Anchorage Daily News

From across Alaska, family and friends of Herbie Nayokpuk have been gathering in Anchorage as a true Iditarod legend nears the end of the trail for the last time.

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Herbie Nayokpuk

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Nayokpuk, known to so many as "The Shishmaref Cannonball,'' was medivacked from his home on the edge of the Bering Sea to the Alaska Native Medical Center after suffering a massive stroke in mid-November.

Doctors were able to keep the 77-year-old musher alive, but he lapsed into a coma. On Wednesday, son-in-law Chuck Newberg sent an e-mail to friends of Nayokpuk everywhere, warning that the famous dog driver is unlikely to recover.

"Herbie was stabilized but remains in a coma,'' Newberg wrote.

Prior to the stroke, Nayokpuk "had specifically asked the family that no life support should be given should something like this happen. ...The family expects that his time is near.

"The family knows that it is his time to go, and he had prepared his family for the difficult days ahead.''

Preparation was always a Nayokpuk hallmark. It put him in the top-10 in eight of the 11 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races he ran between 1973 and 1988.

He never won, but he came tantalizingly close. Teamed with Joe May from Trapper Creek and Ernie Baumgartner from McGrath, he helped blow the 1980 race wide open. The trio broke from the pack in the Alaska Range and never looked back.

A brace of past champions in the field behind them -- led by Rick Swenson, Dick Mackey and Emmitt Peters -- held back, thinking the three front-runners were sure to fold. They never did. Nayokpuk led the way to the halfway point and grabbed the prize there. He looked to be on his way to victory, but a broken toenail on a prized lead dog slowed him along the Bering Sea coast and May pulled ahead to win.

As is the case with everyone who spent time on the trail with Nayokpuk, May has nothing but great memories of the musher with the constant smile and the ever-kind word.

"He is a dear friend and was a fine traveling companion,'' May wrote in an e-mail. "We shared many campfires and on a particularly memorable occasion, while wandering lost together in Old Woman Pass, shared our last remaining food -- a bag of muktuk and a pair of tea bags. I'll not forget that one.''

Sharing a last morsel of food along the trail with a hungry traveling companion was the way of Nayokpuk. A fierce competitor, he was, nevertheless, always a gentleman.

He won the Iditarod's Most Inspirational Award in 1988, the year he finally retired from racing. He had come back for one more go after a disappointing 25th-place finish in 1987. He ended up sixth.

In 1983, Nayokpuk made it from Anchorage to Nome in 12 days, 22 hours and 4 minutes, his best ever. He finished fourth. It looked for a time like his team might have a shot at victory, but Nayokpuk knew better. Recognizing that young Rick Mackey, then 29, had the strongest team among the leaders, Nayokpuk and Canadian Larry "Cowboy'' Smith helped Mackey, son of 1978 Iditarod champ Dick Mackey, chase down race leader Eep Anderson from McGrath while holding off a hard charging Swenson.

In 1982, Nayokpuk came in 12th after failing in one of the boldest bids for victory in Iditarod history. With winds pounding the Bering Sea coast, 12 mushers decided to wait it out in Shaktoolik. Only one -- Nayokpuk -- chose to challenge the blowing snow that limited visibility to almost nothing while pushing windchill temperatures to 50 degrees below zero.

Into the teeth of the storm charged the man who'd undergone open heart surgery only months before. It was one of the most audacious moves in Iditarod history, and it almost worked.

"It was good weather for me,'' Nayokpuk said after being forced to return to Shaktoolik. "I've gone out in worse weather than that. ... I would have made it easy if I had just gone out two hours earlier.''

"I've been out many years in the cold,'' he added. "But that was the coldest night I ever spent.''

He is a tough man from a tough corner of the world where the wind sweeps the snow across the ice for long months of every year.

"One of a kind,'' said past champ Libby Riddles, who in 1985 took a page from the Nayokpuk playbook and charged into a storm while others only thought about it and became the first women to win the race.

"For me, he was one of the dog mushing heroes when I first started racing,'' Riddles said. "We'll be losing a piece of our history, but in a way, he's lucky he had as many years as he did.''

After triple bypass surgery in 1981, Nayokpuk weathered health problems for more than 20 years. Until the last stroke, though, he always pulled through.

"Please keep Herbert and the family in your thoughts and prayers,'' Newberg wrote. "We all want to send our thanks to everyone who has called and written with support from around the world.

Daily News Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.

• Fastest time: 12 days, 22 hours, 4 minutes in 1983.

1973 5th

1974 3rd

1975 4th

1979 Scratched

1980 2nd

1981 7th

1982 12th

1983 4th

1985 8th

1987 25th

1988 6th