The superhighway to Nome
Once a nearly impassable route, today's trail is usually well-marked and packed down

By Tim Murray
Daily News Reporter
February 23, 1997

Ask old-timers to describe trail conditions during the pioneer days of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and they'll smile wryly, scratch theirwhiskers and say, "Trail, what trail?''

In those days, before crews driving wide-track snowmachines blazed a route to Nome, the Iditarod was a hellishly difficult trek through intimidatingand unfamiliar terrain.

Survival, not victory, was every musher's goal.

It took Dick Wilmarth 20 days to win the first Iditarod, in 1973. Today, the race trail is a virtual 1,100-mile speedway -- complete with passinglanes and snowmachine escorts -- and winning mushers routinely complete the Iditarod in less than 10 days.

"Now it's like a super highway,'' said Seward musher Dan Seavey. "It's a white brick highway to Nome.''

Seavey, 59, ran the Iditarod in 1973 and '74. Back then, organizers turned the mushers loose by pointing toward the northwest horizon andsaying, "Nome is that way. See you there.'' Some three weeks later, exhausted from snow-choked trails, hazardous water crossings and blindingwhiteouts, the frontrunners straggled across the finish line.

But what was once a nearly impassable route between Anchorage and Nome is now so fast and so well defined that Iditarod dog teams havebecome, in the words of Jerry Austin, "express trains.''

"The trail used to be a nightmare,'' said Austin, a veteran of 18 Iditarods.

Lavon Barve, another longtime Iditaroder, also had reason to cuss the trail. "It was the biggest obstacle in the race,'' he said. "It took courage to runthose first Iditarods. You had sleds stuck under ice and mushers swimmin' rivers. It was a real chore.'' Today, the person largely responsible for maintaining the trail is Iditarod race manager Jack Niggemyer who, armed with an annual budget ofroughly $25,000 and scores of volunteers, has hacked away the impenetrable brush, chainsawed the deadfall and basically rid the Iditarod Trail ofits most hazardous speed bumps. "I've always maintained that if you gave me enough money I could pave the thing,'' he said.

Bob Hallinen / Anchorage Daily News Steady trail improvements have enabled the Iditarod dog teams to become "express trains," according to veteran musher Jerry Austin.

Niggemyer joined the Iditarod staff in 1986, one year after Libby Riddles thrust the race into the limelight by becoming its first female winner. Theevent was suddenly a popular competition attracting nationwide interest. More than ever, the Iditarod was a race, and as such it needed to be fair,competitive and safe.

"It used to be a tremendous advantage if you'd run the race four or five times before,'' said Austin. "You knew the landmarks, you knew how to getwhere you were going.''

But in 1986, Niggemyer's trail-grooming crews began nullifying that advantage by marking every bend and every stretch of glare ice. "You can'thardly look in any direction without seeing some type of permanent marking,'' said trail hand Scott Duby. "You don't have to worry about gettinglost.''

Last year mushers Martin Buser and DeeDee Jonrowe did get lost, straying from the trail outside of Golovin. It took them several hours to get backon course.

This year's snowmachine crews will try to avoid a repeat of that by marking the trail with 9,500 wooden stakes, 72 rolls of orange tape andhundreds of bright reflectors. In addition, there are countless permanent tripods marking the way.

"Our goal is to build a safe, simple trail,'' said Niggemyer, who knows that Alaska's bitter weather and unforgiving terrain will never guarantee ahazard-free Iditarod.

Last year, Iditarod trail crews built 17 ice bridges on a waterlogged stretch near Ophir, easing what otherwise would have been a wet and difficultroute to the halfway point of Cripple.

"Trail marking has evened everything out and made the race more competitive,'' said Austin, who credits trail markers for saving lives of mushersand dogs.

This year, as in years past, three snowmachine crews will escort the mushers to Nome. Two teams will work off the front, one clearing trail, buildingbridges and establishing the route, and the other hanging close to the frontrunning mushers to break trail in case it snows.

A third snowmachine team will bring up the rear.

"Before snowmachines, you risked crippling your dogs if you cranked 'em up,'' said Barve. "Usually they were crawling over brush or up to theirbellies in snow. Nowadays, the trail has a firm base and the dogs can travel three or four miles an hour faster than they used to.''

"The trail isn't a piece of cake,'' Barve added. "Twenty-five years of obstacles have been removed, but if conditions are bad it's still difficult to getover.''

And during the first 25 years of the Iditarod, the obstacles were plenty.

Fran Durner / Anchorage Daily News Larry "Cowboy" Smith of Dawson City leads his dogs through punchy snow out of the Rainy Pass checkpoint during the 1982 Iditarod.

"We hadn't gone but 50 miles before we were snowbound,'' said Austin, remembering his first Iditarod, in 1976. "There was no trail, notrailbreaker, no trail markers -- and four feet of new snow. We all just stopped.'' In the 1973 Iditarod, George Attla and Dan Seavey wasted countless hours wallowing through deep snow in search of the trail. Three times theyran out of dog food, with pilots coming to the rescue only after seeing D-O-G F-O-O-D stamped in the snow. "We knew the general direction of the trail, but we still did a lot of snowshoeing in search of it,'' Attla recalled. Because the trail was so hard to follow, mushers generally traveled by day. At night, they camped. "It was a matter of surviving,'' said Attla. In some places an obvious route had been hewn through the bone-white wilderness -- a back-breaking task done by the military, villagers andteams of volunteers -- but early efforts to mark "every foot'' of the trail failed miserably. "The trailblazers did a pretty good job for being as green as everybody else, and they're due a lot of credit,'' said Seavey. "But we didn't expectmuch of a trail, and it wasn't really that well marked.'' Iditarod mushers still seem to get lost or stranded almost every year, but they were a particularly wayward bunch during the '70s and early '80s,when the race route was still taking shape. In 1976, Norman Vaughan got off the trail in Rainy Pass and wasn't found for five days, his dogs so hungry they'd eaten through their harnesses.

Raymie Redington, leading the 1974 race, took a wrong turn near McGrath and circled aimlessly for hours. He finished seventh.

In '81, a tired Jeff King left Unalakleet during an overnight blizzard, lost the trail and ended up in the village dump.

"These days the Iditarod is such a super highway that they tell me you don't even need lead dogs,'' said Seavey, who is entered in this year's raceafter a 22-year Iditarod layoff. "You just get on the trail and go.''

Well, it's not quite that easy.

"People say the Iditarod is sissyfied, a walk in the park,'' said King, a two-time winner of the race. "But I'd like to see them go down the DalzellGorge or run the Topkok Hills.''

And for those who think the Iditarod is getting too fast, King says just wait till it snows. "We haven't had a good storm since '91,'' he said. "But youwatch, if we get a good storm this year it'll button us down real tight.''

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