Rollin’ on the River
10:10 a.m.
March 11, 2006

by Tyrell Seavey

Ultimate Iditarod's coverage of the 2006 Iditarod sponsored by:

Welcome to the Yukon River. The trail down the Yukon is approximately 14,000 miles long, about 300 miles wide and as flat as the United States Congress. For the dogs and musher this bit of trail has the entertainment value of pureed beets. It has been rumored that on this section of trail mushers can develop odd twitches and in extreme cases, temporary insanity (56% of the field every year). So what do we do to entertain ourselves? Well, any of you that have read my previous articles know that I have an affinity for classic rock, so I crank the tunes. But, even in this reduced state of consciousness one begins to realize the irony of the song “Rolling on the River” by the 30^th time through the playlist. I really like you CCR, I dig your tunes, but if I ever catch you within 500 miles of the Yukon River I might be tempted to strangle you with my headphone wires, or worse yet… duct tape you to my sled with your song on repeat.

One option is to team up with another musher on the river. You can help entertain each other by passing back and forth and giving the dogs something to think about other than the congressional budget, or you can just ride along behind and watch your fellow musher’s twitch cultivate itself into full blown convulsions and get in a few laughs at their expense. Some mushers try singing to their dogs while they are mushing. This is really good motivation. By halfway down the river (143,000 miles) the dogs have had enough and are tearing down the trail trying to get away from the asylum escapee who is dancing around on the back of the sled. The downside of this strategy is that in extreme cases the dogs start looking for open leads in the river in which to deposit their loony passenger. If you are on the river long enough you can swear you hear the dogs saying, “Do you think they’d figure it out if we just showed up without him.” “Maybe, but at this point I am willing to risk it… I just can’t stand the twitching anymore.”

If you haven’t already figured this out already, I have been on an Iditarod schedule for the past six days. I slept four hours last night and I drank 11 pots of coffee this morning. I got an email from the mythical people who run the World Wide Web from a small cubical in India when I logged in this morning. It said, “Congratulations, you have set a new world record for refreshing your browser 1,978,089,876 times in a week. You just surpassed Tim, a 14 year old kid checking his myspace.com profile to see if anyone has added him as a friend yet.”

I was happy to see Ramy blast through Galena. He will have to give his dogs a good rest on the river but I think this move will bump him up quite a ways in the standings. Judging by my dad’s run times he is going to continue to race conservatively. He knows how to race on the coast so I imagine he will preserve his team as much as possible until then and then pick up the pieces and make a push for Nome. Some years you have what it takes to win and some you don’t but I trust him to keep giving it 100% all the way and he will do the best he can with the team he has.

The race as a whole is moving along well, but I am surprised to see the large number of scratched teams. A lot of teams have had a rough go of it this year. The record of 8 days and 22 hours set by Buser in 2002 is definitely in jeopardy. At their current pace the leaders are staged to come into Nome a few hours ahead of that record, provided of course they don’t get dumped into an open lead.