Think our weather's bad? Former Iditarod racer shares tales of cold adventure

This week gets off to a balmy start as temperatures Monday, Jan. 28, are expected to nudge over 60 degrees.

But last week was a different story entirely, a wintery week with bitterly cold temperatures and biting winds. Area residents who attended Karen Land's presentation sponsored by the Marshall Public Library Nov. 15 might have been better prepared than most to keep the frigid weather in some perspective.

Land is a former dog-sled musher who ran the Iditarod race in Alaska three times, from 2002 through 2004.

Running the Iditarod is living for two weeks (give or take a few days) in weather that's colder and winds that are more vicious than anything Mid-Missourians ever see with nothing but a sleeping bag on a sled and a team of dogs to get you through 1,100 miles of wilderness and back to civilization.

The photo on the Iditarod Web site homepage shows a stereotypical image of a musher, a burly man with steely gaze and ice-encrusted beard.

Land doesn't fit that image. She's a slender young woman with a bright smile. She looks as though a stiff Arctic wind might knock her over.

Obviously, her looks are deceiving, because anyone who has survived one Iditarod, much less three, is plenty tough.

Anyone who has read "Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod" by Gary Paulsen, a popular account of the author's first Iditarod run, will know what Land has endured.

Paulsen's account includes tales of getting lost in the wilderness, enduring blizzard conditions, careening down near-vertical drops and experiencing hallucinations brought on by hunger and sleep deprivation.

In fact, Land said she was inspired by Paulsen's book. Where others might enjoy Paulsen's account from the comfort of an arm chair, happy to experience the rigors of the race vicariously, Land said to herself, "That's what I'm going to do!"

And she was motivated by the same thing that drove him to try the race, she said: the dogs.

Actually, it was one dog who had the most influence on her decision, Kirby, a German shepherd-Catahoula mix she took hiking with her along the Appalachian Trail.

That's where she read Paulsen's book.

"The guy (Paulsen) is crazy. It's hilarious," she said. "But the main thing is his connection with the dogs."

Not long afterward, she made her way to Alaska, where she began working as a trainer for a business that specialized in raising sled dog teams.

She paid some serious dues before getting her chance to run the race working "more than full time for nothing."

She'd only been mushing for two years when she qualified for her first Iditarod. She showed a photo taken of her just before the race began.

"I'm smiling there, but it's fake," she said. "I was terrified. I was scared to death."

She was confident she could take good care of her dogs, which is perhaps the essence of the race, but she worried about her sled-handling ability.

"I was scared of wiping out," she said. "I wiped out a lot, got dragged on my face for miles."

She noted that a key to the race is getting the dogs a bit tired. Otherwise, their strength and eagerness to run makes it almost impossible to control the sled.

Sleds have a brake of sorts, she said, but it only works on the right type of snow and works not at all on ice or rocky terrain. Steering is almost nonexistent.

If the dogs are not tired, "You say 'whoa' and they just keep running. They could care less. And the sled goes where the dogs go."

And often that means the sled bounces off trees and rocks and anything else the dogs drag it into.

Although they stop periodically to feed, rest and tend the health of their dogs, mushers only sleep a couple of hours a day, Land said, and those hours are seldom consecutive.

It's not uncommon for mushers to experience hallucinations due to sleep deprivation and Land related one case where she was sure she saw a pizza delivery man hailing her from a hilltop. She waited for him to come down and bring her some pizza, but when he didn't show up after awhile, she went on.

She didn't realize it was a hallucination until she got to the next checkpoint and asked if anyone else had seen the pizza guy.

"I swear the pizza delivery man was there. It still is so real in my head," she said.

Another adventure she told about also related to sleep deprivation. The last thing she remembered she was on a long, flat stretch of trail.

And then she woke up to the sound of rap music.

"Which is kind of unusual in the back country of Alaska," she said. "I realized I was parked in somebody's driveway. It was 30 below and there was a party going on."

She said the group of men who answered the door were as surprised to see her as she was to find herself at their door. One of them led her back to the trail on his snowmobile.

In spite of the detour, she did well in her first race, placing 49th and finishing in 14 days and collected her prize money. Although the top finishers get substantial purses, every racer who arrives in Nome gets $1,100, she said.

"They say they give you the money so you can afford the plane tickets and don't have to live there the rest of your life," she said.

She said the best part of the whole journey was hitting the finish line.

"You can hear the town sirens go off and the people come out of schools and churches and bars" to cheer.

And that moment was all it took to convince her to give it another go in spite of the hardships along the way.

"It's as perfect as it's going to get," she said, noting the "blissed out" feeling of making it to the end. "You feel like such a team. You kind of forget all the chaos. It's just a wonderful feeling."

Land dispelled some of the myths and misunderstandings about dog sled racing.

For instance, the image of sleds pulled by Alaskan malemute dogs isn't quite right. Malamutes aren't the best racing dogs, she said.

"Malamutes are the weight-lifters of the sledding world," she said. For racing, though, "we don't want fluffy dogs because they 'snow up.'"

Better dogs are smaller and sleeker than malemutes, but with a thick undercoat of fur to keep them warm.

One of her best dogs was a border collie mix, she said, named "Pig."

"That dog was just phenomenal," she said.

Her assistant at the presentation, Borage, an Alaskan husky with some hound dog in his ancestry, was the most popular part of the presentation with the children in attendance.

Before and after her talk, Land let the children surround and pet the very patient former sled dog.

"He likes to work the crowd," she said.

On the Net:

http://www.mymusher.com/

http://www.iditarod.com/

Contact Eric Crump at marshalleditor@socket.net