Iditarod

An exorcism of dog-racing demons on Alaska's Iditarod Trail

The world did not notice when Hank DeBruin exorcised his personal demons in Nome, Alaska, shortly after 1 p.m. on Saturday. He was the 49th musher to finish the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. He and his team passed under the burled arch on Front Street more than three days behind new race champ Dallas Seavey, the 25-year-old son of a former winner and grandson of one of the entrants in the very first Iditarod in 1973.

There was a lot of talk about the Seaveys. Not only had Dallas led a posse of young guns into the top-five finishing spots, but his father, Mitch, the 2004 victor, completed the race in the top-10, and his grandfather, Dan, took a memory tour up the 1,000-mile trail from Willow to the fabled city of the Golden Sands on the shore of the Bering Sea. The Seaveys were news.

DeBruin was not. The quiet man from Haliburton, Ontario, Canada, and the 10 Siberian huskies that finished the journey north with him attracted no fanfare, but after all he'd been through over the course of his two-year Iditarod journey, he was happy.

"It feels pretty damn good," he said from Nome.

His wife, Tanya McCready, and their four kids along with a few friends and end-of-race Iditarod hangers-on were at the finish to greet him. That was enough, but that was also about it. DeBruin and the dogs were forgotten also-rans, little known members of the BOP, as the mushers at the back-of-the-pack are known to Iditarod nation.

And this time there was no controversy. Not like back in 2010, when he first tried to run the race.

What exactly happened to DeBruin that year was and never will be clear. Officially, the short version is that he dropped out, "scratched" as they call it in Iditarod lingo. The longer version, at least in DeBruin's view, was that he got the quit-or-be-fired treatment from Race Marshal Mark Nordman. Nordman has denied that was the case. Suffice to say, all that is really known for certain is that DeBruin and Nordman had a telephone conversation and afterward DeBruin's 14-year dream of running the Iditarod was dead.

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He left the race more than just unhappy.

"As the plane flew west (from Nulato)," he wrote in the book "Iditarod Dreamer -- A Rookie Team's Journey" in 2010, "I didn't see any of the scenery. I just got angrier and angrier to the point I felt like I would explode. Angry at the phone call (from Nordman), angry at myself for getting talked into scratching, but more than anything wondering what the hell had happened."

Things would not get better soon.

"Sitting in Unalakleet for those two days (after) was probably the biggest emotional roller coaster of the entire race," he wrote. "I would go from fuming to confused to depressed and then start all over again. I remember asking Tanya at one point, 'I didn't finish. How do I go home?'"

The answer, as with so many things in life, was simple. You move on by moving on. You go back. You pick up the pieces. And you start again. DeBruin did. In 2011, he finished the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, thus proving his dogs could go the distance. And this year he came back to finish with a relish the Iditarod race that really began in 2010.

Vindication is a sweet, sweet elixir.

Crushing dreams

But now we're getting ahead of a story that really begins in the old, Athabascan Indian village of Nulato on the Yukon River. DeBruin arrived there in 2010 at the very tail end of a long string of Iditarod teams headed west and north. Nordman was at the finish line hundreds of miles away.

With temperatures in the Interior hovering around 50 degrees below zero, everyone in the race has struggled and suffered, dogs and men, race leaders and back-of-the-packers. DeBruin and his dogs had endured a cold, slow run into face-searing winds roaring up the Yukon River as they made their way toward Nulato. In "Iditarod Dreamer," DeBruin recalls how an Iditarod volunteer there told him he was supposed to talk to Nordman on the phone before leaving the checkpoint.

DeBruin would later describe the decision to abide by this request as one of the bigger mistakes in his 47 years of life. This year, he reportedly told Nordman not to bother calling about anything because no phone calls would be answered. Things might, indeed, have been different in 2010 if DeBruin had simply avoided phones until he reached the Bering Sea coast. But he is Canadian, and Canadians are notoriously well-mannered. Asked to talk to Nordman before leaving Nulato, DeBruin went to some effort to get a race volunteer to get the marshal on the phone.

"It took several tries for her to reach (Nordman)," DeBruin later wrote of this phone call. "The first words I heard were 'can you tell me why you were the slowest team in 15 years to make that (Galena-Nulato) run? Why was your run so slow?' Much of the rest of the conservation is a blur, and I'm the first to admit it. But I remember trying to explain how cold it had been, how the dogs had slowed down. I remember saying the wind would be at our back now, things would get better. Nothing I said changed his question of 'why were you so slow?'"

As it turned out later, DeBruin wasn't the slowest team in the last 15 years on the 50-mile run down the Yukon between an old U.S. air station and the historic Native village. That distinction belonged to another team of Siberians that had gone on to finish the Iditarod. For Siberians, the diesel trucks of the trail, DeBruin's time was not even that slow. Siberians are big, long-haired dogs from another era. They are not the small-boned, big-chested, long-legged, thin-coated whippets that lead the front of the Iditarod today.

The latter are genetically bred to run. Thin coats mean they can better rid themselves of the heat produced by exercise, and exercise-induced over-heating is for dogs -- as for humans -- an impediment to running at speed. Meanwhile, big chests mean big lungs and big hearts for increased aerobic capacity. And long legs ensure the dogs can cover ground, at least on good trail. They are more like Ferraris; the Siberians more like Mack trucks.

DeBruin's dogs were rumbling north along the trail fine in 2010 even if they were a little slow, but Nordman did not know that. He had not been watching the team. The job of the race marshal is difficult, and most of his attention focuses on the competition at the front. There's hell to pay if the trail gets messed up and the leaders get lost or if, for that matter, anything else goes wrong that could be seen as having affected the outcome.

What exactly anyone might have told Nordman about DeBruin's team has never been made clear. But Nordman has conceded he thought DeBruin and his dogs were going awfully slow, even considering the temperatures. And Nordman does agree there was a phone call. A tired musher talked to a race marshal probably near equally tired. It did not go well. DeBruin was left with the belief -- right or wrong -- that he'd been told he could quit in Nulato or be thrown out of the race at the next checkpoint in Kaltag.

"I got the distinct impression my team was no longer welcome on the Iditarod Trail," he wrote. "I (told Nordman), 'if I'm going to be done in Kaltag then there is no point in going on.' Mark said, 'so you are scratching.' I said, 'I guess so. I would rather scratch here than be labeled as withdrawn 40 miles down the trail.' I now look at things very differently but at the time I felt being withdrawn was a disgrace on your ability to look after your dogs or yourself."

DeBruin is a proud and hard-working man. He runs a business, Winterdance Dogsled Tours, back in Canada. A big chunk of his self identity is wrapped up in his skill as a woodsman and dog handler. Scratching did not go down easy for DeBruin. Alaska Dispatch reported his story at the time. It was one of the great human-interest stories of the 2010 race. And the sled-dog racing world exploded.

The 2 faces of Iditarod

To understand why, you have to know a little about the uneasy relationship between the Iditarod and the "back of pack." Some of the top mushers don't much like having the slowpokes around, tying up race resources and stealing attention from the few kennels that see themselves as the Far North, canine equivalent to NASCAR teams and stock car racing. There are some big egos involved, and there are those who would rid the Iditarod of the back-of-packers, if they could.

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Unfortunately for them, the organization overall has long and reluctantly accepted that it needs the BOP.

The mushers struggling and suffering just to get to Nome bring attention from Outside. They stir national and international interest in a far-off dog race across the wilds of Alaska. And those from Outside, as Alaskans call everywhere else, who venture north across the Alaska-Canada border to partake of the Iditarod adventure return home as ambassadors to spread the good word about the so-called "Last Great Race."

Still, this is not an easy relationship. One BOPer sued the race after being forced out as too slow. An Alaska judge ruled against him, holding that while the Iditarod might have violated its own rules, there are no requirements the organization follow those rules. That left a lot of BOPers angry. The response of some top mushers was "shut up and run faster, and you won't have a problem."

Unfortunately for Iditarod, the tension between the front and the back is hard to avoid, because everything that makes some of the top Iditarod competitors look down on the BOP is what makes the BOP necessary: these are the last adventurers in what began as and continues to be sold as an adventure race, even as it has evolved away from that.

Over the years, Iditarod has become less and less an adventure for the people at the front. The best kennels have gone fully professional. The trail has gotten better. And just to be sure that it stays that way, Iditarod puts a team of snowmachine pace-cars out front.

Once the Iditarod was a race of significant strategy dictated by bad trail. Too much trail-breaking could cost a team a victory. Teams held back to save themselves. Breakaway groups of mushers were sometimes allowed to get far in front only to be later rolled up, at least usually, by the chase pack.

Those days are largely over. A race that used to be something like the Tour de France is now more like the Indianapolis 500, except at the back. There is still adventure at the back. There are still plenty of amateurs there just trying to get to Nome, and they get the worst of the trail. Nobody hangs around to fix it for them. If it blows in with snow, their dogs break it open. If all the trail markers -- mostly lathe with reflectors on top stuck in the ground -- get knocked over, they are left to find the trail themselves somehow, some way.

Some have gotten lost as DeBruin did on Norton Sound this year because all the trail markers are gone. Others have gotten hurt. In 2010, the trail was so bad that rookie Pat Moon from Park Ridge, Ill., couldn't handle it. His sled hit a rough spot and launched him head first into a tree. He had to be evacuated to an Anchorage hospital. He, like DeBruin, came back to try the Iditarod again this year anyway, because once the idea of going 1,000 miles across Alaska by dog sled gets in man's (or a woman's) mind, it can be almost impossible to resist.

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"It an addiction," DeBruin said Monday.

(Moon's costly addiction, unfortunately, only got him as far as Ruby on the Yukon River this year. It remains to be seen whether he will try once more.)

Don't retreat; reload

DeBruin left Alaska in 2010 an emotionally battered musher. He had reservations about returning to Iditarod, but his dreams of north land adventures still burned. He wasn't giving up. He's not the type. He shifted his sights to the Quest, a race that is in some ways more challenging than Iditarod.

"The Quest is a little harder physically," he said, "but the Iditarod is harder mentally."

The reason is pace. For dogs as for people, running long distances is not all that difficult. Running long distances fast is another matter. Human runners know this well. Almost anyone in reasonable health can train to run a five-hour marathon. It's hard to go under four hours, harder still to go under three hours, and inside of two and a half hours all but impossible for all but the most committed and genetically blessed. A fast pace changes everything, and the modern Iditarod is a fast-paced affair.

"It's always in the back of your mind," said DeBruin, who has noted that while race winning times have slowly but steadily gotten faster over the years, BOP times have changed dramatically. Brian O'Donoghue from Fairbanks wrapped up the 1991 race in 22 days and about 6 hours. A decade later, Canadian Karen Ramstead ended the 2001 Iditarod in just a shade under 15 days. By 2010, Montana musher Celeste Davis had shaved the last-place finishing time -- the so-called "red lantern time" -- time to 13 days and 5 hours.

DeBruin was that year planning a 15-day race, not knowing that the 15-day race was already BOP history. No one was going to be allowed to dilly-dally on the trail that long, any longer, unless there was some good excuse. It takes volunteers and costs money to keep checkpoints running. Since 2007, every red lantern winner has arrived in Nome within a week of the winner. No longer does anyone finish way back as did O'Donoghue and a whole string of mushers before him. It took Washington state's Jan Steves about 14 and half days to reach Nome to grab the red lantern this year, but she had an excuse. The trail was slow. She was about 15 hours behind the red lantern time for 2011, but race winner Seavey was also about 10 hours behind the pace of 2011 Iditarod champion John Baker from Kotzebue. And the five-day gap between Seavey and Steves was only about half the gap between O'Donoghue and 1991 race winner Rick Swenson from Two Rivers.

There is no doubt that the speed with which teams now motor north makes the race more difficult for everyone, not just the winner. All of which is kind of a strange turn of events for DeBruin, whose whole Iditarod obsession began after reading a book by Libby Riddles -- "Race Across Alaska, The First Woman to Win the Iditarod." That book, he has said, inspired him to flee the city, start his own dog tour business, and begin working toward the goal of running the Iditarod.

Riddles won the Iditarod in 1985 in a time of 18 days and 20 minutes. It is the fourth-slowest winning time in Iditarod history. The race she won was the slowest by more than a day since 1977. The race was twice stalled by snow. Riddles battled through an epic coastal storm to win. It was a true adventure race, and the race that truly boosted the Iditarod onto the international stage.

And the champion that year finished about 5 days behind DeBruin's fifth-to-last finishing time this year. The guy inspired to run the Iditarod by Riddles' book can now take pride in having slam-dunked the champ's finishing time. But DeBruin isn't even thinking about that yet. He's still relishing the accomplishment in finally getting his team up to speed to make it to Nome in a race that has become more about getting there quickly than just getting there.

"'It felt great getting through the arch," he said. "It got a little nasty on the (Bering Sea) coast. I kind of got lost" going across the Norton Bay ice with all the trail markers knocked down, but "it was an awesome run. The people are amazing. (The high point) was getting past Nulato. When I got to Kaltag, it was with a big sigh of relief."

And by White Mountain, where mushers and teams take a mandatory 8-hour break before pushing on the last 80 miles to the finish line, "it was kind of like, 'Damn, is it over?" DeBruin said. He'd crossed the Alaska Range through Rainy Pass with a bright moon rising. "It takes your breath away," he said. He'd powered through the old Inland Empire of the Interior with the northern lights dancing overhead. "They were breathtaking," he said. He'd experienced the legendary "blowhole" in the Topkok Hills just outside of Nome. "It's pretty nasty," he said.

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And finally, at long last, he'd reached Nome to accept the Iditarod belt buckle awarded all official finishers.

"It's an expensive buckle to keep my pants up," he said. "(But) it's an amazing race."

So too the race DeBruin ran with himself as he chased his demons north along the trail until they were gone, banished to fading memories now by a burled arch and a belt buckle.

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.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.

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