Alaska News

Baker wins Iditarod, Smyth second

NOME -- Musher John Baker from Kotzebue came home to Western Alaska Tuesday to be greeted by a bright morning sun and a crowd of cheering fans waiting to welcome him as the new champion of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. He had sped north along the more than 900-mile trail from Willow so fast that his 8-year-old daughter Tahayla barely got to the finish in time.

Her flight from Kotzebue to the north touched down just before John pulled onto Front Street, untangled his dogs after a small problem, and walked them to the burled arch that marks the race finish. He had a big smile on his face. He was lit by the rising sun.

Tahayla Baker gave dad a big hug and said, "I love you." Race officials rushed to put wreaths around the necks of lead dogs Snickers and Velvet. John moved to the snow fence holding back the finishing chute crowd to shake the hands of some friends before behing hustled into the winner's circle where photographers shouted at him:

"This way, John! Pull the dogs together" Look at the eyes!"

Meanwhile, a crowd behind was yelling at the media to get out of the way so they could get pictures, too. And back down the trail behind, Ramey Smyth from Willowwas closing on the finish line. A native son of Alaska, he had chased an Alaska Native son of the 49th state relentlessly for more than 200 miles along the Bering Sea coast.

Though he couldn't catch Baker, his steadfast pursuit helped both teams break an old Iditarod record for the fastest run to Nome. Tired but satifsfied, Baker and his team reached Nome three hours hour quicker than four-time champ Martin Buser form Big Lake did when he set the race record in 2002. Tired but not quite as satisfied, Smyth and his team finished a little over an hour behind Baker.

"It's a little hard not win," Smyth said, "but there's no person in the world that I'd rather be beaten by than John. I think I've never seen a champion team look so good."

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Baker's time on the 900-mile-plus trail was eight days, 18 hours and 46 minutes. Smyth's time was eight days, 19 hours, 50 minutes. It took Buser eight days, 22 hours and 46 minutes on what some believe is a shorter trail.

For Baker, it was the first victory after 16 years of trying. "It's awesome," said Tahayla, who has always known her dad as an Iditarod musher. "I was like 'finally, he made it,' and I'm so proud of him. I felt like I was going to faint. It was amazing."

As she hugged with her dad in the finish chute, a handler took the booties off the feet of the dogs in Baker's team and threw them to an eager crowd as souvenirs. Baker is a regional hero from a village just north along the Bering Sea coast, which made this a monumental win not just for him but for all of Northwest Alaska.

"We're lucky when we do something good,'' said Baker, but there was more than luck to this victory. Baker confessed that when four-time champ Martin Buser, Canadians Hans Gatt and Sebastian Schnuelle, and Tok's Hugh Neff pushed the race pace early, he had to try to stay focused on his own race and stick to his shedule.

He never allowed himself to become concerned about Buser or the others, he said. His plan was to run the measured, steady race he knew his dogs could run. It took them into the Iditarod lead on the Yukon River just past the halfway point in the race. And Baker and the team built on that as they powered to the coast.

"I wouldn't want to run against this team," Baker said.

His dogs bested not only the teams of Smyth, Gatt, Schnuelle, Neff and Buser, but also that of four-time defending champ Lance Mackey from Fairbanks. Mackey, an Alaska mushing powerhouse, was on his way to the White Mountain checkpoint, about 70 miles from the finish line, when Baker finished. Mackey's wife, Tonya, was on hand here to greet the winner and congratulate him.

It has been a tough race for Mackey, who had to drop seven of his 16 dogs early because of injuries or fatigue and is now struggling to hang onto a top-20 finish. The race had good trail early, which encouraged the best teams to charge ahead fast, but the trail across new snow got a lot harder as the race turned west from the checkpoint of Ophir in an old deserted mining camp.

The Iditarod alternates between northern and southern routes out of Ophir and across the Interior of Alaska in even and odd years. The southern route this year ran through the old ghost town of Iditarod, on to Anvik and then almost straight north up the frozen Yukon. The route is thought by most mushers to be longer than the southern route, and in fact, a GPS satellite tracking system for the race showed it so by about 20 miles.

But the race route varies so much from year to year, and the GPS is so unreliable in tracking the small but prevalent zigzags, dips and rises in the trail's surface, no one really knows the true distance of either route. The GPS said 936 miles this year, but the odometers on some snowmachines making the run have clocked over 1,000 miles, which stirred some debate about the record times of Baker and Smyth.

Some argued they deserved special mention because they were set on a longer course than the one covered by Buser, but the year Buser set the record the starting line for Iditarod was in Wasilla for the last time. The Wasilla start made the race 15 to 20 miles longer than it was from the start this year in Willow. Another 20 miles in running distance could add a couple hours to the race, but even taking that into consideration Baker was faster on his way to accomplishing a feat that rocked the mushing world.

Never before has an Iditarod musher labored as long for victory as Baker. He won in his 16th try. Never before, despite coming close several times, has an Inupiaq from Western Alaska won the race, either. And not in decades has a musher from rural Alaska won.

Baker changed all that in one marvelous, unprecedented victory. It was enough to turn a crowd riotous on Front Street in Nome.

"It is the biggest win in Inupiat history," said Sheldon Katchatag, an elder from the Native village of Unlakaleet, an Iditarod checkpoint south of here. "This is historic. It has taken 39 years. There have been other Alaska Native (champs) but never an Inupiaq. We are the people who have the culture and tradition of mushing.

"When I left to go to Mount Edgecumbe (boarding school in Southeast as a youth), I left my dad 16 dogs that could easily go from Anchorage to Nome without booties and probably faster than most of these dogs. (This is) the biggest deal since Jimmy Huntington -- known as the Huslia Hustler -- who won the Fur Rondy Championship."

Huntington was an Athabaskan from the Interior who journeyed to Anchorage to show mushers what Alaska Natives could do in the days when the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race was the biggest show in the state. It has since been far surpassed by the Iditarod, where Baker's victory lifted him onto the international stage and into a pantheon that includes the likes of the legendary Shishmaref Cannonball, Herbie Nayokpuk, and Joe Garnie from Teller, who helped Libby Riddles train and condition the team that took her to Iditarod victory.

Thanks to Garnie's help, the Garnie-Riddles team put the first woman in the winner's circle in 1985. And the following year, it looked like Garnie might become the first Inupiaq to win the race. He came close -- very, very close. But thanks to the help of training partner and husband Dave Monson, Susan Butcher became the second woman in a row to win the Iditarod that year.

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Garnie was second, less than an hour back in a race that had been even closer up until Safety where he recognized that Butcher could not be caught and told his team to take it easy to the finish. Some still believe that if not for the help Monson provided Butcher along the trail in '86 Garnie would have won. Race rules were later changed to ban such help, and Butcher went on to show she was more than capable of winning all on her own. She notched three more victories.

Garnie, a four-time top-10 finisher, never did get a championship in a race that is so much easier to lose than to win. He finally retired in 2008. By that time, Baker was well into a long string of top-10 finishes that somehow always seemed to end just short of victory.

Despite that, he never gave up. Some thought he should have won last year, when he made a tactical blunder and camped for hours short of the halfway checkpoint at Cripple, unsure of where he was on the trail. Some might have let that mistake get them down. Baker didn't. He came back to win.

For his efforts, he collected $50,400 cash and a big new Dodge truck. Some professional golfers make more on a single putt, but this race isn't all that much about the money. It's about the honor. The Iditarod is to sled dog racing what the Masters is to golf. There is a parallel there for Baker, too.

As Phil Mickelson once was, Baker was on a list of the "greatest" never to have won a major victory. Eleven tmes, Baker finished in the Iditarod top 10. Five times, he cracked the top five. Twice he came as close as third, but until this year victory was always just beyond his grasp.

No more. Now it is his. He will be forever: "John Baker, Iditarod champ."

Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com and Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Jill Burke

Jill Burke is a former writer and columnist for Alaska Dispatch News.

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.

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