YENTNA STATION - The long, exhausting buildup to Iditarod 2000 finally flattened musher Dave Straub in the Monday morning darkness on the hard-packed snow of the frozen Yentna River. Just 20 minutes out of this checkpoint, the Iditarod rookie pulled his team over and parked. There they rested for the next 10 hours. The dogs ate and slept, slept and ate. Straub caught up on rest stolen by prerace jitters and let some of his long-running anxiety fade away. Three short months ago, it looked as though the Willow musher might not enter the race of his dreams. During a training run along the George Parks Highway, a pair of his lead dogs bolted across the pavement in front of a fast-moving semi tractor and trailer. The rest of the team instinctively followed. The truck driver had no time to react. The semi slammed into the dogs at almost full speed, instantly killing three, injuring another and leaving the musher traumatized. For days, Straub oscillated between abandoning his long Iditarod quest and rationalizing that he should go on, for the surviving dogs if for no other reason. "It's almost unimaginable what happened," he said at the time. "I'm sick about it. It's a hard deal to face. "Do you stop? Do you go on? I don't know." Time and responsibilities eventually made the decision. Straub had a yard full of sled dogs in need of exercise. They barked and strained at their tethers, demanding to be run every time he came out of his cabin. It wasn't long before the first musher to sign up for Iditarod 2000 was back on the runners, and from there it was a short trail to the decision to continue on the 1,100-mile wilderness trip from Anchorage to Nome. Standing in a bright March sun that cast long shadows behind tall riverside cottonwood trees at midmorning Monday, a smiling Straub fawned over a lead dog named Donna and blamed himself for the time-consuming campout that left him as the third-to-last musher in this year's race. "It was me not trusting the dogs," he said. "I was due to get up here and rest about six (hours), but I thought the dogs were getting me off the trail." Searching for trail markers, Straub kept geeing and hawing the team back and forth across a river packed almost 100 yards wide by the snowmobile traffic that rumbles back and forth daily between Big Lake and Skwentna. "It's easy to get lost," said Straub, who still had some nervousness about what his dogs might do. As it turned out, however, they knew exactly what they were doing here in the semiwilderness away from the noise, bustle and danger of the asphalt civilization. The dogs were on the tracks of the 70-some Iditarod teams that had gone before. "They were scent trailing," Straub said. "I should have just trusted them." Now trust was growing in the sunshine of a new day. The dogs tugged against their harnesses as Straub pulled on his parka, slipped in earphones, tuned in an easy-listening station on his stereo radio and prepared to hit the trail to Skwentna. The leaders in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race were already 100 miles away at the south end of Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range. Straub didn't care. His Iditarod was going better by the minute. The 20-degree temperature was low enough for canine comfort, high enough for human comfort. The sky was a sun-kissed and buoyant blue. A fast, hard-packed trail called. "On ahead, Donna," Straub said. "On ahead." q Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.
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