Anchorage Daily News
Anchorage, Alaska

Thursday
March 4, 1999

Musher follows dream from Baltimore to Nome

S.J. KOMARNITSKY
Daily News Reporter

On rolling hills outside Baltimore, where the average winter temperature hovers near 40 degrees and snow is cause for a citywide shutdown, Dan Dent is doing his best to train for 1,100 miles of Alaska wilderness.

As he rides his 21-speed mountain bike along paved roads, he envisions himself 3,000 miles away on the Iditarod trail. 

Instead of being hunched over a metal bike frame, he's standing on the back of a dog sled, his gloved hands wrapped around a wooden handlebar while a team of huskies pulls him across the snow-covered trail. 

Long, flat stretches transform into the desolate Farewell Burn north of the Alaska Range.

Steep downhills become the notoriously treacherous chute of the Dalzell Gorge. 

On inclines, he switches to a high gear and imagines steep snow-covered hills where he'll have to get off the sled and push. He pedals until his lungs burn and his breath comes in gasps, hoping the work will carry him through in March. 

"I try to keep it in as high a gear as possible, he said. "Hopefully it will give me the stamina to last."

AN IDITAROD DREAM

Dent, like many, came upon his Iditarod dream by chance. The investment adviser was vacationing in Alaska in 1995 when he happened to catch part of the Iditarod in Skwentna. The mushers, their eager teams and the vast expanse of land reminded him of his favorite Robert Service poems.

"I am the land that listens. I am the land that broods steeped in eternal beauty," he said, quoting a few lines. "You read that stuff, and it's pretty powerful."

He came back to Alaska a year later to join Joe Redington's Iditarod Challenge, a noncompetitive mushing trip that follows the trail at a comfortable pace, taking three weeks to run the same path that Iditarod champions cover in nine days. Redington's enthusiasm for mushing rubbed off, and when the father of the Iditarod suggested giving the race a try, Dent was hooked.

Redington, 82, was 55 when he ran in his first Iditarod. Dent was 55 when he did the Iditarod challenge. A connection was born. 

"Look what he's accomplished when most people are in retirement," Dent said of Redington.

At 57, Dent is one of the senior entries in this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and one of the least experienced.

His mushing resume is three races long, the longest event only 300 miles. While many rookies spend a winter or two getting ready for the Iditarod, Dent has done his training in a few weeklong snippets.

He won't be looking to win or place in the top 20. His goal is simply to finish what will likely be a grueling two- to three-week trip to Nome.

He'll join a list of adventurers, dreamers and thrill seekers who venture north each year to try the Last Great Race. 

Heart surgeons and lawyers, carpenters and truck drivers have all tried. Stockbroker Steve Fossett, for instance, reached Nome before he sought fame riding the world's jet streams in hot air balloons. He was 47th out of 63 Iditarod teams in 1992.

The exploits of those amateurs keep alive an Iditarod mystique that doesn't exist for front-runners. For those competitors, the race is against themselves. Can they press on despite bone-chilling cold, a lack of sleep and an environment that is often completely foreign?

"It's the challenge," said Iditarod veteran Tim Osmar, who is helping Dent prepare for his race and leased him 16 dogs. 

Or as father of the Iditarod Redington Sr. puts it: "You run the Iditarod, you done something pretty good."

For Dent, the question is whether he can leave his cushy three-story home in Baltimore - with its swimming pool and gardens - and survive the Alaska wilderness. 

"A lot of the surroundings here (in Baltimore are) about artificiality and superficial values. People know Alaska is totally different, and that's the real attraction."

He struggles to explain his dream to friends, who ask if he'll bring a cell phone on the trail. 

"My answer isn't just no," he said. "It's no way. That's the whole challenge of it, to go down the trail the way our ancestors did it, the way they used to do it without satellite navigations, global communication and all sorts of technology."

At 57, it's also a test he wants to do now rather than later. 

THE ADVENTURER

A tall, intense man with dark brown eyes and a penchant for dominating conversations, Dent said he's always been an adventurer. 

As a Navy officer in the 1960s, he was recruited to retrieve dummy torpedoes in the shark-infested water of the Caribbean. In 1984, he rafted through Hell's Canyon in Idaho in dories. 

"I guess I'm kind of always looking for disaster," he joked.

Part of his desire, he said, is to escape the trappings of his life in Baltimore, where he runs a lucrative investment firm that manages more than a billion dollars worth of portfolios.

"I know people who get in their car and they can't get off their cell phone," he said. "The whole Alaskan thing for someone like myself is a way to get away from that."

Dent has been to Alaska twice this winter to train. His first trip came just after Thanksgiving for the mandatory Iditarod rookie meeting. This month, after training 10 days, he raced the Copper Basin 300, finishing next to last in 98 hours. Champion Martin Buser beat him by about 44 hours.

To make up for his lack of Alaska training, Dent bicycles 30 to 40 miles a day and trains with weights in Baltimore.

Dent's 6-foot-4 frame is less than ideal. The extra bulk is a burden on the team, and the constant bending to tend to dogs and retrieve equipment makes his back ache and his neck sore.

"He's a good student," Osmar said. "He's come a long ways. But he doesn't have a great wealth of experience."

FOCUS ON THE FINISH

Finishing will take a combination of luck and willpower, Osmar said. 

"It's not the things they sensationalize that get you," said musher Stephen Carrick, who finished his first Iditarod last year and is helping Dent train. "It's the things you haven't heard about."

The much feared Dalzell Gorge was a breeze on Carrick's first trip through last year. But later on, the trail was covered with glare ice, and his sled kept sliding into trees. 

The toughest part, though, may berealizing how long you're going to be on the trail. 

"It's like, 'Oh, my God, I've got 12 days of this,' " Carrick said. "You basically think you're going to die."

Still, Dent isn't daunted. 

"That's what this sport is about - overcoming adversity," he said.

He ran his first two races last year, finishing a respectable 17th in the Copper Basin 300 and hanging on for the red lantern in the Knik 200. 

At the start of this year's Copper Basin 300, Dent stood behind a fresh dog team, looking confident in his bright orange and blue parka. 

"I've run it before, so I think I've got an advantage over these guys who have never seen the trail," he said as he waited his turn in the starting chute. 

But less than halfway through the race, Dent was in last place, wobbly-legged and bleary-eyed. The mistakes were adding up 

"I wasn't just on the ropes," he later joked. "I was on the canvas."

On a 70-mile run across the foothills of the Alaska Range, a bulb in his headlamp burned out. While he searched for a replacement, some dogs started fighting, and the team, which had been stretched out in a neat line, snarled. Dent began to get cold.

"I'm shivering and feeling hypothermic, and I started thinking, 'What am I doing out here?' " he said later. "It wasn't fun."

Once into the checkpoint, Dent took two hours to feed and bed down his dogs - four times as long as top mushers.

"There's so many little things to do," he said, staring blankly at an array of plastic bags that included frozen chunks of liver, lamb and salmon.

Carrick, who was standing nearby, reminded him to get straw for the dogs and gave him tips to speed up his work. 

"Here," he said, showing Dent how to quickly twist off the plastic tie on a bag of food with pliers rather than try to cut it with a knife. 

"Hey, you learn something new every day," Dent said. 

Osmar, who has helped Dent train, acknowledges that his student has plenty working against him.

"He's no spring chicken, that's for sure," he said. All the same, he's been impressed by Dent's stamina and drive. 

"Dog care, that's the key," Dent acknowledges, "and checkpoints. I need to get more efficient there."

He worries about how he'll do on the Iditarod with only a couple of hours' sleep each day. He doesn't want to think about not being able to finish. 

"Like Tim keeps telling me: one step at a time, just keep moving," he said.

Whatever happens, he'll have lots of people cheering him on, including at least one notable Alaskan.

"He ain't gonna win the race, but he'll do all right," Redington said.