The 1999 Iditarod     As I watched my parents run the Iditarod, I thought about myself one day running the race.  To be perfectly honest, I dismissed the idea, thinking that there was no way I would ever be tough enough to accomplish such a feat.  The past year changed me.  I have gone from wondering if I could do the race to knowing that I can handle some of the toughest trail and weather conditions imaginable.

    When I left the Wasilla re-start on March 7, my head was swimming with worries, hopes, and excitement.  Ten miles later, when I said good-bye to my dad at Knik (Race rules require that mushers have a handler accompany them to Knik for safety reasons.), I began to wonder what I had gotten myself in to.  The feeling is really quite hard to describe.  There you are, starting an adventure which you have worked extremely hard to get to, and all of a sudden you feel like maybe you'd just rather be a spectator.

    By sunset on Sunday, those feelings had pretty much gone away, however, and I was starting to get into my trail routine.  Much of the Iditarod is based on routine:  Run dogs, stop every hour or two to snack and rest them, get to checkpoint, sign in, get dogs bedded down, make food for dogs, take care of dogs' feet and wrists, feed dogs, feed yourself, organize your equipment, sleep, wake up, get ready to go, pack sled, put boots on dogs, wake up dogs, do it all over again....  I would typically run for no more than seven hours between the rest breaks at checkpoints.  I would rest at the checkpoints for between six and eight hours (sometimes longer).  If it would take longer than seven hours to go between two checkpoints, I would split the run into two parts, with a four or six hour rest in the middle.  The routine becomes your life, and becomes as automatic as breathing.

    The first three or four hundred miles of the race contains the trial that is reputed to be the toughest.  This year, we were lucky enough to have a lot of snow on this part of the trail.  Many of the bad spots were easy thanks to the snow.  There were still some very rough parts to this stretch of trail and also some interesting stretches of glare ice and open water, but the dogs and I were able to cross them without much trouble.

    I really enjoyed the first half of the race.  I was traveling with some of the other "puppy teams" in the race, and we were enjoying the good trail, good teams, and good company together.

    When we started up the Yukon River about six hundred and fifty miles into the race, I began to feel a bit "bummed" about the whole thing.  I felt like I had come a long way, and I was looking forward to the river because it was a long, flat stretch of trail where the dogs could move fast.  What I didn't know was that the long, flat trail was also extremely boring for both the dogs and myself.  We weren't moving as fast as I thought we could because the trail was soft and we were running into some head winds.  I couldn't believe that I had to do 150 miles of it!

    But we made it off the river at Kaltag, crossed the ninety mile Old Woman Portage, and arrived on the Bering Sea Coast at Unalakleet.  A feeling of accomplishment swept over me as we were pulling into Unalakleet.  We had just run from one coast of Alaska (Cook Inlet at Anchorage) to another.  We had done it by crossing the Alaska Mountain Range, the Interior or "Bush" of Alaska, and the Yukon River.  It was pretty amazing.

    By the time we reached Shaktoolik, a wind storm and ground blizzard was beginning.  I was traveling with three other teams.  We decided to stay a few hours longer in Shaktoolik to see if the weather would improve.  Things did a bit, and three of the four of us started out across the sea ice on Norton Sound to the village of Koyuk.

    It was on this stretch that I realized how loyal and trusting my dogs were.  The conditions worsened, and the winds at Shaktoolik were measured at fifty knots.  (We didn't know this while we were out on the ice, but they told us when we got to Nome.)  The winds were directly into the faces of our dogs and us, but the dogs found the trail under the drifting snow, and they got us to Koyuk safe and sound.  They are amazing animals.  Especially amazing was the lead dog belonging to Jim Lanier.  I don't know how to pronounce or spell the dog's name, but it was this dog that lead Jim (who was the front team in our group of three) across the ice and through the wind.

    The weather improved steadily as we traveled the last 175 miles from Koyuk to Nome.  By the time my dogs crested Cape Nome, and the lights or our destination sparkled below us, there was no wind, and a sliver of moon was beginning to set just beyond Nome.  It was a wonderful sight, and a wonderful feeling as we descended from the cape and crossed the final miles to the finish.

    Thirteen of my sixteen dogs made the entire journey with me.  Three dogs, Dozer, Oscar, and Cortez, had to be sent home due to minor injuries.  Sparky, Misty, Cuda, Emmie, Mondo, Nellie, Duncan, Swift, Crawdad, Dirtbike, Taz, Prince, and Duchess made the trip from Wasilla to Nome (a distance well over a thousand miles) in thirteen days, fourteen hours, fourteen minutes, and forty seconds.

    I made a trip that has forever changed me.  It started a year ago when I saw my mom finish on Sunday morning.  I, too, finished on Sunday morning, 363 days, 13 hours, and 26 minutes later.