My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [48]
The complaints and threats were meaningless. Adkins knew it. Words weren’t going to part the white sea blocking the race leader’s trail.
When I poked my head out of the dark cocoon, the sky was clear, and the terrain was nothing like I expected. Ace and I were not, as I had thought, camped on a downward slope. Our teams rested in a flat, exposed bowl.
Ace could hardly believe his eyes. The survival shelter stood a few hundred yards away. I was more surprised when I looked at my watch. Nine hours had passed!
The dogs, and the gear I’d tossed out, were cemented around the sled in white mounds. There was no trace of a trail. But the route ahead was clearly defined by a line of fluorescent orange strips waving from bushes in the gentle breeze. I looked up the line of markers to the notch at the end of the bowl, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The pass.
I turned to Rainy. “You knew right where we were last night. Didn’t you girl?”
She yawned, leisurely stretching and sunning her tight white belly.
A thin skin of snow clung to the rocks at the top of the pass. Watching Rainy and Harley scrambled over them, I braced for a wild drop. But the slope was gentle, and I could see my whole team cresting the ridge. It was too cloudy to see much of the valley beyond. Dalzell Gorge was saving her secrets.
It was a grand morning on the Iditarod Trail. A hundred yards from the pass, I stopped the team, throwing my sled on its side for an anchor. Pulling out the pocket camera I wore around my neck, I shot pictures of Ace descending the mountain.
The gorge was nothing like the icy roller coaster I was warned to expect. The storm had dumped over two feet of new snow. Rainy was swimming in powder deeper than she was tall. Harley’s head wasn’t covered, but he was swimming just the same. Repeatedly he looked back at me, eyes crying out for a rescue. Tough going. The team kept bunching up, tangling every few feet, and breaking through the soft crust into concealed pools of water.
“Those dogs do like to tangle,” said Ace, chuckling as he watched from behind.
Struggling though the deep soup, I thought back to something Mowry had told me on our final test run. We were crossing an open field. Tiny six-inch drifts were on the march, riding the rising wind.
“This is probably worse than anything you’ll see the whole way to Nome,” the Coach shouted. He gestured at jets of snow raking sideweays across the back of his legs. “Compared to this trail, Iditarod is a highway.” In two trips up the Iditarod Trail and one Quest, representing over 3,000 miles of long-distance mushing, Mowry liked to brag that he had never even unpacked his snowshoes. I shook my head as I reached for mine.
I broke trail for an hour or two, gaining perhaps half a mile as I wallowed in powder and sweat. Progress was steady, albeit at a snail’s pace. It was sweet finally hearing the whine of engines echoing from the ridge. It was Medred and Lavrakas. The journalists were traveling to Rohn by snowmachine. Like cavalry to the rescue, they flew past Ace and me, leaving a new trail in their wake.
Two teams, driven by Mark Williams and Tom Cooley, came loping down the gorge behind the snowmachines. My dogs were in snow-plow mode, and a traffic jam developed. Waving Ace and the others by, I stopped my dogs for a snack break.
Our subsequent run through the gorge was exquisite. The new trail provided footing for the dogs yet remained soft as a cushion. Team and sled glided through thickening trees, skirting pools of open water. I was enjoying life when I spied Medred and Lavrakas up ahead, suspiciously perched on a rock. Rounding a curve I confronted the photo opportunity: a narrow icy bridge over an open creek.
There was no dodging this. As my sled skidded sideways on the ice, I flipped it on one runner and steered it by the open water, trotting alongside like a pro.
“You’re the first one to make it,” Medred called out, sounding surprised.
Lee came through an hour later. His sled whipped into