Anchorage Daily News

A few miles south of nowhere, out of sight of even most Alaska media, the world's best dog mushers will gather Wednesday to battle for $100,000 in a winner-take-all reenactment of a Gold Rush-era race around the once-booming but now desolate Seward Peninsula.

Sixteen mushers are signed up for the historic All-Alaska Sweepstakes, which features the biggest payday ever witnessed in an Alaska professional sporting event. They will compete on a 408-mile trail that circles through some of the wildest, snow-covered, windswept terrain in North America.

To get into the game, mushers paid an entry fee of $1,500 to $2,000 cash -- the price was marked down for early registration -- plus one ounce of gold, current value about $1,000.

This is almost identical to the buy-in when the Nome Kennel Club began the race 100 years ago. Not much else will have changed from those days when the still-functioning club stages the race this week on the event's centennial anniversary.

Same rules, same trail.

Gone, of course, are the legendary mushers of old. Dog drivers like Leonhard Seppala and "Iron Man" John Johnson, whose exploits back in the day sometimes made headlines in East Coast newspapers. But taking their places are some legends of the modern era.

Jeff King, four-time champion of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, will try to seek revenge against Fairbanks' Lance Mackey, who caught the Denali Park musher napping in Elim two weeks ago and sneaked away with his team to win his second straight Iditarod title.

"No doubt about it," Mackey said, "we're going to have a slugfest."

The Sweepstakes was born in 1908. Long before the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championships, the Iditarod or the Yukon Quest International, it put Alaska sled dog racing on the map and helped dog drivers like Seppala, Johnson and Scotty Allan make their names.

In 1983, the Nome Kennel Club brought the Sweepstakes back for its 75th anniversary, with five-time Iditarod champion Rick Swenson of Two Rivers capturing a $25,000 winning prize.

Then the race disappeared again for another 25 years.

"It's a huge milestone in the history of sled dog racing," Dr. Phil Schobert, the All-Alaska Sweepstakes' executive race director, said by cell phone.

The inaugural race boasted a $10,000 purse that today be would worth an estimated $220,000. That was arguably the biggest payday in the history of sled dog racing. But this year's $100,000 will be the biggest payday in modern times, topping the previous record set by the Iditarod's $72,066 first-place payout in 2005.

"It's unique because of its purse," Schobert said. "The Sweepstakes was the birth of long-distance racing."

Still, by the new standards, the Sweepstakes is more of a mid-distance race -- like the Kuskokwim 300 out of Bethel -- than a modern distance race like the Quest or the Iditarod. Both of those are about 1,000 miles long.

The Sweepstakes does, however, feature some different rules from either of those ultramarathons.

The Iditarod and Quest allow mushers to drop injured, sick or tired dogs, and require some lengthy rest stops along the trail. Those races also prohibit outside assistance in dog care or race strategy.

In the Sweepstakes, for which mushers can harness a maximum of 12 dogs, they alone choose when and where to rest their teams and for how long. And outside assistance from a pit crew is permitted.

But perhaps the most unique, controversial and problematic rule is the prohibition on dog drops -- mushers must finish the race with the dogs with which they start.

If a dog dies, the musher is immediately out of the race.

If a dog goes lame, the musher will face the choice of hauling it or quitting. The same if a dog gets sick. If a dog simply gets tired and slows down, the choice will be similar but different: Slow the whole team to its pace or haul that dog.

Unfortunately, there is no quicker way to slow a team in a sled dog race than to start adding the weight of canine passengers to the sled.

Thus, mushers want "bombproof dogs" in their teams. A bunch of Energizer Bunnies are the perfect group in harness here. King, who did the unprecedented in taking a full team of 16 dogs from Anchorage to White Mountain just outside of Nome in this year's Iditarod, thinks he has that.

"I feel confident that we have picked a super team," wrote King in his blog.

The "we" is King and an entourage of helpers that includes two veteran snowmachiners -- 1998 Iron Dog partners Bob Himschoot and Chris Provost -- plus two race strategists.

"These four will do much of the thinking for me," King wrote.

On the contrary, Mackey said he will travel with a crew big enough to "just get by."

"I don't have a lot of money to pay these folks," he said, "so I'm doing it all on volunteers.

"I've got people with airplanes and snowmachines. I'm going for the experience alone, but I'm damn sure taking it seriously."

In 1908, hundreds of bets were placed in Nome, according to Schobert, on which team could travel fastest on a well-packed survey trail used daily by dog sleds and horse-drawn carriages traveling from gold mine to gold mine.

The trail is no longer the busy transportation corridor it once was, however.

A dozen snowmachiners were breaking trail Saturday, hacking down cornices from record snowfalls between Council -- about 85 miles into the race -- and Candle. Schobert said snow depths could reach 10 feet, with the consistency of powder in some places or concrete in others.

Johnson set the course record in 1910, finishing the 408-mile race in 74 hours, 14 minutes and 37 seconds, a mark that has now stood for 98 years.

The only difference in the route of this year's trail from the original is checkpoints. This race has 14 checkpoints, while the original had 17.

A new record doesn't seem likely. When Swenson, who was in his prime, won the 1983 race on a trail with very little snow cover, he was about 10 hours slower than Johnson's record. On a trail with deep snow, mushers are expected to go even slower.

"It's a slow and steady trudge," Schobert said. "What Iditarod mushers travel in 1,100 miles, these guys will condense into 400."

The trail passes up and over three mountain ranges. There are roughly 50 water crossings -- most frozen, some not.

"Basically, it's going to be 400 miles nonstop," Mackey said. "I don't know much about it, but if I had to choose one of the three races I really want to win, it's the Sweepstakes."

Besides the money, the 37-year-old cancer survivor wants the recognition of becoming long-distance mushing's only triple-crown winner -- Yukon Quest, Iditarod and Sweepstakes.

Even with a small field of 16 mushers, Mackey expects a stiff competition. There are no slackers in a group that includes top-five Iditarod racer Ed Iten from Kotzebue, former Quest champ and Iditarod runner-up Ramy Brooks from Healy, and 2004 Iditarod champ Mitch Seavey from Sterling. This is the second race for Brooks since the 2007 Iditarod, from which he was suspended until 2010 for abusing his dogs.

"I can't imagine a two-man race (with King)," Mackey said. "There's going to be fresh teams, but to look at the list, me and Jeff are the favorites."

Mackey plans to use only two dogs from this year's championship Iditarod team, with the rest coming from his Yukon Quest team or his stepson's Junior Iditarod team.

The day Mackey won the 2008 Iditarod, King told him his plan was to pick from the 16 Iditarod dogs that had made it all the way to White Mountain. Even if that's not the case now, at the time Mackey said it was music to his ears.

"I know it's beatable," Mackey said.

Find Kevin Klott online at adn.com/contact/kklott or call 257-4335.