Ed Iten of Ambler works with his dogs at the Finger Lake checkpoint. Iten, who finished 10th last year with a team of young dogs, is considered by some to be a top contender this year. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)

'Best field ever' is ready to run

Veterans face a stiff challenge from newcomers on the trail to Nome

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News reporter

As the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race slides into a new century, a strange mix of veterans and rising newcomers promises a kind of competition seldom seen on the 1,100 miles of wilderness between Anchorage and Nome.

At least 10 teams – possibly 15 – have a legitimate chance of winning, which is forcing all the top mushers to reconsider race tactics.

Once there were only a few contenders, and all the wannabe challengers focused on them. Now a lot of people must be watched.

‘‘It really is kind of a parity situation,’’ said Vern Halter, the third-place finisher last year. ‘‘This year I think you’ve got the best field ever.’’

After 13 years in the game, the Willow attorney ought to know.

Back in 1983 when Halter ran his first race, Iditarod strategy was simple.

Everyone watched Rick Swenson of Two Rivers and Susan Butcher of Eureka and responded to them. Their teams dominated. Between them, they have claimed nine championships.

Find a way to beat Swenson and Butcher in the 1980s and you would probably win.

In 1983, Rick Mackey of Nenana teamed with Eep Anderson, Larry ‘‘Cowboy’’ Smith and Herbie Nayokpuk to form a pack of teams that worked together on the Bering Sea Coast to get Mackey to Nome hours in front of Swenson.

Dean Osmar of Clam Gulch used patience in 1984, when a charging Swenson suckered Butcher out of the Rohn checkpoint in the Alaska Range after a lengthy rest. Osmar watched her go, then sat tight to complete the race’s one mandatory 24-hour stop at that checkpoint.

When Swenson and Butcher paused for their mandatory rests, Osmar pushed past. Then he hung on to beat Butcher to Nome by less than two hours.

She wouldn’t let that happen again.

After a 1985 race marred by a moose stomping through her team, which forced Butcher out of the competition and opened the door for Libby Riddles of Teller to become the first woman victor, Butcher ran up a string of three straight victories.

Swenson was second two of those years and third the other.

Not until 1989 did anyone else break into the two-musher show. Joe Runyan of Nenana led his team beyond Rohn – at the time the standard stopping point for mushers their 24-hour mandatory rest – and grabbed a lead he would never relinquish.

He beat Butcher to Nome by about an hour. Swenson was third.

Runyan wouldn’t repeat, and Butcher and Swenson were on their way out, though it sure didn’t look like it at the time.

The Iditarod’s two winningest mushers began the 1990s with back-to-back victories, but the new decade was destined to belong to a trio:

• Martin Buser of Big Lake, the smooth-talking Swiss immigrant, brought new blood from Alaska sprint dogs into the game, creating a faster Iditarod dog. He won three races.

• Jeff King of Denali Park, an equipment innovator, also began a dog-breeding program to match the best. In one snow-drought year, King, a three-time champion, planned to run a dogsled on wheels until race officials put the kabosh on the idea.

• Doug Swingley, the Montanan with sharp business acumen, approached the Iditarod with a long-range plan for victory and the athletic background to try and become the proverbial best-dog in the team. He won twice and set the record for the fastest time to Nome.

The Three Amigos not only brought better sled dogs to the Iditarod. All three were athletic mushers who added all sorts of new twists to the game, including cross-country ski poles to help their teams along flat sections of trail and homemade sails to take advantage of coastal winds.

Together, they owned the 1990s. After Swenson’s last victory in 1991 came this string of victors: Buser, King, Buser, Swingley, King, Buser, King, Swingley.

But as the race enters the new millennium, a bunch of mushers – some old, some new – are threatening their grip on the championship. Consider:

• Swenson finished fourth in last year’s Iditarod with what he labeled a ‘‘team in training’’ for the year 2000. It is Swenson’s oft-stated goal to win in each of the race’s first four decades. He’s already secured victories in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

• Charlie Boulding of Manley, the fifth-place finisher in last year’s Iditarod and a former winner of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, has been one of the dominant forces in Iditarod tune-up races this year. In the Kuskokwim 300 he beat both King and Buser.

• Paul Gebhardt of Kasilof, the sixth-place finisher in the Iditarod last year, has shown constant and steady improvement. He won the Copper Basin 300, an Iditarod tune-up this year, and finished a close second to King in the Tustumena 200.

• Ramy Brooks of Fairbanks, a five-time top 20 finisher, is heir to a great mushing tradition. His mother is Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race winner Roxy Wright, and his grandfather is mushing legend Gareth Wright. Brooks finished eighth in the 1997 Iditarod and won the Yukon Quest last year. He’s returning to the Iditarod, looking to follow in the footsteps of Runyan and King, whose paths to Iditarod glory ran through the Quest winner’s circle.

• John Baker of Kotzebue, the fifth-place finisher in 1998, is looking to bounce back from a slide to eighth last year.

• Mitch Seavey of Seward was another musher on the rise when he finished fourth in 1998. But then he slid to 11th last year.

• And then there’s DeeDee Jonrowe of Willow, who scratched when her team quit on the Yukon River last March. She’s back with a new team. Nobody expects her to win with a bunch of young dogs, but nobody’s counting her out, either.

They can’t. Look at her record: Second in 1998 and 1993, fourth in 1995 and 1997, fifth in 1992 and 1996; and top-10 finisher in every other race she completed in the 1990s.

And they’re not alone:

• Linwood Fiedler of Willow, the second-place finisher in this year’s Kusko, was eighth in the Iditarod in 1998, 14th last year.

• Ed Iten of Kotzebue, the 10th place finisher last year, is a man to watch, according to several mushers.

Throw so many good teams into a race where the difference between a top-10 finish and victory is sometimes as simple as a little luck or the timing of a storm, and the race looks wide open.

‘‘This is the ultimate year for competition,’’ Halter said. ‘‘It just gets harder every year, but it’s going to be kind of fun.’’

At 51, Halter knows he has only a few more years to try to grab that elusive first Iditarod victory, but he isn’t about to concede anything to the youngsters.

The Ramey-Ramy contingent – 25-year-old Ramey Smyth of Big Lake (12th in the Iditarod last year) and 32-year-old Ramy Brooks – may be part of a coming generation of champions, but the old generation may not go away easily.

‘‘This ain’t the Quest,’’ Halter said in reference to Brooks, who has high hopes for the Iditarod this year. ‘‘He had one competitor in the Quest to deal with. There’s a whole bunch of people to deal with here.

‘‘You’ve got those fast starters’’ like Buser and Swingley; and a bunch of people who could grab the lead in the middle of the race and pull away: Swenson, King, Boulding, former champ Mackey and others.

If any one of them gets a four-hour lead, Halter said, they could win.

‘‘They get you out of sequence’’ on the rest-vs.-run cycle, he said, and then it becomes very hard to catch up. Unless, of course, a storm changes everything, as it did in the year Riddles won.

‘‘That’s interesting, too,’’ Halter said, ‘‘because Nome has got almost seven to nine feet of snow. They usually get 15 to 20 inches.’’

If all that snow gets to blowing around on the coast, it could radically alter the outcome of the race, just as it did in 1985 when Riddles essentially came out of nowhere to win.

As competitive as the Iditarod has become in recent years, the weather still holds the wild card.

Outdoors editor Craig Medred has covered the Iditarod numerous times. He can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.

Skwentna-area residents gather around a large bonfire on the Skwentna River as mushers in the 1998 Iditarod stream into the checkpoint. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)