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See Related File
See related pages:
http://www.adn.com/pf/mushing
http://www.iditarod.com/
http://www.adn.com/iditarod/
NIKOLAI - Jim Lanier never felt the cold seep into his feet as he mushed his team across the desolate Farewell Burn and up the Kuskokwim River into this small village. The minus-40 temperature worked its way in quietly, ebbing the feeling from his toes and turning once-malleable skin into a numb, hard mass. By the time he pulled into the checkpoint here Tuesday evening, his toes were cold, black lumps. "I never felt anything," he said as he sat in the village's community hall eating a cheeseburger and sipping on a juice drink. Dressed in black polypropylene pants and top, he sat on a barstool looking comfortable despite the unhealthy appearance of his bare feet resting beneath him. His left foot had fared the worst. The nails were black, and the skin was stained dark purple like it was bruised. His right big toe looked just as bad. "I still can't feel them," he said, flexing his toes back and forth. Lanier, a pathologist from Chugiak, is no stranger to frostbite. He nipped a toe on a previous Iditarod and lost the tips of two fingers to frostbite on another expedition. "I guess I did it again," he said. Lanier's latest battle with cold wasn't going to stop him, though. Asked if he was going to scratch, he shook his head and answered definitively: "No." Lanier wasn't the only musher who suffered in the brutal, bone-chilling cold. After a springlike start and temperatures that reached 15-above at Finger Lake, 200 miles into the race, the thermometer plummetted as mushers made their way into the Interior on Tuesday. "I was basically freezing frickin' to death," said Teller musher Joe Garnie, warming up along with his dogs in Nikolai's afternoon sunshine. Dressed in dark ski pants and jacket, Garnie said he hadn't prepared for the cold. The gear he normally carries, including a skin pullover, is stored in a cabin on the coast that he couldn't reach before the race because of storms. Instead, he wore a North Face parka and pants that he bought before the race. "I went in and got the sales pitch," Garnie said. "They said it would be good to 80 below. But I tested it, and it didn't work." Garnie said he could feel the cold seeping through the seams as he made his way upriver. "Basically, my pants and my parka weren't doing it, and that's most of my body," he said. His hands were fine, though. They were protected by a pair of fluffy polar bear mitts. "You can't get any better than that," he said. Across from him, two other teams were warming up, too. Jim Gallea and Jeremy Gebauer had run together over the 90-mile stretch from Rohn to Nikolai with five other teams. In addition to the cold, they'd battled a slick ice floe that sent one team after another sliding back down. "It was unbelievable," said Matt Hayashida, who is running a team of young dogs from Martin Buser's kennel. "It was hard to describe. You'd step on the ice and it would break through, but then you'd hit a hard spot and start sliding." Mitch Seavey, one of the early mushers to cross the ice floe, said he slipped down it twice before finally making it up. "It was like sheer ice with water running down it," said Gallea, who was the only musher of the seven to have brought ice shoes. Gallea said the group worked together to get up the ice floe, but it still took them an hour to cover a couple hundred yards. "I was working hard and fell a couple times," he said. "I don't see how anyone could have done it on their own." Once the group made it past, they stopped at a cabin about 30 miles from Nikolai, where they warmed up during a six-hour rest. The cabin had a stove and firewood. "It was great; we just hung our stuff up to dry," Gallea said. "All we needed was a case of beer and it would have been a party." Just down from Gallea, another musher was out of the cold, but it had taken its toll. Stephen Carrick, of Australia, had lost his only leader. The dog, Excel, had been fine when he pulled into this checkpoint early Wednesday morning, but several hours later, by the time Carrick was ready to go, the dog had turned stiff and sore. That left Carrick with a team of inexperienced young dogs, heading onto a trail that would confront them with brutal wind, cold and more. "I think I'm going to scratch," he said as he walked toward a small, log cabin that serves as the checkpoint. His usual jovial demeanor had turned downcast. Without a leader, he was worried about pushing the dogs beyond their limits, he said. "The reason I do this is not for the money," he said. "I do this because I love the dogs and being out on the trail. If I push them too hard, it defeats everything I'm out here to do." After talking to a race official, though, he decided to press on to McGrath. He hooked up his team and followed Kasilof musher Jon Little out of the checkpoint. He didn't know whether he'd continue with the race to Nome, but he said, "I'll know by the time I reach McGrath." * Reporter S.J. Komarnitsky can be reached at skomarnitsky@adn.co
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