My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [73]
During his second trip up McKinley, nearly a decade before, Peele had frozen his hands so badly that several fingers had turned black. None had to be amputated, but he lost a good deal of feeling, and his hands remained more sensitive to cold weather. Peele wasn’t thinking clearly in the hours after Runyan left him. Fatigue and determination combined to induce a sort of madness in the musher. Battling to stay awake, he kept popping caffeine pills. And the musher took off his gloves, figuring that the pain of gripping his icy handlebar would keep him alert.
In the front of the pack, Susan Butcher weighed the risk. A ground blizzard was raging over the ice ahead. These were extreme, life-threatening conditions. Sixty-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures to 30 below combined to produce a wind-chill factor in the 100-below-zero range. Rather than attempt the exposed 40-mile crossing to Koyuk, Iditarod’s leader took refuge in a shelter cabin below Lonely Hill, the last finger of land overlooking Norton Bay.
Butcher had mushed from Shaktoolik holding a 45-minute lead over Swenson. He, Osmar, Buser, and Barve caught her at a shelter cabin, where she spent six hours waiting for the wind to drop.
King and Jonrowe left Shaktoolik together, about four and a half hours after Butcher. The storm, moving inland, made for slow going. The pair hadn’t got far before they were overtaken by Joe Runyan, whose swift, strong dogs were refreshed after a long rest. Jeff and Dee Dee spurred their teams to chase the tall musher from Nenana, but his team was faster and vanished into the swirling tempest. The storm intensified, at last forcing the pair to turn back.
Joe Runyan spied the camping teams as he approached the shelter cabin at Lonely Hill just before dark. If I can slip by here, he thought, I just might take it. He quietly crept past. For a moment, the wily former champion thought that he might actually escape unnoticed, but then he saw someone—probably from a news agency—running for the cabin door.
Out on the exposed ice, Runyan’s breakaway was hampered when his headlamp blinked out. The musher shed his gloves to fix it. Wind instantly burned his moist bare hands. He knew he had to watch it or he’d get frostnipped. Cursing himself for such unprofessional carelessness, Joe put his gloves back on and dug out a spare headlamp. He beat the others to Koyuk, but Joe Runyan’s appetite for risk was tempered by that close call.
Nature was keeping the game close. But Susan’s team remained unquestionably the strongest. The Butch led the pack out of Koyuk at 7:30 A.M. on Wednesday.
The storm rolled backward along the Iditarod Trail. John Barron left Unalakleet in eighteenth place, behind the same pair of young leaders who had guided his team to victory in the balmy Klondike 200. In the village whose Eskimo name means “where the east wind blows,” his leaders were overmatched. Frightened by the gale, they swung his team back toward the shelter of the village, spinning his sled in a circle. Barron’s fourteenth Iditarod ended with that futile dance in the wind, less than 300 miles from Nome. This was his best dog team ever, but the dogs’ coats were just too thin for a storm like this.
Barron grew protective when a reporter asked for the names of his reluctant lead dogs. “I don’t want to say their names,” he said. “Put John Barron. It’s John Barron’s fault. Dogs don’t make mistakes. The dogs don’t quit. It’s always the musher. If there’s a problem, it’s me.”
The radio operator found Garth still wrapped in his sleeping bag. The Englishman hadn’t budged since Lee had passed the previous