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| 28th
year of Alaska's great race
|
| 01/07/00 JONROWE ENLISTS NEW HELP MUSHER STARTS OVER IN COPPER BASIN 300 By Craig Medred Daily News Outdoors Editor Since last March's mutiny on the Yukon River, DeeDee Jonrowe has been building a new dog team. Gone are the 12 dogs that called it quits in the 75-below wind chill hammering down the frozen, snow-covered Interior waterway. The Willow musher retired them all. They had learned what she feared was a dangerous lesson: that the team could ignore the coach and set its own game plan. That doesn't work in any sport. If it did, there would be no need for coaches anywhere. Starting over this year with a new team was tough, Jonrowe said Thursday, but she knew it had to be done. How well her new youngsters will perform remains a big question. Her new lead dogs, she said, are 3-year-olds -- young for animals that must deal not only with the stress of running hours a day but also with the burden of trail-finding along the way. The first test for them comes this weekend in the Copper Basin 300 Sled Dog Race. Jonrowe ran the race for the first time last year and quickly concluded it was a good warm-up for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage into the Interior, up the Yukon and on along the Bering Sea to Nome. ''It was quite a surprise,'' she said of Copper Basin. ''It was tougher than I had thought.'' The hills, she said, seemed bigger than she was told, the trail-breaking was tougher than she anticipated, and the cold was severe enough to match any Iditarod. Three-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser of Big Lake has known this ever since he ran the very first Copper Basin race in 1990. That's why he always puts the race on his Iditarod training schedule. Buser, the defending Copper Basin champion, is expected back again this year, said Copper Bain race marshal Jon Van Zyle. Buser finished second in eight of the first nine races. He was leading the other, in 1996, when it was canceled because of extreme cold. When the temperature plunged to 60 below, race officials and mushers couldn't keep race-support equipment running. Most of the dogs were doing fine, but handlers couldn't get trucks to run, which raised fears that they wouldn't be able to get dog food and water to checkpoints. Weather of all sorts has a history of making the Copper Basin tough. Last year the big headache was deep, new snow. Trail-breaking was a nightmare. Most mushers compared it to trying to run a race through sand dunes. Buser largely ignored it and encouraged his team on to claim the first Copper Basin victory for the Happy Trails Kennels. Close behind was fellow Susitna Valley musher Linwood Fiedler. A Jonrowe neighbor from Willow, Fiedler is expected back this year. Other notables planning to run are 1994 champ Will Forsberg from Denali Park and Jon Little from the Kenai Peninsula, who briefly led the race last year before falling to fourth. Forsberg said he doesn't know what to expect from his team. ''I've got a bunch of old, big guys and a few younger ones,'' he said. ''They're all pretty healthy, (but) I've barely got 1,000 miles on them.'' Like a lot of other mushers, he had trouble finding good training. The 50-below Interior cold was either too much or the snow was too little. Jonrowe said she and Andy Willis, who will run a second Jonrowe team in the Copper Basin, drove all over the state early on looking for snow to train on. ''I think we've tripled the (normal) mileage on our truck trying to find snow,'' Jonrowe said. At least she found it. Forsberg said training problems caused Healy-area neighbor Dave Sawatzky, the third-place finisher in last year's Copper Basin, to stay home this year. Van Zyle said there won't be a complete list of Copper Basin starters until the mushers' meeting at the Gakona Lodge today at 4 p.m., but he expects between 40 and 45 teams in this year's race. Among mushers he expects is Baltimore's Dan Dent. Dent will long be remembered as the musher mauled by his team in the '99 Iditarod. Dent's dogs got into a big tangle when they strayed off the trail into deep snow on the Susitna River last year. A dogfight ensued. By the time mittless Dent jumped in to try to subdue his animals, the fight was a full-blown riot. His hands were badly torn up before he got the team back under control. His Iditarod ended in an Anchorage hospital. But the accident does not appear to have killed Dent's Iditarod dreams. He has signed up to run the race again this year and is back in the Copper Basin, where he spent most of last year bringing up the back of the pack. Spectators can catch him in action at the race start in Gakona at 1 p.m. Saturday, hang out in Glennallen for the afternoon arrival of Dent and other mushers there, or take in the race's scheduled restart at the Wolverine Lodge at Lake Louise at 10 a.m. Sunday. The race route this year runs the opposite of past years'. Instead of looping counterclockwise through the Nelchina Basin and the Alaska Range, mushers will progress clockwise from Gakona to Glennallen, Glennallen to Tolsona, Tolsona to Lake Louise, Lake Louise to Sourdough, Sourdough to Meiers Lake, Meiers Lake to Summit, Summit to Chistochina and from Chistochina back to Gakona. Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com. |
©2000
Anchorage Daily News