Anchorage Daily News

BIG LAKE -- The howling raaaap, raaaaap, raaap of the tireless engines of iron dogs filled the air Sunday as the world's longest, wildest and craziest snowmachine race once again launched toward Nome.

Click to enlarge

Story tools

Comments (0)

E-mail a friend

Print

Share on Facebook

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Follow on Twitter

Font size : A | A | A

On hand to officially send off the 70 drivers entered in the 2009 Tesoro Iron Dog competition was Gov. Sarah Palin, whose husband, Todd, was one of those hitting the trail. He appeared to be comfortably back in the snowsuit, body armor and helmet of a snowmachine racer after having spent the fall criss-crossing the country in finely tailored suits as the escort for Sarah on her failed bid to become vice president.

Asked to pick which attire suited him best, Todd gracefully sidestepped and said he would prefer Helly Hansen rain gear smeared with salmon slime. One of his jobs, aside from being a periodic oil field worker on Alaska's North Slope, is commercial fishing in Bristol Bay.

Another of his jobs is racing Iron Dog.

He and partner Scott Davis won the race in 2007. It was Todd's fourth victory and Davis's seventh, but the first time the duo had ever won together.

They are a testament to the fragility of Iron Dog relationships. Todd first won Iron Dog with Dwayne Drake from Fairbanks in 1995, but split with him shortly thereafter. He came back to win with Dusty Van Meter from Kasilof in 2002 and 2004, but then broke it off with him.

Meanwhile, Davis -- who first won in 1985 -- went through at least five partners in the years that followed, winning with some and losing with others. None of Davis's old partners are racing Iron Dog now, but the Davis-Palin team will face stiff competition from at least two of Palin's past teammates.

Van Meter is running with Marc McKenna from Anchorage, one half of the 2008 race winning duo of McKenna and Eric Quam from Eagle River. And Drake is with Andy George from Wasilla, with whom he teamed to win in 2006.

Racers are required to compete in teams for safety. The Iron Dog has never suffered a fatality, but there have been close calls. In a number of cases, racers were saved only because they had partners there to help them.

Sarah Palin knows a bit about the risks, given that Todd broke his arm in the race last year. Nearing Galena on the Iron Dog's return leg from Nome to Fairbanks, he hit an oil drum hidden under snow. His sled cartwheeled, and he was thrown off. Davis picked him up and rushed him to the Galena clinic then went back to retrieve the damaged sled. A health aide advised Todd to drop out of the race, but he and Davis pushed on anyway, though they did not win.

Recognizing the dangers, Gov. Palin made a plea Sunday for "God's protection'' for the competitors, gushed that she "loves you guys,'' and then told a crowd of hundreds they probably didn't want to listen to some "politician" anymore.

She promptly made good on her promise by staying largely out of sight for the rest of the day, emerging from a heated and guarded motor home only briefly to see Todd off.

Whether the large turnout for the race start was due to the new-found celebrity of Sarah, the former mayor of Wasilla, or the love affair Alaskans have with high-speed snowmobiles is impossible to say, but the crowd that showed for the start of the $150,000 race sprawled across the normally deserted lake.

In the hour before the green flag dropped, traffic flowed steadily, bumper-to-bumper as trucks, and a few cars, motored over an ice road plowed across the frozen lake to reach a starting line near the Islander Lodge. A makeshift parking lot on the ice overflowed with motor vehicles and snowmachines. The machines ripped and roared everywhere across the snow-covered lake as Iron Dog wannabes tired to show their stuff. The real racers waited in a secured, protected paddock for their start numbers to be called at two-minute intervals.

After a countdown from five, family or friends were allowed to wave the flag to send them on their way. Within seconds of its dropping, they had shot across the lake in a blur and disappeared into the Alaska wilderness.

Within a couple hours, the best of them were already starting the crossing of the Alaska Range several hundred miles to the north. Behind the leaders, followed a train of little-known riders signed up more for the adventure than the race.

"If I finish, I'll be happy,'' said Russ Siepert, a rookie from Anchorage. "If I make the top 10, I'll be ecstatic.''

A former racer in Idaho, Siepert said he'd flown the Iron Dog course as a support crew for racers in the past. He finally decided it would be more fun to get on the trail on a snowmachine than ferry parts in an airplane.

"I'm not getting any younger,'' the 46-year-old added. "You've got to start somewhere.''

The danger is that the adventure can prove addictive. Unch Schuerch, 38, from Kiana in Western Alaska, was back for his eighth try this year, though things have not gone well in recent years. He crashed out in 2006 and 2008. His best-ever finish was third when he was a rookie in 1996. He's riding with 34-year-old Stephen Spence from Anchorage, whom he met at a race in Kotzebue 15 years ago. Spence was seventh last year, and Schuerch is optimistic about improving on his position.

"Things are going good,'' he said, "feeling good, a lot more training this year even with gas at $8.50 a gallon.''

That's the going price in Kiana, which got its last barge of fuel before freeze up and won't see another until spring. Despite the high costs of gas in rural Alaska, 13 drivers from beyond the Alaska road system flew into Anchorage to do Iron Dog this year, and two more came from Manley Hot Springs, which is darn near off the road system. One of the latter bears a surname famous in the state.

Thirty-nine-year-old Joee Redington Jr. from Manley Hot Springs is a grandson of the late Joe Redington Sr., founder of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. More than two decades back, Joe Sr. fought the creation of Iron Dog, fearing its popularity might one day eclipse that of the Iditarod and kill off the fledgling sled-dog race in the way snowmachines had decades earlier spelled the end of sled dogs as working animals in the Bush.

The Iditarod, however, grew into an Alaska institution and a multimillion dollar global event no longer threatened by snowmachines. People from around the world now flock to the March start in Anchorage, and hundreds of thousands follow the race on the Internet. The race is credited with helping sled dogs survive. Hundreds of people now invest their hearts and souls in taking care of the animals just to be able to make one run each year along the trail from Anchorage to Nome.

Noting the back-swaying, day-to-day labor involved with maintaining even a mediocre sled-dog team, snowmachine racer Redington joked that "everybody asks me, 'Which Redington are you?' And I say, 'The smart one.' ''

Many in the Redington clan are still up to their mukluks in dogs. Two of Old Joe's grandsons will be in the spotlight as competitors when the Iditarod starts March 1.

Joee, like at least half the people in the Iron Dog, has no expectations of being competitive. Having tried Iron Dog before and failed, he just wants to reach Nome, enjoy the halfway celebration, and, he hopes, make it to Fairbanks.

The almost 2,000-mile long race roars north from Big Lake to Nome over the course of the next couple days with racers spending as much or more time completing mandatory rest stops as they do racing on the trail. At Nome, there is a lengthy layover and a Wednesday night "Halfway Banquet.''

Then the race turns east for Fairbanks.

Victory often hinges on getting to Nome with as little damage as possible to the equipment, and then racing hard back along the frozen rivers of the Interior to where the race ends Saturday around noon in downtown Fairbanks. Racers are held at the last checkpoint overnight to ensure a daylight finish in the Interior city.

Just getting to Nome on a snowmobile is no easy take. In this, the Iron Dog shares something in common with the Iditarod.

If the trail is fine, everything is fine. But trying to keep a snowmachine on the twisting, bucking, sideways slanted trails of the Alaska Range is not so fine.

Iron Dog trail riders Faby Membrila and Issa Otten have already gotten a taste of it. The only women's team associated with the event this year, they left Big Lake on Friday in the officially non-competitive trail rider class of Iron Dog, and were in McGrath, 350 miles to the north on the far side of the Alaska Range, repairing sleds on Sunday.

"Trees got in our way,'' Membrila said when reached by telephone. "I hit one. Issa hit two.''

The last one, Membrila added, was a big one only five miles out of McGrath. It caused enough damage they had to limp Otten's sled into the checkpoint, where they were making repairs and planning to continue.

"It was the last set of trees (we saw) that got her,'' Membrila added.

Trees, rocks, hidden oil drums, open water, snow-covered driftwood, rock-hard drifts, flat light and engine failures all work against Iron Doggers on the Iditarod Trail, though technology has made the snowmachines incrementally better year by year.

Todd Minnick from Wasilla said he and partner Nick Olstad, a fellow Wasillan, put about 2,500 miles of rough riding on their Polaris Dragons in preparation for this race and never had a real problem with anything.

"It's a little scary,'' he added. "I like little problems.''

Knowing what might fail is in some ways comforting, but ideally nothing fails.

Tyler Aklestad from Palmer and Tyson Johnson from Eagle River put about 2,000 miles on their SkiDoo Rev XPs in training and never broke anything, either.

"They're just pretty much trouble-free,'' Akelstad said.

Aklestad, 23, Johnson and Minnick, 29, and Olstad, 26, are the Iron Dog's young guns. Olstad has already been part of one winning team. Minnick joins Alkestad after years of racing with one of the winningest racers in Iron-Dog history, seven-time champ John Faeo from Wasilla. Faeo, who retired last year, remains tied with Davis for the most Iron Dog victories ever.

"He taught me everything,'' Minnick said of Faeo.

A team of young racers with Faeo's knowledge could be tough to beat, said Eagle River's Quam, one of the defending champs. He isn't counting out himself and new partner Bradley Helgwig, 35, an Anchorage rookie, or McKenna and VanMeter, or even old dogs Davis, 49, and Palin, 44, but time is obviously gaining on all of them.

"It's very possible,'' he said, that this is the year a new generation takes charge.

And the teams of Minnick-Olstad and Aklestad-Johnson were vying for the race lead Sunday night, although both said before the start one of the main things they had to avoid was youthful exuberance.

"We're going to ride safe and smart,'' Aklestad said.

Time will tell whether any of the young guns can stick to that plan.

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

ADVERTISEMENT