ve venture there are the ones responsible for having risked their own lives.
And now there are indications this view is spreading onto Alaska’s winter trails.
