Almost since the beginning, this has been where the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race really began, and the Delias have always been there. No one thought it would ever change, even as Joe slid from his 50s into his 60s and then his 70s.

Some people seem like they can go on forever, and Joe was one of those. Even after he caught a stick in one eye and lost vision in it while running his snowmachine on the trapline, he went on with the Iditarod as if nothing had changed.

He couldn't just skip past the heart problems last year, however. He needed good doctors and a little luck to make age 78. Checkpoint management is a huge chore for a man that age, even one in the best of health.

Norma always worried more about Joe's health than he did, of course. Come Iditarod time, he never seemed to sleep. Norma didn't like that much, and the annual invasion of their log cabin up on the bluff overlooking the Skwentna River could be trying.

On most Iditarod nights, the upstairs was stuffed with snoring, stinky mushers, and the big, open room downstairs was jammed with who knew what -- mushers, media, veterinarians, race officials, Iditarod hangers-on, wanderers lost on the trail.

Often, it was a crazy scene.

Some of the best nights of my life were spent in that cabin.

The last was in 2005 with former Iditarod champs Susan Butcher and Joe Runyan. Up to that time, there had been some speculation about health problems Butcher had been experiencing, but on that night she was in fine form. She and Runyan had spent the day flying the trail in separate aircraft, and they were busy comparing notes.

Not many people can tell just by looking at a dog team what potential it holds, but these two were among the few. I can't remember whether either of them pegged Norwegian Robert Sorlie to win that year, but I do remember them commenting on the machinelike precision with which his team gobbled up the trail miles.

More than the discussions about the dogs, though, I remember the hint of melancholy in Butcher. We talked for a long time about how the race was back when the pace was slower, when there was time for mushers to hang out and shoot the breeze in places like Skwentna.

By 2005, that was just about over.

The top teams were simply blowing through, pausing only to grab food and straw for beds for their dogs before heading on up the trail away from the airport that would start throbbing with traffic the next morning.

Even if there had been a Joe Redington left to tell tales about the old Alaska, there wouldn't have been many people around to hear them.

We talked about Old Joe for reasons I can't remember. Susan had once been his dog handler, and she'd stayed close up to his death in a familial sort of way. When she was still running the Iditarod, she loved to give him grief about his lead dog Tang -- Tang being one of Redington's sponsors. Butcher would always make the observation the lead dog Tang of the moment was different from the lead dog Tang of a year ago. Redington would always insist it was the same old Tang, though they both knew otherwise.

Joe had some great dogs over the years, but he was never really known for his lead dogs. It takes a lot of time to train good lead dogs, and Joe didn't really have the time. He had too many things going on.

As a result he ran with what everyone liked to call "trail leaders" -- dogs happy to run at the front of a team and follow a trail, the emphasis there being on "a" trail -- as in one trail.

God help him if the team came to a Y and he had to try to tell those lead dogs which trail to take.

That was a job for "command leaders," dogs that actually knew gee from haw, and Joe didn't have those. I remember laughing with Susan about it.

Ninth months after that talk, doctors finally figured out what was ailing her. She was diagnosed with leukemia. Within a year, she was dead.

It was more than a little ironic that Delia's cabin was the last place Susan and I talked at length, because it was also the last place I remember listening to Joe talk for hours in the days before he found out he had cancer. It would claim him too.

Whether it was Joe's last Iditarod or second to last, I don't know. I just remember Joe Redington and Joe Delia sitting down at the big table just off the kitchen and talking about freighting with dog teams in the 1950s; the value of simple, single-cylinder engines a man could fix himself; and what cheechakos they had been when they came into the country.

Redington had good stories, Delia had great ones.

Some of them are impossible to forget, like when he bought a war-surplus boat in Seattle and set out to paddle to Alaska. Someone stopped him on the Green River to ask him what he was doing. Delia told them. He was promptly informed that, unfortunately, he was going the wrong way.

Delia had thought he could follow the flow of the river to the ocean. But, having grown up in Kansas City, he wasn't savvy to the ways of the ocean.

The tide happened to be on the rise, pushing back into the Green River. So instead of paddling with the flow of the current toward the ocean and Alaska, he was paddling with the flow of the tide back toward the state of Washington.

He eventually hopped a freighter to Alaska.

Delia laughed his big laugh when he told that story, and he had more. Nearly all of them as self-effacing.

Had you heard them without knowing Delia, you would never have reckoned he was one of the best woodsmen ever to tramp the wilderness of Alaska. Everything he learned, though, he obviously learned the hard way.

He talked about building a cabin near Big Lake -- when Big Lake was wilder than Skwentna -- his first winter in Alaska. He got the idea to put a thatched roof on it, because he'd seen a thatched roof somewhere. It didn't work. Snow accumulated on the roof, and when the heat of the cabin melted it, it ran through. Joe was living wet, miserable and starving until a moose wandered past.

He grabbed his rifle and shot it. It ran into the Y of a tree, promptly got stuck there and died. Joe wasn't sure what to do next. The problems only got worse when the moose froze solid, still in the tree.

I remember vividly Joe laughing and talking about how all winter long he was hiking out to that moose with an ax to chop off a hairy chunk of frozen meat to throw in the pot.

To understand how hilarious that could be, you have to understand how skilled at woodscraft Delia would become. He was literally one of those guys who could go into the wilderness with a pocketknife, build a cabin, carve out a homestead and end up living comfortably.

I can't remember many nights I laughed as hard as I did that night.

I'm sure I don't begin to do his stories justice. Norma says he has written a book. She's been working for some time to get it into publishable form.

I hope that day comes. I'd love to read it and remember.

Because it's painful to think, and hard to believe, that the warm and welcoming log house up on the bluff could ever cease to be Iditarod-checkpoint Skwentna.

Times change. I know that, but it doesn't necessarily make the change easier to handle.

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Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist.