Alaska Dispatch

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has big problems. Some of them are financial. Most everyone has heard or read about those. Others are organizational and human. Some Iditarod insiders know about these. The general public does not, and yet the latter problems might far outweigh the former.

I spent the past two weeks on the trail on a snowmobile reporting on back-of-the-pack mushers, talking to people in checkpoints, and doing a lot of observing. Lots and lots of observing. The best reporting advice I ever got came from my father, who knew nothing about reporting. He was a medical technician turned small businessman turned welder who understood, as he told me, "You can learn a lot if you just keep your mouth shut and watch and listen."

What I saw when watching along the Iditarod this year was a race increasingly disconnected from rural Alaska. Small armies of mushers, veterinarians, checkers and other Iditarod types descended on villages and pretty much took over parts of them. In the best cases, there was some interaction between the villagers and the Iditarodders. There was often way too little. It was a noticeable change from the past.

The Iditarod used to belong to Bush Alaska. One of Joe Redington's dreams in founding the race was to keep the dog mushing tradition out there alive. When I covered my first Iditarod in 1983, I sometimes scrounged up dog teams in villages so I could go run dogs in my free time. Now you can't find enough dogs in many villages to put together a team.

The dogs are disappearing. The rural mushers who used to add so much Alaska richness to the fabric of Iditarod are already gone. No one has stepped up to take the place of Emmitt Peters, Herbie Nayokpuk, Clarence Towarak, Joe Garnie, Don Honea, Alex Sheldon, Ken Chase and the rest.

At Ruby on the Yukon River, I couldn't help thinking of Howard Albert -- a young, talented, up-and-coming musher who committed suicide long ago. I remembered sitting with Albert and Garnie around a campfire in the woods at Rohn one year talking about how painful it was for them to find themselves running behind "doctors and lawyers" in the race. Men who had spent their lives with sled dogs, Garnie and Albert didn't much hanker to being bested by those whose main connection to the sport was the financial ability to buy the best dogs.

Garnie eventually retired from Iditarod. Albert is gone. And the Iditarod has now been almost fully taken over by doctors, lawyers and businessmen. It has become a race for well-educated, well-to-do mushers from along the Alaska road system or Outside.

The blue collar mushers from the Bush are all but gone. In the field of 71 mushers in this year's Iditarod, there were six from rural Alaska, four of them Alaska Natives. Thirty years ago with a field of 36, 17 came from rural Alaska; most of them were Native. Twenty years ago with a field of 61, 10 came from rural Alaska, and most of them were Native.

The Bush used to be intimately involved with the Iditarod. The Bush used to feel part of the race. Mushers used to stay at the homes of villagers. No more, and because of this, the Iditarod is in danger of losing rural Alaska.

How bad is it? Well, let's put it this way:

Athabascan Emmit Peters from Ruby, one of the greatest champions the Iditarod has ever known, couldn't get into the Iditarod Banquet in Anchorage this year. There weren't any tickets left. Someone did finally find him one, but the next day he couldn't get onto Fourth Avenue downtown to say "hi" to the many Iditarod racers who remain his personal friends. Peters didn't have the right badges to hang around his neck. He tried to explain to one of the Iditarod guards charged with keeping the riffraff off the avenue clogged with riffraff that he was a past Iditarod champ, but that got him nowhere. Likewise, he was reportedly kept out of the finishers' chute in Nome when he went there to greet mushers at the end of the race.

I don't think Iditarod meant to slight Peters intentionally. But to accidentally slight a past champ of his stature is equally as bad. If this keeps up, the Iditarod will lose rural Alaska, and if it loses rural Alaska, the race is doomed. Iditarod is already renting buildings where facilities used to be volunteered by villages. If it loses much more support in the Bush, it won't have enough money to rent the space it needs or get a trail put in. The race needs to recognize this and do something about it.

Where to begin? Well, I'm going to offer a few ideas. I have nothing to lose. I've already PO'd what few friends I had at Iditarod by covering the Hank Debruin mess, so I might as well let rip. Here are some things that need to be done:

1. Waive the Iditarod entry fee for anyone living off the road system. This is, admittedly, a token gesture, but it sends a signal that the Iditarod wants to at least try to help rural mushers get back in the race.

2. Ditch the corralling system now in use and let mushers stay at the homes of villagers once again. Corralling was instituted to make the race more fair. Some mushers -- the late Susan Butcher most notable among them -- had been developing relationships with villagers to gain an advantage in the race. Other mushers thought this unfair. It is. So what? Having some of the key players in the Iditarod visiting villages during the off season to develop relationships with villagers is one of the best things that could be done to help ensure the race survives. Scattering mushers around villages will make life harder for reporters like me, without doubt. And some veterinarians will complain about this change making dog teams slightly harder to track down for examinations, but in these days of Google maps of everything, this ought to be easy enough to solve. Not to mention the change might actually make some teams easier to find and examine. A lot of mushers these days grab straw and food and blow through checkpoints to avoid resting in busy, noisy corrals. They might stay in villages more if they knew they could find quiet retreats there.

3. Start doing some of the necessary grassroots public relations work that keeps nonprofit organizations alive. The Iditarod has trail sweeps coming along behind the race to make sure everyone makes it safely to Nome. Historically, the sweeps enjoy their own little joyride and party to the finish. They need to be doing more than that. They ought to be taking time to talk to villagers about the Iditarod, stressing how important local involvement is to the race. The trail sweeps might even make it a practice to collect the thousands of dog booties that litter the trail, throw them into bags and deliver them to the next village on down the trail. A local musher there might well be able to wash them up and use them.

4. Get the Iditarod bureaucracy in Wasilla out of the office and onto the trail. Race manager Mark Nordman is the example to follow here. He tries to show the colors everywhere along the 1,000-mile route to Nome. The rest of the gang needs to get involved. Villagers need to believe there are people in Iditarod who care about them more than they care about producing their next Emmy award-winning video.

5. Make it clear to everyone involved with ITC -- mushers, staff and volunteers -- that the press is not the enemy. The whole Iditarod empire is built on a mythical Iditarod story. If the story dies, the Iditarod dies, and yet I heard from several reporters this year about the Iditarod not only refusing to help them move photos or stories, but actually making that harder. I personally had an Iditarod official jump me in Rohn demanding to know what I was doing "taking notes." This, he charged, was making people uncomfortable. Funny, no one else said anything, and I was note-taking in a public place. If Iditarod wants to worry about something, worry about an activist from PETA or the Humane Society in that same public place with a lapel camera, recording every bump and sneeze to edit into a gag reel of I-Killed-A-Dog ammunition.

6. Go ask the Alaska Legislature to create an Iditarod Trail Special Management Area modeled on the Kenai River Special Management Area. The Iditarod Trail is one of the state's great resources. Much of it runs across state lands. The Bureau of Land Management, which has oversight on the Iditarod National Historic Trail, says it is powerless to do anything on state lands. The state Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation says it has grant money to do trail work on these lands, but no entities with whom to contract to do the work. Solve that. Set up the management organization to mark, clear and maintain the Iditarod on state land, and then do it so well the feds are embarrassed into improving the marking, clearing and maintenance of the Iditarod Trail on their land.

7. Foster winter trail grooming crews in the villages and help connect them with sponsors willing to donate trail grooming equipment. There are state grants available for trail grooming. Jobs are needed in villages everywhere. Packing the trail in earlier and better, along with maintaining it regularly, would create jobs and help dogs. The trail from Ophir past Cripple to Ruby was so bad this year dogsleds rocking-horsed over moguls for more than 100 miles. Every time the tip of the sled rocked back, the gangline was jerking on the wheel dogs. Some of them got jerked off their feet at times. Shoulder and ankle injuries are inevitable in situations like this.

8. Fill the gaps in the map. The Iditarod checkpoint at Cripple has been a collection of tent cabins squatting on state land just off the trail for years now. Go to the Legislature and ask for Cripple to be designated as part of the Iditarod Trail Special Management Area with a public use cabin to be built there. And then reroute the trail past the cabin so there's no foul up like this year when musher Jon Baker from Kotzebue, one of the few rural mushers in the race, stopped and camped because he thought he overshot the checkpoint. This might have cost him an Iditarod championship. As luck would have it, the turn off the Iditarod Trail to Cripple was well X-ed off, and if Baker had kept going he would have discovered this. But a trail setup that requires mushers to divert off the main trail almost a mile to get to the checkpoint is bound to make the race leader nervous. How can you avoid thinking: What if it isn't X-ed off?

9. Insist bureaucrats at the state and federal level establish standards for marking the Iditarod Trail, which is poorly marked in places and largely unmarked in others. It is no wonder mushers have been lost in Rainy Pass in recent years. Old tripod markers are hidden in the willows that have grown up around them. New tripod markers are way too far apart out in the windswept valley. They are great in broad daylight when no one needs them, but they are so far apart that at night not even the powerful beam of a snowmachine can pick up the next reflector. It's hard to follow the trail when you can't find the trail. Were the miners and trappers who once traveled the Iditarod still alive, they'd be appalled.

10. Get the kids involved. The future of the Iditarod isn't in the hands of this generation; it is in the hands of the next generation. The Iditarod's Teacher on the Trail program has done a great job of bringing the race to students all over the country. It is time now to bring students in rural Alaska to the race. Many of the kids I talked to were barely half interested, if that. This needs to change. Joe Redington's Iditarod was a pretty darn exciting event. Kids ought to get a chance to share the excitement.

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