WANTED: Permanent home for Iditarod restart. Must have space to park 1,000-plus sled dogs and hundreds of cars on the first Sunday of every March. Will sit vacant the other 364 days of the year.
Wasilla's role as the official jumping-off-place for the restart of the Iditaord Trail Sled Dog Race is history.
Officials of the Iditarod and the Alaska Department of Transportation say they're on the verge of working out a temporary arrangement to continue staging the restart at the Willow Airport, but the Federal Aviation Administration isn't too happy about that.
And all parties agree a permanent home needs to be found for the real start of the ever-more-popular 1,000-mile race from Anchorage to Nome.
Anchorage years ago became the site of a "ceremonial" Iditarod start, something of a dog show and pageant staged to please fans, businesses and television cameras. The real race was then scheduled to begin a day later on up the George Parks Highway to the north.
Up until last year, the where of that start was something of an annual question.
Wasilla was the officially designated restart, but it sometimes lacked adequate snow -- not to mention that most mushers wanted to avoid the bustle and traffic in the Anchorage bedroom community.
So for years, though Wasilla was the officially designated restart, the real run to Nome usually began another 27 miles on up the road at Willow. Last year, Willow was named the official location.
How long that continues, however, remains to be seen.
The Iditarod would like to keep the restart in the Willow area, said Iditarod executive director Stan Hooley, but it clearly has to find some home other than the Willow Airport.
Hooley is hopeful the state or the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, both of which own significant amounts of land in the Valley, might be able to help, but as of yet nobody has offered a permanent home for the restart of the state's most famous sports attraction.
While major cities Outside are building stadiums, ballparks and arenas to try to hang onto sports franchises, the Iditarod -- the only sports franchise of national note in the 49th state -- is having trouble hanging onto the wide spot along the Parks Highway from which it annually sends mushers north to Nome.
The FAA has wanted the race off Willow Airport property almost since the race first staged there.
On occasion in the past, said FAA inspector Stephen Powell, the Iditarod has interfered with airport operations, but the real problem is that the Iditarod has used the airport for free. Federal law plainly states that commercial activities staged on airport grounds should generate revenue for the airport, he said.
"The state has received millions of dollars in grant money," Powell added. "With those grant monies come obligations."
The FAA tried hard to get the Iditarod booted from the Willow Airport proper last year. The agency threatened the state with a loss of airport funding. The state responded by proposing to clear a forested area away from the runway for staging the restart.
The lot never got cleared, however, and the Iditarod almost lost the Willow restart. With the FAA threatening to intervene, negotiations to gain access to the airport were under way almost until the day mushers left for Nome. Top state officials finally ordered DOT administrators in the Valley to let the Iditarod use the airport.
"There's politics involved with it," Powell said, "and my heart goes out to the (local) state people. It's the flag and apple pie and the Iditarod and 'Don't stand in the way of this, buddy.' "
Not only is the Iditarod a popular institution in Alaska, one of the members of its board of directors happens to be Jim Palin -- the father-in-law of Gov. Sarah Palin. All of these things give the Iditarod considerable political muscle.
That might be useful to the Iditarod in the short term, but Powell said it doesn't matter with the FAA. Either the state can comply with federal regulations at Willow, he said, or it can pay back federal grant monies and forgo future dollars.
Christine Klein, a deputy director of the Alaska DOT, said the state recognizes the problem and the consequences.
"We're trying to get the airport back into compliance,'' she said. "We are out of compliance.
"What we've done, what we're doing right now, is building a parking area. We're doing some brush cutting, some tree cutting.''
Once the area is cleared, she said, all the DOT and the Iditarod will need to do is negotiate some sort of lease agreement that meets FAA standards.
"The Iditarod will be required to pay a permit fee," she said.
The size of that fee is still in negotiations, said Hooley, who noted that although the Iditarod is now a multimillion-dollar event, it is not a rich one. The race still relies heavily on volunteers for staffing, and the logistics of staging a race across 1,000 miles of unroaded Alaska are extremely costly.
Hooley does, however, expect to get an agreement worked out with the DOT long before the start of next year's race. But that only solves the immediate problem.
"What we've asked them (Iditarod) to do is to find a better home,'' Klein said. "We'd like to see them in a permanent home somewhere else."
The race has been trying to find such a home for the restart since two years after the 1973 birth of the event.
The first two Iditarods had no restart. Mushers made their way from Anchorage to Eagle River and then out along the Glenn Highway and along the Palmer Hayflats to Knik and off onto the historic Iditarod Trail.
By 1975, that was judged too much of a problem, given that highway bridges over the Knik River had to be closed to motor vehicles to make way for dog teams.
Beginning in 1976, the Iditarod raced to Eagle River and then had mushers truck their dogs north. Upon arrival at the Eagle River checkpoint, the dog drivers had several hours to get their dogs into trucks and speed to a designated restart in the Susitna Valley.
From year to year, the location of that restart changed, bouncing between Lake Lucille, Settler's Bay and Wasilla. Meanwhile, the rush to the restart was complicated by several car crashes over the years.
Eventually, the dog-truck racing portion of the Iditarod from Eagle River to the restart was eliminated. The restarted was rescheduled for the Sunday after the Saturday, downtown Anchorage start of the race to make life easier and safer for mushers, their handlers and their teams.
When that change was first made, the idea was that the restart would become an annual event -- sort of a mini-replay of the downtown Anchorage start -- in Wasilla, headquarters for the Iditarod Trail Committee.
Urban sprawl and global warming quickly conspired to put the kibosh on that idea.
The Wasilla area often lacked the necessary snow on the trail paralleling the Knik-Goose Bay road to Knik Lake to join the historic Iditarod Trail north. Meanwhile, the development of more and more subdivisions along the Knik road meant more and more road connections, and thus more and more intersections for dog teams to cross. Every one of those intersections needed a crossing guard to ensure safety.
There are now so many crossing, Hooley said, it is unrealistic for anyone to think about ever again using the route along the Knik-Goose Bay Road. Some, he added, hold out hope for establishment of a trail from Lake Lucille in Wasilla to Big Lake. That has been suggested as a route that could be used to start both the Iditarod and the 2,000-mile Tesoro Iron Dog snowmachine race in Wasilla.
Costs of building such a trail, however, appear prohibitive, Hooley said. That has led the Iditarod to begin looking for a permanent home in the Willow area. Willow, being close to the Susitna River, safeguards the race no matter what sort of future development takes place in the Valley.
Once on the frozen surface of the Susitna, mushers and their teams are done worrying about road crossings until they get to the tiny village of Nikolai on the north side of the Alaska Range hundreds of miles ahead on the trail.
And even in the warmest winters -- or at least the warmest winters yet -- the Susitna always freezes into an icy, sled-dog highway.
Find reporter Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com