Saturday, March 7, 1998
Copyright 1998 Anchorage Daily News
Another outdoor adventure
Iditarod pilot trades volunteer duites for dogs and a racing bib
By S. JANE SZABO Daily News reporter
Most in the crowd will be cheering for the favorites as the field of 63 mushers takes off from Fourth Avenue this morning. But favorites aside, thousands of eyes will be watching a rookie named Sam Maxwell. He's the most well-known Iditarod "unknown" in town. Maxwell, 40, is one of four Anchorage mushers running in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Born and raised here, he seems to be everyone's acquaintance or friend-of-a-friend.
Air to earth to sea - Maxwell has wrung adventures out of every part of Alaska, starting from his boyhood on a Rabbit Creek-area homesite. He's a pilot, motorcyclist, climber, diver, skiier,snowmachiner - and family man.
Maxwell honed his outdoor skills the old-fashioned way - hunting rabbits and spruce hens at age 9, sledding, riding his banana bike, fishing, playing with slingshots, building tree forts and climbing mountains.
"All those peaks from McHugh to Campbell Creek - I've been on top of all of those as a 12-year-old," he said. "I shot my first moose at age 9 at Portage" - his father, Les Maxwell, was a guide.
In 1973, Sam, then 15, was introduced to the Iditarod, when he and his dad rode in the Iron Dog snowmobile race from Nenana to Nome and the first Iditarod was in progress.
Maxwell said he was a "motorhead" at that time, interested in snowmachines, motorcycles, cars and airplanes. He got his first airplane at age 19 and has been flying in remote Alaska ever since. His experience has included volunteering in the Iditarod Air Force, which flies supplies, people and dogs in the race. He was the pilot for official Iditarod photographer Jeff Schultz for nine years - gaining the inspiration to fly on the ground.
"I think it's going to be mentally and physically taxing," he said about the race. "But when you get on the runners of a sled and go, it's just an amazing amount of fun. And I've been amazed at the amount of work involved in just getting to the start line."
Maxwell's family can attest to that, starting with his wife, Candi.
"What I really, truly love about him is that he is adventurous and goes all-out for things," she said. "I'm truly thankful that he does live life to the fullest - at times, though, it gets kind of hard."
The hardest part was a major dad-absence from October on. Candi shouldered most of the parenting role with their children, Ashley, 14, and Jake, 11. Sam works during the day at NC Machinery and trained evenings at the Chugiak dog lot of longtime Iditarod participants Diana and Bruce Moroney, whose dogs Sam will use this year while the Moroneys fly planes for the race. The Maxwell family worked on trails at the Moroney lot in August and September.
When school started, it fell to Mom to chauffeur the kids from activity to activity - dance and fiddle lessons, skiing - after her workdays at Reeve Aleutian Airways, where she's the assistant manager of the ticket counter.
The family helped put on a fund-raising auction in February at Hampton Inn. Sam's sister, Linda Sture, played a large role in this event, which raised $6,000 of the estimated $18,000 to $20,000 race budget. The couple's large extended family also was central with financial and moral support - especially parents Les and Barbara Maxwell and June and Jerry Goard.
With all this help, Maxwell still had the hard part: training, which was especially tough in the fall.
"It was bone-jarring rough," he said, "basically going on dirt covered with ice, going out and mushing back with arms and legs aching after running three teams out there 30 miles or 40 miles a night, pounding over the same trails - and the brakes didn't work because of the glare ice. Then I'd go back the next night for the same abuse."
After Christmas, Maxwell did qualifier races - he placed 10th in the Knik 200 in January and 23rd in the Copper Basin 300. Then preparation for the Iditarod got serious.
Candi spent Super Bowl weekend cooking about 40 items - everything from brownies to fried chicken to fajitas. Sister-in-law Janet Goard made 300 chocolate-chip cookies. The food was frozen and organized into one plastic container per day. Then came the dog food, which the family and friends prepared at the Horseshoe Lake home of Bill and Kathy Kramer.
"We cut up over a thousand pounds of meat," Candi Maxwell said. "We got together 50- to 60-pound slabs of frozen liver, lamb, beef, and used a band saw to cut it into 4-by 1-inch chunks," she said. They trucked 1,650 pounds of dog food (including the dry food) to the airport in Anchorage, to be flown by volunteers to the drop sites.
Some calmer activities also went into Maxwell's preparation. He answered about 15 letters from curious schoolchildren in other states and took an afternoon to give a slide show at a local school.
For Maxwell and his family, it's been an interesting several months. Maxwell says he's running the race "as my way of thanking the volunteers;" he just wants to get to Nome with happy dogs. He'll return to volunteering next season.
"From the air, I'd look down and say, 'Oh, that looks cool. Dog teams racing across Alaska. That would be fun. What an adventure.' Then, when you go and do it, it's like, 'Oh, wow. There's a whole lot more to this."