01/09/00
WILLIS CHARGES INTO LEAD
By Craig Medred
Daily News Outdoors Editor
Traveling fast on the ice-hardened trails of the Nelchina Basin, Andy Willis led the Copper Basin 300 Sled Dog Race -- and his boss -- into the Tolsona Resort on Saturday evening.
A veteran of the 1996 and 1998 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races, Willis, who grew up in Anchorage,
is now a dog handler for Iditarod contender DeeDee Jonrowe of Willow.
Willis is running half the dogs Jonrowe is training for the 2000 Iditarod. Jonrowe is running the other half as part of her focused effort to put a competitive Iditarod team together by March.
A two-time Iditarod bridesmaid and a consistent top-10 finisher for more than a decade, Jonrowe was forced to scratch for the first time in 17 years after her dogs quit on the Yukon River last year.
She flew them all back to Anchorage, gave them plenty of pets and hugs and then started finding them new homes. The Iditarod isn't much different from the NFL when it comes to winning. The good players get to keep playing. The ones who fail to perform are retired.
Retirement is why Jonrowe is working with a new team this year, and 23-year-old Willis, a former second-place finisher in the Junior Iditarod and the veteran of a lot of dog racing despite his relative youth, is an important assistant coach.
The second musher to leave the race start in Gakona at 1 p.m. Saturday, he quickly passed Jessie Royer of Fairbanks and held off Hans Gatt of Atlin,
British Columbia, to arrive first in Tolsona -- about 45 miles down the trail.
With Copper Basin defending champion Martin Buser of Big Lake and 1999 runner-up Linwood Fiedler of Willow home in bed with the flu, Gatt is one of the favorites here. He is a two-time winner of the 450-mile International Rocky Mountain Stage Stop in Wyoming, a race that has regularly attracted the likes of Iditarod legends Rick Swenson, Susan Butcher and Jeff King.
King won the stage stop last year with Gatt close on his runners.
Still, before the end of this 300-mile roller-coaster chase through the Nelchina Basin and the foothills of the Alaska Range, Copper Basin race marshal Jon Van Zyle expects to see a number of other teams in the hunt.
The Kenai Peninsula, he said, appears to have sent north a couple of good ones in the form of Iditarod veterans Paul Gephardt and Jon Little. And Canadian Brian MacDougall of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and Iditarod veteran John Barron of Willow can't be counted out.
Last, Van Zyle said, there is the long shot: mushing veterinarian Sonny King of Spartanburg, S.C.
This King, no relation to the three-time Iditarod champ, first came to Alaska in 1993 to work as a volunteer veterinarian for the Iditarod. Sled-dog racing quickly got in his blood. By 1997, he was on the runners for his first Iditarod.
He finished 42nd but has steadily moved higher in the finish every year since. He brought two teams of dogs and a handler with him to Copper Basin this year with an eye to figuring out which of the canines will best meld into a topflight Iditarod team.
With plenty of hills, rough trail, trail breaking through new or windblown snow, and a regular run of subzero temperatures, Van Zyle said, the Copper Basin might be the ideal Iditarod warm-up race.
He said this year's record field of 37 mushers contains a large contingent of Iditarod first-timers who must put a qualifying race behind them by march. The weather gods seem to be smiling on the rookies this year too, he added.
Once canceled by 60-below temperatures that made it difficult to keep dog trucks running, regularly pitting mushers and dogs against 20- to 40-below cold, the 2000 Copper Basin is proving downright ''balmy,'' Van Zyle said.
It was near zero at Tolsona Saturday night, having dropped from 10 degrees earlier in the day. Van Zyle worried that it might be almost too warm for some dogs.
''But's it's clear,'' he said, ''so it will get better tonight.''

Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.