The Iditamob of more than 100 who left Knik on Feb. 22 is now down to a diehard half-dozen/Spencer Martin, Facebook

Iditarod Invitational resumes at last

Almost everything in and about America’s Far North has changed in unimaginable ways over the course of the last 110 years, but in winter, one thing remains strangely the same.

As Archdeacon Hudson Stuck observed in 1916 in the Alaska classic memoir “Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled,” a trail is the greatest gift one can give to another once the snows of winter pile deep.

Such remains true to this day even in Anchorage, the state’s largest city, where after every big snow there comes from those wedded to today’s all-about-me convenience and controlled by “car-brain” an incessant whine about how the roads – the trails of today – remain unplowed or done badly so.

A man of a different time, when life was so much harder than today, Stuck would no doubt find the complaining hard to comprehend, but he would surely understand the reasons behind it.

“Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one could wear the large snowshoes that are used for hunting,” he wrote in 10,000 Miles. “But the hunting shoe, though it carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs (behind). The small shoe known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.

“The notion of snowshoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all.”

“Laborious” is something of an understatement as to how hard trailbreaking can be.

The lack of a trail was this year enough to stop in their tracks the ironmen and ironwomen of the Iditarod Invitational 1000 – a human-powered, 1,000-mile race from Knik on the shores of Cook Inlet to Nome on the shores of the Bering Sea.

At the very front of that race, Irish hard-man Gavan Hennigan did give a go to the up and back snowshoeing as described by Stuck before coming to the realization that without a dog team behind to pull a heavily-loaded sled, he lacked the necessary food and fuel to struggle on to his next point of resupply.

So Hennigan settled in to camp near an abandoned mining camp just north of the Kuskokwim River at a place called Ophir, where he awaited the arrival of the snowmachine-powered trailbreakers of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

And he stayed camped there in the 30-degree-below-zero cold for days as behind him 25 fat-tired cyclists and hikers/snowshoers, the segment of the more than 100-strong Invitational starting field planning to follow the Iditarod Trail all the way to Nome, one by one gave up the chase.

A bike pusher – South Dakotan Ryan Wanless – eventually did trudge on to Ophir to join Hennigan’s camp out, while four fat-tired cyclists hung on in the small town of McGrath, crossing their fingers that they could go on once the aforementioned Iditarod trailbreakers arrived.

Today, these six are the only human-powered travelers left on the trail.

Hard beyond hard

Few left in Alaska, and fewer still in Canada and the Lower 48 states, can understand the thankfulness Stuck knew in encountering a broken trail. But the recorded words of the long-dead Episcopalian preacher still put it well.

“…We met a couple of Kobuk (Native) youths on their way to the Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man to give us – a trail! There is no finer illustration of the mutual service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways across the unbroken snows,” he wrote.

“Each is at once conferring and receiving the greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the other; (he) is, it may be – has often been – saving the other, and being himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting about hither and thither when open stretches are crossed; no more three times back and forth to beat the snow down – 20 miles a day instead of 10 or 12 – the boys’ trail meant all that to us.

“And our trail meant almost as much to them. So we were rejoiced to see them, sturdy youths of 16 or 17, making the journey all by themselves. My heart goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted, industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep …adept in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the uncharted arctic wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a white man, I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux than any other native I know of.”

Sadly, such people are now almost wholly gone from Alaska. Snowmachines and four-wheel, all-terrain vehicles are today as ubiquitous in rural Alaska as the motor vehicles that control the movement of the residents of the rest of the continent.

You will rarely, if at all, find anyone snowshoeing trails across the “unbroken snows” of which Stuck wrote to get from point A to point B. The end of such travel on foot can be tracked to the rise of snowmachines, or what most of the world calls snowmobiles.

They have come a long way from the inefficient machines of the 1970s subject to regular breakdowns. They are now efficient and dependable machines that have transformed rural Alaska, not to mention the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which went from being “The Last Great Race,” due to the demands it placed on humans and beasts, to something more resembling a wannabe, doggy Formula 1. 

The late Susan Butcher, a four-time Iditarod winner, and the one-time king of the trail Rick Swenson, a five-time winner and now 76-year-old dog driver who walked away from Iditarod in 2018 as the organization sought to turn its back on the doping of dogs to increase performance, were in the ’70s known for taking their dog teams on long, wilderness trips as training exercises.

This is no more.

The dogs are now trained on groomed trails and treadmills because the Iditarod has become more about speed than about mushers and dogs challenging the wilderness. All that needs be said here is probably said best by one photograph:

Back on the trail

The Invitational’s Hennigan and Wanless watched the machines needed as lead cars for the Iditarod roll through Ophir on Sunday and almost immediately jumped onto the track they laid down.

As this was written, a global-satellite-positioning (GPS) tracker carried by the 44-year-old Irishman showed him dragging his sled full of food and gear north at a walking speed of 2.5 to 3 mph with Wanless chasing as they neared Cripple, the halfway point on the trail to Nome.

Behind them, the group of four, heavily-loaded-down, fat-tired cyclists who’d elected to wait for the Iditarod trail breakers inMcGrath, were closing down what had been a nearly 45-mile gap.

Australian Troy Szczurkowski, a 53-year-old who has ridden the trail to Nome six times before, had closed in within about 35 miles and was rolling along at speeds of three to five mph, or about twice the speed of the two men ahead on foot or snowshoes, depending on the condition of the trail newly minted by the Iditarod trail breakers.

Not far behind Szczurkowski were two determined damsels on fat bikes – 36-year-old Mayella Krause from Brazil and 36-year-old Kendall Park from St. Louis, being chased by Erick Basset, a 51 year old seeking to become the first Frenchman to complete the Invitational 1000 on skis, on foot and now on a bike.

And not far behind them, and poised to overtake at any moment, were the leaders in the dog race – 66-year-old, Norwegian Kjell Røkke, the race’s first ever “expedition musher” and his guide, fellow Norwegian Thomas Waerner, who won the Iditarod in 2020.

Technically, the duo isn’t supposed to be in the “race” itself. Røkke was allowed on the trail only in an “ambassador role” after he “pledged substantial philanthropic support” to the tune of $300,000 to the Iditarod Trail Committee, according to pre-race statement from the race organizers.

He was not required to complete the qualifying races imposed on other rookie mushers. He was allowed to bring along Waerner as a guide, plus a veterinarian to help care for his dogs and other helpers. His dogs were likewise exempted from Iditarod’s testing program for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), although, according to authorities on the subject of PEDs, the Iditarod testing program is so lame that it is basically a testing-in-name-only drug program.

Not that any Norwegians would be known to take advantage of the benefits of medical technology. And, in this case, why bother, given that the special rules for expedition mushers allow them to swap out tired dogs for fresh ones at any point along the trail. 

That is one huge advantage that sets the billionaire apart from everyone else in the race, and yet Iditarod continues to treat him as just one of the gang. The official Iditarod standings today recorded Røkke and Waerner as the race’s co-leaders as they reached Ophir together at 10:25 a.m.