Alaska News

Feelings run high among Iditarod back-of-packers

Two months after a blizzard killed two dogs along the Iditarod Trail and threatened the lives of animals and mushers in several teams, the wounds suffered by the people who invest their emotional lives in dogs continue to bleed.

Lou Packer, the musher whose dogs died, has had a lawyer send threatening letters to other mushers who suggested a more capable dog driver might have avoided the deaths.

And Rob Loveman, a rookie musher removed from the race because he wasn't traveling fast enough, has protested his withdrawal as unfair and cited pressure on back-of-the-packers to keep moving as a possible contributing factor in dog deaths.

"Jeff King didn't have to worry about being withdrawn if he turned his team around," Loveman said. "Lou Packer did. Given the arbitrary way the non-competitive withdrawal is carried out, (mushers like Packer) would be far less inclined to return once they saw how bad conditions really were."

Race marshal Mark Nordman, the man who tossed Loveman, says that's just not the case. No one would be kicked out for making a decision in the best interest of their dogs, he said.

Statistics on dog deaths, according to race veterinarians, tend to support Nordman; dogs die at similar rates among mushers at the front, middle and back of the race.

Loveman's dogs, Nordman noted, were in great shape when the rookie driver was ousted. The problem there wasn't an issue of dogs but of a dog driver.

ADVERTISEMENT

"He was just having a hard time staying awake and just trying to keep up with his dogs," Nordman said.

By the time the race marshal pulled Loveman, a 52-year-old Montanan, he had slipped to the very back of the pack and faced the long, desolate and difficult 90-mile trail to the ghost town of Iditarod alone with his team.

Out in front of him on the trail, 47-year-old Kurt Reich from Divide, Colo., was already in trouble. Another rookie, he eventually had to be rescued from the makeshift shelter of Don's Cabin by Iditarod officials who found him there seriously hypothermic.

50 BELOW ZERO

Weather conditions were brutal this year. Temperatures plunged to 50 degrees below zero in the Innoko River country north of McGrath and winds swirled deep, soft snow into ground blizzards. Nordman said it has been years since Iditarod mushers encountered such sustained extremes.

Packer's two dogs died when he got pinned down on the trail in bad weather. His attorney, Ward Merdes from Fairbanks, is now questioning whether the Iditarod did enough to support him and other back-of-the-packers.

In a letter to race veteran Diana Moroney, a long-time volunteer and Iditarod Air Force pilot this year, Merdes blames the Iditarod Trail Committee for failing to adequately monitor the progress of tail-end mushers, arguing that this is why Packer, Blake Matray from Fairbanks and Kim Darst from New Jersey ended up in trouble.

"When the ITC observed that these three mushers had not moved for 12 hours," Merdes wrote, "somebody should have immediately checked on these mushers. If there is any blame to be pointed at in this situation as to who made 'many errors' it should lie squarely on the feet of the ITC."

Nordman said he hasn't seen the Moroney letter but has heard similar charges voiced by Iditarod tail-enders in the past. His answer is that the Iditarod, which celebrates the idea of individuals facing challenges and overcoming them, lacks the resources to baby-sit anyone. The race, he said, works hard to help rookies prepare for what they will be getting into, but race officials can't hold everyone's hand while they are on the trail.

Twelve hours, Moroney added, is a long time to be camped out, but not that long. She notes that others have been missing longer.

Five-time champ Rick Swenson from Two Rivers and four-time champ Martin Buser from Big Lake disappeared for almost 24 hours in a blizzard between White Mountain and Nome in 1991. Joe Garnie from Teller that same year spent 18 hours hiking along the coast in a storm looking for the dog team he'd lost.

Garnie, an Inupiat from Teller on the wild Seward Peninsula, never complained to anyone. Race officials never even knew he had a problem until he later explained why it took him so long to get from one checkpoint to the next.

Technology has changed the race now, though. All Iditarod dog teams were tracked by global positioning satellites for the first time this year. The tracking indicated Packer, Matray and Darst were stalled between Iditarod and Shageluk in some of the wildest country left in the world.

Concerned Iditarod officials eventually organized a rescue. The volunteers of the Iditarod Air Force found Packer. Volunteers from Shageluk on snowmachines went out into the storm to help save him and his dogs. He recounted being pinned down afraid for his life with dogs dying around him.

DIRE STRAITS

Darst, who almost lost a dog, and Matray were meanwhile making heroic efforts to get their teams through the storm safely. Darst at one point huddled with a freezing dog in a sleeping bag in Matray's tent to save the animal from hypothermia

Matray, trained in survival by the U.S. Air Force, built snow caves for his dogs and lined them with straw to help his team survive the storm.

ADVERTISEMENT

Moroney, whose husband Bruce was one of the pilots involved in the rescue, later said she thought "what happened to Lou (Packer) was preventable. He as a rookie made many errors, but also his past performance in races has shown that he is not a capable musher."

That's the statement that prompted the letter from Merdes warning her to "immediately cease and desist from further remarks that place my client in a false light or he will take appropriate legal action."

Nordman refuses to take sides. He feels uncomfortable second-guessing the actions of people in dire straits.

"Until things go in the tank," Nordman said, "you don't know how you will respond."

Others have not been so reluctant. Views sometimes reflect the Iditarod's long-standing split between two groups of entrants: a relatively small group of professional or semi-professional, front-running teams competing for finishing positions and prize money, and a larger group of back-of-the-packers on the trail for the adventure, hungry -- but not always fully prepared -- to experience Alaska in all of its winter beauty and, sometimes, ferocity.

Relationships between the two groups have sometimes been strained. Back in the days when Susan Butcher dominated competition, Dave Monson, her husband and manager, once suggested limiting the race to only the top teams and letting the adventurers tag along with guides, in much the way most people climb Mount McKinley.

A fiercely independent lot, mushers in general refused to buy into that idea. So the Iditarod for a time set benchmarks that trailing teams had to meet to be allowed to keep moving north along the trail.

That rule pretty much died after race officials tried to boot legendary 81-year-old Norm Vaughan because he couldn't keep up with the field in 1987. Vaughan ignored the order to quit and just kept going, which only added to his legend.

ADVERTISEMENT

When car salesman Tim Triumph did the same thing in 1996, he became the subject of an award-winning short film -- "Dead Last: A Tale of Triumph."

The benchmarks were eliminated and the race marshal given broad power to remove people based on whether he thought they were capable of keeping up. Nordman said he is comfortable with the decisions that were made this year in that regard, but he is thinking now that it might be a good idea to have an Iditarod race judge, or some other knowledgeable person, hanging close to the back of the pack for much of the race.

Someone with a little experience and some intelligence about the condition of the trail ahead might have advised Packer, Matray and Darst to hold in the Iditarod checkpoint and await better weather, Nordman said. That might have saved the lives of a couple of dogs.

As for the psychic wounds suffered by amateurs like Loveman, Nordman said he can empathize as someone forced to drop out of his own second Iditarod in 1994. He knows well the emotional investment made by the hopeful who joins up with a bunch of dogs to try to travel 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome by dogsled.

"It's a shame when anyone has to (quit)," he said.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

By CRAIG MEDRED

cmedred@adn.com

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

ADVERTISEMENT