Top Iditarod contender Charlie Boulding, winner of the Kuskokwim 300 this January, stops during a training run on the trail between his cabin on the Tanana River and Manley. (ANNE RAUP / Anchorage Daily News)

Boulding aims to win, his way

Manley iconoclast got his life together; now his mushing is at peak form

By S.J. KOMARNITSKY
Anchorage Daily News reporter

MANLEY HOT SPRINGS – The patched and ratty parka is gone now, replaced by a new yellow windshell, and beneath the wind pants are the sometimes-hidden nylon and Velcro braces to protect 58-year-old knees against the pounding of a dog sled on a backwoods trail.

But little else about Bushrat Charlie Boulding has changed in the nine years since the North Carolina hillbilly musher burst onto the Alaska dog-racing scene by winning the 1991 Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

The long, scraggly white hair remains, as does the bushy white beard the size of his face. The hint of a drawl lingers. And Boulding’s dog teams still charge ahead with a well-trained determination that has made him a musher to watch no matter where he shows up.

He was fifth in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race last year and third the year before. So far this season, he has won two of the state’s major middle-distance races: the Kuskokwim 300 in Bethel and Klondike 300 in Big Lake.

Still happy to lead a rough-and-tumble Bush lifestyle, Boulding has also replaced five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson and four-time Iditarod champ Susan Butcher as the dominant musher in the Manley Hot Springs area. Butcher retired to Fairbanks to devote herself to motherhood. Swenson moved east to Two Rivers outside of Fairbanks to wire himself into the electric and communications grids that make it easier to do business with sponsors, fans and the media.

Boulding endures in a log cabin tucked into a stand of spruce trees along the Interior’s Tanana River. His lifestyle, not to mention his personal style, is far from the profile of today’s professional musher. He is a true Bush musher, living far off the power system 90 miles west of Fairbanks.

No plaques or signs mark his racing kennel. There is only the wild barking of 50-some dogs and the lingering scent of dried salmon.

The only memento of Boulding’s mushing success is to be found in the outhouse. There the walls have been decorated with fan mail and a plaque from a second-place finish in the Kobuk 440.

By any standard, Boulding is among the more unusual mushers in Alaska since the late Joe Redington, the Okie dog-lover who helped create the whole modern business of mushing.

Like Redington, Boulding is a backwoods jack of all trades with a Southern country upbringing and the willingness to speak his mind. Boulding can offer opinions on everything from Olestra, the artificial fat, to the form of government in Argentina (‘‘feudal’’) to the pipe dream of new technology allowing ever more people to live off less land (‘‘It started with agriculture’’).

Boulding would probably stand out in any group of Alaskans; on the professional mushing circuit, he really stands out.

In contrast to mushers in Gore-Tex parkas, driving dogs in matching harnesses and booties unloaded from powerful new trucks carefully adorned with sponsors’ stickers, Boulding has been known to show up for races with a patched, 12-year-old sled bag, a creaky hickory sled he built years ago and a dirty parka smeared with stains from training runs.

If asked, he will explain the reasons for this gear, offering that hickory won’t break like the plastic and metal other top mushers prefer for their sleds these days, or explaining there is no sense in throwing away a sled bag when a few patches will fix it up fine.

Part of him, it seems, just doesn’t want to see anything wasted. One of his sled bags was patched so many times that his wife, Robin, finally couldn’t get the stitches to hold anymore.

Along with Boulding’s personal dislike for waste, though, there is another reason for the frugality.

His sponsor list is short: Exceed Dog Food, which feeds his team; Air Cargo Express, which flies his team to races for free; and an electric company owned by friends, who slip him a little cash every year.

Boulding likes it that way. He says he believes lack of money means lack of influence, leaving him free to say and do what he thinks without worrying about consequences.

‘‘If I want, I can tell the world to piss off and die,’’ he says.

But don’t make the mistake of writing this frank-talking hillbilly off as just another strange character of the type for which Alaska is famous.

He might be that. But he’s a lot more, too. He has earned a reputation among mushers as a wily competitor likely to do just about anything. Other mushers nicknamed Boulding ‘‘the loose cannon’’ in honor of his sometimes unpredictable race strategies, which have accounted for two Quest victories, five top-10 finishes in the Iditarod and victories in a variety of middle-distance races.

He trains his dogs hard, but he makes sure he doesn’t take himself too seriously. After all, he says, mushing isn’t everything.

MUSHING WAS AN ACCIDENT

Charlie Boulding works on the feet of of his dogs in Kaltag during the 1998 race, in which he finished third. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)

For his first race, the 1984 Coldfoot Classic in the Brooks Range, Boulding wasn’t even signed up. He had only made plans to head north along the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot to help a friend. But a few days before the race, the friend pulled out.

Boulding figured he already had the trip planned, and he had dogs. So why not race them?

‘‘Hell, I was all geared up. I said, ‘I’m gonna go.’ ’’

The team was an odd mixture of mutts – a collie, a St. Bernard mix, some malemutes and a few sled dog rejects.

Boulding entered a race that turned out to be the toughest he has ever run.

‘‘There were 100 mph winds, 30 below, 30 above, everything,’’ he says.

At the remote village of Anaktuvuk, one of the race checkpoints, Boulding gave the collie to a woman who said she’d never seen the breed before.

‘‘I just unclipped the line and said, ‘Here, you can have him,’ ’’ Boulding says.

On the homestretch, Boulding was well behind the leaders but ahead of a few mushers. Then every musher behind him scratched, and race officials even forgot Boulding was on the trail. But he hung on and took home the Red Lantern award for coming in last.

He also contracted a serious case of sled-dog fever. The next summer he turned his yard into a dog pound, rounding up unwanted sled dogs from local mushers. He ended up with about 80 dogs, ranging from pups to aging huskies.

With his first eight-dog team, Boulding finished third in the 1984 Tour of Minto behind another obscure musher: Jeff King, who went on to win the Quest and three Iditarods.

Boulding started improving, too, but not quite as fast. He was still spending most of his time trapping and fishing. Then, in a three-year period in the late ’80s, those two sources of income disappeared. Salmon runs soured, and prices for marten pelts plunged from $125 to $25.

‘‘At the end of the year, we looked and I was making more money from mushing,’’ Boulding says.

A new career as a professional musher was about to begin.

AT HOME IN THE BUSH

Boulding’s cabin is a compact affair. Hanging pots, cups and tools take up most of the wall space. There’s little room for pictures, but he does keep two on a bookshelf. One shows Boulding with his wife’s family; the other shows his grandfather – gaunt and stoic in his later years – standing next to a woman who appears half his age. The two are surrounded by children.

The woman is Boulding’s step-grandmother. She was sent to take care of the old man after Boulding’s grandmother died. The senior Boulding ended up marrying the younger woman and fathering four more children.

Boulding likes to tell that story, the drawl tinging his voice. He’s proud of his heritage, of growing up in the Appalachian foothills of Eden, N.C., where he learned to shoot squirrels and opossums.

It was in the backwoods that Boulding also learned about fighting and drinking. It was not an easy life. A recovering alcoholic, he says there’s a difference between learning and wisdom.

‘‘Wisdom only comes through pain,’’ he says.

When Boulding was 9, his grandfather put him to work ripping apart old chairs. Dirty work, he says. He did it for four years, then moved on to upholstering.

From there, he left to spend two years in the Army’s Special Forces, which later became the Green Berets. The next 20 years were devoted to drinking and working construction jobs back home in North Carolina.

The ’70s were good years for Boulding, who was pulling down $20,000 to $30,000 as a construction superintendent. But a rough divorce from his wife, Lilly Mae, who won custody of the couple’s two children, shook Boulding. One day in the middle of mowing a hayfield, he decided to leave North Carolina.

He spent the next several years working his way west. His search took him to Wyoming, Montana and a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. It was on the reservation that he gave up drinking, he says. He went on a vision quest, fasting and meditating.

The best way to describe it is as an out-of-body experience, Boulding says now.

‘‘I could see myself how everyone else saw me, and I didn’t like what I saw,’’ he says. ‘‘I was a hard-working, hard-drinking redneck.

‘‘The contrast between my life now and then – I look back and remember events, but it’s like it was someone else. You wouldn’t be writing about that Charlie.’’

He moved to Alaska in 1982, bringing a companion, a Sioux woman, and their 9-year-old son. She didn’t like the climate, Boulding says, and soon took their son and left. Boulding stayed, spending two years in Nenana before moving to his current home on the Tanana River near Manley. He spent the next few years by himself, mostly trapping and fishing.

Then he met Robin.

At first glance, they seem an odd couple. With his unkempt beard and deeply lined face, he looks more 70 than 58. A slight paunch hangs over his stout legs. He needs reading glasses. He’s partial to jeans held up by red suspenders.

In contrast, Robin looks more like 20 than 30, with her black hair braided in twin pigtails. Her complexion is marred only by a scar she’s had ever since she was hit by a car while riding a bike. She’s slim and energetic and, at times, earns the ‘‘slave-driver’’ nickname her husband hung on her.

But the two work well together. At home, Robin cooks, cleans the dog lot, gets water from the river and tidies the house. In the summer, she cleans fish and peels the bark off the spruce trees that will make up their fish wheels. Done when the spruce sap is running, it’s as easy as peeling a banana, she says. Boulding fixes the sleds, maintains the trails and trains the dogs.

It’s a hard life with few rewards, but the two wouldn’t give it up.

‘‘If it ever came down to having to move to the city to keep dog racing, we wouldn’t,’’ Boulding says, taking a break from dragging trails around the house.

‘‘We moved out here for the lifestyle, for the freedom.’’

A 30-mile sled ride from Manley Hot Springs, their cabin has no phone, no electricity, no running water. They cook on a wood stove. Dog food is mixed in a heated 55-gallon drum.

Water comes from a hole chopped in the ice of the Tanana River. To stay in touch with the outside world, they listen at night to Nenana-based KIAM radio, which broadcasts messages from friends and relatives. For entertainment, the two often sit at the table, talking about mushing.

One of Boulding’s favorite stories comes from his 1993 victory in the Yukon Quest. During the first part of the race, he knew Jeff Mann was his main competition. But whenever Boulding was asked by a reporter, he said he was worried about someone else or the trail conditions.

He was trying to get to Mann, knowing reporters would spread remarks around. Mann was apparently listening. After Boulding’s interviews, Mann would drive his team even harder, Boulding says. Finally, heading up Eagle Summit, Mann’s team just laid down and quit.

Every time, Boulding goes into a race, he has a strategy. But he’s always ready to adapt, too.

‘‘If you can’t change your strategy,’’’ he says, ‘‘you’re not going to win the race.’’

In the 1995 Iditarod, he says, Alaska mushers underestimated Montana musher Doug Swingley. When Swingley left Iditarod village, four teams – those of Bill Cotter of Nenana, Dee Dee Jonrowe of Willow, Martin Buser of Big Lake and Boulding – could have followed.

Only three-time champ Buser did. The rest stayed behind, thinking the two leaders would burn each other out. They didn’t. Swingley set a record that year. Buser finished second, two hours in front of Cotter. Jonrowe and Boulding were fourth and fifth, respectively.

‘‘We thought they would fry,’’ Boulding says. ‘‘We were sure the winner was back behind those two. That won’t happen (again).’’

Boulding says his toughest Iditarod might have been in 1994, when he ended up seventh. He was one of several mushers who spent time in a tent filled with carbon monoxide from a propane heater. He left with a huge headache, he says. Before the problem was discovered, Boulding spent 48 hours making all sorts of screwy decisions.

‘‘I didn’t want to tell anybody how I was feeling,’’ he says. ‘‘I thought I was losing my mind.’’

The month before the Iditarod is rest time for Charlie and his dogs.

Throughout December, he and an alternating string of six 10-dog teams pound trails around their home, making training runs to Manley, Nenana and Minto.

He works his dogs hard, running them 100 miles at a time through overflow, deep snow, glare ice – anything they might encounter on the trail.

‘‘They’ve got to be trained tough enough to win,’’ he says. ‘‘After you’ve got a team trained, there’s not a thing you can do to improve the dog team to make them faster or better. Nothing. But there’s about a thousand things you can do to screw it up. Strategy is minimizing those ways to screw it up.

‘‘My dogs are the happiest in a race because it’s the easiest run they’ve seen all year.’’

S.J. Komarnitsky is the Daily News Mat-Su reporter and can be reached at skomarnitsky@adn.com. She covered the Iditarod in 1996 and 1999, as well as this year’s Kuskokwim 300. Anne Raup is the Daily News assistant photo editor.

Charlie and Robin Boulding attend to chores at their cabin outside of Manley. (ANNE RAUP / Anchorage Daily News)