Iron Dog dreams crash on driveway berm

After training for months for the world's longest, toughest snowmachine race, Brown didn't even make it off Big Lake on Sunday before he became the Iron Dog's biggest loser so far.

First came a crash caused by a collision with a berm along an ice road plowed on the lake, and then came a detour into a stand of trees. By then, Brown was hurting badly.

A medical helicopter eventually evacuated him to the emergency room at Providence in Anchorage where doctors started to detail the damage from the crash. The worst of it was a broken pelvis, but Brown also tore the tendon that attaches the hip bone to the body.

"I crashed good, buddy," the North Slope heavy-equipment operator said from his hospital bed Monday morning. "I broke my hip. I really feel sorry for my partner."

Brown's partner, 36-year-old Andy Lachinski from Palmer, saw his Iron Dog dream go down with Brown. Race rules require competitors to travel in teams of two for safety -- the most obvious concern being that there is someone to go for help in the event of a crash like Brown's.

Lachinski and Brown are coworkers with ASRC Energy Services on Alaska's North Slope. For most of the winter, they've been spending two weeks at work in the Arctic running heavy equipment, and two weeks at home in the Susitna Valley riding snowmachines as much as possible to prepare for Alaska's biggest snowmachine race.

The Iron Dog roars to Nome on the Bering Sea, lays over there for a halfway celebration, and then turns to make a mad dash east for Fairbanks in the Interior. The entire race distance is close to 2,000 miles and given mandatory rest stops -- another safety requirement -- the race takes almost a week to complete.

Brown and Lachinski prepared for it with rides that sometimes took them for hundreds of miles into the Alaska Range. They rode across Big Lake so many times that Brown has forgotten how often he left his home there and hit the ice.

And yet it was the familiar lake that proved their downfall.

"I hit one of those driveway berms down by the Call of the Wild (bar)," Brown said. "I don't know if they'd bermed it up the night before or what."

Brown said he'd never seen the berm there before, and it caught him by surprise. He wasn't ready when his snowmachine bounced into the air. He flew off, landed on the lake ice, bounced a few times, got up, dusted himself off, and got back on.

He believes now that it was this crash that broke his hip, but in the adrenaline charge of the moment, he didn't feel it.

Instead, he went off down the lake on the trail, hit another bump, went airborne on the snowmachine once more, tried to balance his sled as it flew through the air, and discovered he couldn't put any weight on one leg.

That was not good.

Because Brown couldn't get his sled balanced, it landed at an angle and bounced into a clump of black spruce trees along the trail.

That crash, he said, was even worse than the first.

"It blew my shoes off and my helmet,'' he said. "I've never blown my shoes off before. You should see the bruise on my back."

Brown is thankful Iron Dog rules require racers to wear body armor to protect their torsos in crashes like this.

"Without it," he said, "I definitely wouldn't be here."

As it is, he said, "I'm going to be laid up for a while."

Along with breaking his pelvis, he tore the tendon that holds the hip in place, he said. But bodies heal, he said, and he is hopeful of doing the Iron Dog next year.

Ironically, he added, he was the one at the start of the race who told his partner, "Let's go easy. Let's just not crash."

Not only that, he figures he was only doing about 45 mph when the accident happened in an area he knows like his backyard.

"I know those bumps," he said. "I just couldn't get my sled back to level (after hitting them). I'm not sure what happened."

Brown wasn't the only one caught by surprise on the lake, either. Fifty-six-year-old Steven Graham and partner Casey, 18, also crashed out of the race on the lake Sunday. The elder Graham also reportedly cart-wheeled his sled after hitting a berm. The extent of his injuries was unclear. He has yet to return to his home in McGrath, and could not be reached in Anchorage.

But a coworker of Casey's in McGrath said the word there was that Steven broke his wrist, and may have cracked some ribs.

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Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588