ROHN - A dog from the team of five-time champ Rick Swenson was injured on the trail to Rohn after apparently colliding with a tree, according to observers in Rohn and Iditarod officials. "Something did happen with Rick Swenson's dog team and a tree," race director Joanne Potts said Wednesday. "The dog's going to be OK." Sketchy reports suggested that the dog collided with the tree hard enough to break the gangline. Swenson was on the trail headed for Ophir on Tuesday and could not be reached for comment. Initial treatment took place inside the isolated log cabin checkpoint, nestled in a wooded valley in the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River. "You should have been here last night," Iditarod communications volunteer Jim Johnson said Tuesday. "This place made (the TV show) ER look tame." With bottles of intravenous fluids hanging, a team of veterinarians led by Anchorage's Bob Sept went to work. The dog was flown back to Anchorage early Tuesday morning in a single-engine plane accompanied by Sept, who monitored that animal's care all the way back to the city. "I think they did a lot of emergency care," said vet tech Pam Morgan. "They really helped turn the situation around to be real positive situation." The male dog, whose name was not released, was undergoing cage rest on Wednesday at Sept's VCA Bering Sea Animal Hospital. "The dog is here in the clinic, and he's doing fine," Morgan. "We're fairly pleased to say things are going pretty well." Superhighway to Nome The Iditarod Trail remains a rough route to Nome, but it gets a little better every year. The so-called 'buffalo tunnel" going into the bison range near the Post River is no longer so narrow that a sled that tips over is sure to be smashed. In the old days, the trail was so narrow and the accidents so common that there was an annual litter of sled parts and gear ripped out of sled bags. Now, there's a good 5-foot wide path, and just past the Post the Iditarod trailbreakers this year found a good path around a notorious "glacier." The glacier is really just overflow, but the way it ices up and flows down a muskeg valley, it looks and acts like a glacier. This year the trailbreakers found a snow-filled gut to the right and around the worst of the glacier, then swung across a flat spot at the top that appeared to be sanded so mushers wouldn't fall down. Trail manager Jack Niggemeyer said he has a good crew working on the trail this year but didn't think they'd go so far as to sand the trail. He attributed it to dirt just blowin' in the wind. Yell a little louder Race officials have been having a small problem with Russian Fedor Konyukhov, who understands little English. Judge Rudy Indermuhl, who has a strong German accent, said he had a terrible time trying to explain to Konyukhov that he couldn't park his dogs on the Skwentna airstrip. "He got mad when we told him he couldn't park there," Indermuhl warned Rohn checker Terry Boyle. "Well, he better pay attention when he gets here," Boyle said. "He ain't parking where he wants." If there's a problem, Indermuhl joked, it seems to work best to talk slower and yell louder. That caused a number of mushers to joke about an old "Saturday Night Live" skit -- News for the Deaf. If that doesn't work, Indermuhl said, try hand and foot signals. Remembering the good old days Iditarod veteran Rich Bosela stopped in the heart of the Alaska Range on Tuesday just long enough to reminisce when the Rohn checkpoint used to be everyone's favorite 24-hour stop. "I was thinking about that coming in here," he said. "In the old days, this was such a staging area. This was where the race started. Jerry Austin, Emmitt Peters, Rick (Swenson), they all used to be here plotting strategy." All of that has changed, however, since Joe Runyan pushed farther into the race than anyone before him before taking his mandatory stop; he went on to win. Today most mushers go hundreds of miles down the trail from Rohn before stopping. Wilderness medical tent The one-room log cabin at Rohn was starting to look like an Eco-Challenge pit stop or a marathon medical tent this week with veterinarians putting multiple dogs on intravenous fluids to battle dehydration. Some of the dogs were stressed by daytime temperatures in the 30s, although most mushers were resting during the heat of the day. The IV treatments are relatively new for the Iditarod dogs. Vets say they help dehydrated dogs perk up and recover faster. Unlike participants in some human sports, however, dogs that get IVs can't go on. They are flown home
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