Sole and Buttercup, two of the victims of a snowmachine collision on the Denali Highway/Mike Parker via Facebook

Charges brought in dog deaths

A professional snowmachine rider from Minnesota has been charged with reckless driving in connection with the death of three sled dogs and injuries to more in a collision along Alaska’s Denali Highway in December.

Alaska State Troopers have been investigating the crash for months and late last week filed a single misdemeanor charge against 48-year-old Erik Johnson, a resident of Roseau, Minn.,  the home of Polaris Industries.

A LinkedIn page for Johnson describes him as a professional test driver at Polaris Industries. One of the nation’s largest snowmobile manufacturers, Polaris had a team of riders testing machines on the Denali when one driven by Johnson is alleged to have slammed into a dog team driven by Mike Parker.

Johnson could not be immediately reached for comment.

In the immediate aftermath of the deadly collision, Polaris issued Fox 9 News in the Twin Cities a statement describing what happened as a “tragic accident.”

The statement went on to say that “safe riding is central to how we operate. Our employees who are responsible for testing our snowmobiles are expert riders that (sic) have significant riding experience.

“In addition to their long-time riding experience, our test riders must meet our detailed training requirements, which includes industry training, as well as internal trainings (sic) and meeting our internal requirements. They are required to follow our riding safety protocols, such as staying within posted speed limits, wearing proper riding gear, and abiding by regulations of the local area.”

The legal speed limit on the Denali is unclear. There is a 40 mph sign along the road near Cantwell, but most of the highway has no signs and appears to fall under a general Alaska Department of Transportation regulations that stipulate speeds of 20 mph in business districts, 25 mph in residential districts, and  “55 miles per hour on any other roadway.”

But even if there were a posted speed, it wouldn’t matter because Troopers have declared speed limits don’t apply to the road in winter because it isn’t plowed.

No accident

Parker was training a team of Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race veteran Jim Lanier’s well-known “Northern White” huskies when the dogs were hit head-on by a snowmachine in a group of snowmachines he said were “hauling ass” toward Cantwell on the summer-only Denali.

He said he saw their headlights coming in the dark and that they made no obvious attempt to slow down. He believes it is impossible they could have failed to notice him with his headlamp lighting up his dog team.

How fast they were going, he doesn’t know, but he estimated their speed at well in excess of 50 mph. The first two machines went safely by the team, but the third hit it.

How Troopers decided that the speed limit on the road in winter doesn’t apply is unclear. A trooper spokesman emailed that 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.”

There appears to be nothing in state law to stipulate that unplowed roads divert to status as public land or public trails, and the Alaska Department of Law, asked about all this weeks ago, has yet to explain who decided that traffic laws don’t apply on roads that are non-maintained.

Many of the roads in the city of Anchorage were non-maintained for days, in some cases for more than a week, after unusually heavy snows earlier this winter, and traffic laws appeared to remain in force. But this was an unusual situation for the state’s largest city.

The same is not unusual for the Denali, Alaska Highway 8, which closes to traffic in the fall.

Left unplowed in the winter months, the largely unpaved and desolate roadway that runs along the south side of the Alaska Range for 135 miles from the ghost-town of Paxson in the east to the not much bigger community of Cantwell, population of about 200, in the west has long been in use as a testing ground for Lower 48 snowmobile manufacturers.

Increasingly since the start of the new millennium, too, it has become a training track for Iditarod teams as the Last Great Race has morphed from a challenge of men and dogs against the wilderness to an extended, doggie version of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Ironically, the volume of snowmachine traffic along the road helps to pack in a trail well-suited to conditioning dog teams to motor along at a fast trot for hours on end rather than gearing down to struggle through soft snow. This is important in an event that has over the years become more and more about team speed than about team power and durability.

The convergence of more dog teams and more snowmachines on the Denali led to what might be considered an inevitable conflict.

A month before Parker’s team was hit, 28-year-old Austin Gibbs from the community of Healy just north on the George Parks Highway was at the controls of a snowmachine that slammed into a team belonging to five-time Iditarod champ Dallas Seavey.

Ticket and fined

One of three Seavey teams training on the highway at the time, this one was under the control of a young handler from Montana who was deeply traumatized by a collision that left two dogs dead and several others injured.

Gibbs was cited for “negligent driving” in the wake of the accident. State court records reflect that he offered a plea of “no contest” the citation and has since paid a fine of $320. Some have criticized that as a mere slap on the wrist.

But for killing two dogs, Gibbs was fined $220 more than newly identified driver Russell E. Webb who this summer ran over and killed retired dentist Carlton Higgins while he was legally using a city crosswalk intended to protect pedestrians.

The Anchorage Police Department (APD) for months shielded Webb as its normal practice for drivers involved in collisions involving vulnerable road users. A police spokeswoman has previously explained that this is because collisions that kill pedestrians and cyclists are only “ticketable offenses,” not real crimes.

APD apparently bowed to public pressure after The Alaska Landmine did a story revealing the penalty imposed on the driver who killed Higgins and noted that “drivers who break traffic laws and kill pedestrians face significantly lower penalties than those levied for littering, chasing moose, or using studded tires out of season.”

Killing dogs by running into them with a snowmachine can now be added to that list. The Russell E. Webb in question appears to be Russell Eugene Webb, a former deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services now retired and the husband of retired Anchorage District Court Judge Stephanie Rhoades.

No matter how this might look, there are no indications – let alone any evidence – to indicate his connections had anything to do with the way APD handled the case.

In Anchorage – as in South Dakota where the state attorney general drove off the roadway surface to run down and kill a vulnerable road user only to suffer a slap on the wrist for bad driving – the penalties for killing pedestrians or cyclists appear to be normally minor if there are any penalties at all.

After the South Dakota death, South Dakota Public Media did a deep dive into the cases of pedestrians and cyclists killed by motorists in that state and found most penalties were even smaller than the $1,000 Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was ordered to pay after agreeing to a plea deal.

The same would be likely to prove the case in Alaska, but a deep dive into the data here is difficult because both APD and troopers shield the names of drivers who kill vulnerable road users. And looking up court cases to find out what, if anything, happened with cases involving nameless individuals, is just about impossible.