TAKOTNA -- Emil Churchin, slam poet and dog musher, rubbed the leg of a sled dog named Scully on Friday morning looking for cramps.
"Good girl ... Good girl. ... OK, so she's got a little soreness right here," Churchin said, pouring a pungent oil on his hands to warm the muscles. The clear liquid, with its medical, grandmotherly smell, is the same stuff he's using to nurse a hamstring he pulled earlier in the race.
It was a common scene along the Iditarod Trail. But the wrong place. On Day 6 of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, Churchin wasn't supposed to be here, at the very back of the pack and -- in his view -- in danger of being booted from the race for taking too long.
Up the trail, Iditarod institutions like Jeff King and Lance Mackey are dueling with the race's rising stars in a contest to cross the famed burled arch in Nome and claim $50,000.
Churchin, a rookie, is just trying to make his mentors proud and justify the roughly $40,000 he's spending to be here.
"I could have bought a house instead of doing the Iditarod," he said. "Or I could have paid off my college tuition."
At 42, Churchin looks 10 years younger and carries a soulful resume. Raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, he studied philosophy in college, he said, before bouncing between cities and landing in Alaska in 1996. Here he's sold hand-woven imported rugs and competed on Alaska's National Poetry Slam team, worked at Prudhoe Bay, and, now, joined the mushing fraternity.
It started in the summer of 2004, when Churchin was working as dinner cook, housekeeper and part-time bartender at lodge along the Denali Highway and Iditarod veteran Jim Lanier passed through, dropping off straw and dog food for winter training runs.
Lanier mentioned he needed a dog handler, and Churchin asked for the job -- a common apprenticeship for aspiring mushers.
Churchin began working two weeks on and two weeks off on the North Slope to allow time for mushing and is now the only Iditarod competitor who lists Anchorage as his hometown. He commutes to Knik to train with a team leased from Iditarod veteran Ryan Redington and bought a few of his dogs himself.
Two of those dogs, Mulder and Fat Chance, yawned and squinted at the sun above the Takotna River as Churchin ran his fingers across Scully's back, sending tufts of fur floating to the snow. Ravens squawked from thin trees above the village.
Despite donations from friends, family and co-workers, Churchin can't afford to come back to the Iditarod next year, which means that this year, he can't afford to fail.
Race organizers have tightened rules to discourage mushers from treating the Iditarod as a two-week camping trip, and Churchin is worried he'll be disqualified if he doesn't pick up the pace.
The dogs are healthy, he said, but he's been dehydrated and disorganized at times, spending too long at checkpoints.
As race leaders roared toward Nome, Churchin resolved to regroup and treat the second half of the Iditarod as a brand new competition: a race to do his dogs and his mentors justice. And, simply, to finish.
"I'm paying $40,000 for a belt buckle," he said of the award given to every Iditarod finisher.
Now he just has to get there.
Baker's race unravels
RUBY -- A crucial bout of confusion fueled by mysterious landmarks, unfamiliar trail markers and simple fatigue may have sent John Baker spiraling from the lead to being lucky to break the top 20 finishers, Baker said Friday.
The Kotzebue musher wrapped his dogs' feet in booties as a plane engine buzzed from the frozen Yukon River below in this hillside village of 170. Sixteen mushers lined narrow snow roads of the checkpoint, feeding dogs and wrestling with icy sled runners in the burning cold.
The race leaders were already long gone, passing pool-sized stretches of open water along the riverbank on their way to Nome.
Baker figured to be right there with them. He won the Kuskokwim 300 this year. He expected to contend for an Iditarod win, and he was leading the race out of the Ophir checkpoint Wednesday night.
But on his way into Cripple, something went wrong. Baker started seeing landmarks he didn't recognize. It was getting late, and he wondered why he hadn't already reached the checkpoint. Confusion set in.
"I thought I would be there. I was running slower than I expected, I think. And then, of course, you're tired," Baker said.
Rather than head down what might be the wrong route, he stopped to wait for someone else to arrive. Hours passed as temperatures plummeted to 50 below.
"The dogs sat on the snow without any insulation or straw or anything for five hours and got really stiff," Baker said. "I had some frozen food to feed them, but that was all they had to eat."
While 23-year-old musher Dallas Seavey would be the first into Cripple -- a minute ahead of Baker -- it was someone walking along the trail that first told Baker he was indeed still on the Iditarod Trail.
The man may have been a competitor in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, an ultra-race for cyclists, skiers and runners.
"He was walking along, and he pulled out his GPS that their sport provides for them, so they know where they are all the time," Baker said. "He said 'No, sir, you are on the right trail.' "
Baker had stopped less than an hour from the next checkpoint.
"I was three miles from Cripple. It was really sad," he said.
No sign of drug testers
RUBY -- Several Iditarod mushers Friday said they haven't been drug-tested during the race, and haven't seen signs of testing so far.
"I haven't heard anything, but I'm sure they'll probably have something down the trail ... they said they would," said Fairbanks musher Jessie Royer as she replaced sled runners pocked by gravel on the way to Ruby.
Iditarod officials said before the race that they planned to test mushers for the first time this year, spurred by complaints from competitors.
"Testing is random. ... So we don't know where it will take place along the trail but we do know that (testing) officials are in place on the trail," race spokesman Chas St. George wrote in an e-mail Friday.
Royer, who finished eighth in the 2009 Iditarod, approves.
"If somebody's taking a drug, I guess, that could help them stay awake better, then that's a huge advantage over their competitors," she said. "That's a huge part of this race, being able to stay awake."
Drug-testing for dogs has been far more obvious. Emma Cantor, a biology student from St. Louis, moved from team to team Friday wearing an "IDITAROD DRUG-TESTING" ballcap, part of a long-running program that checks dogs for steroids and painkillers.
The routine goes like this, Cantor said: Mushers arrive at a checkpoint and feed and water their dogs, who then sleep for several hours. When the dogs wake up, testers collect urine samples in sterile cups that are sealed with evidence tape and frozen for testing in Colorado.
Sometimes testers "spice up" a patch of snow with a pee sample to get the dogs going, Cantor said.
"When you go to the doctor and pee in a cup, it's basically the same thing," she said. "Except we hold the cup."
Sled Blog: Meet the dogs -- Houston
By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com