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Iditapod: Rainy Pass, Race Rookies, and Rohn Axe-Throwing

[sound of an axe hitting wood]

[men cheering]

Discordant voices: Ayyy! That was it! That was it hitting the bullseye

[theme music plays]

Casey Groves: Welcome to the Iditapod! It’s a podcast about dog mushing and the Iditarod, and… axe throwing? We’ll get to that in a few minutes. But first, here’s a word from our sponsor

[ad plays]

CG: Well, my friends, since the last time we talked, the more than four dozen sled dogs teams competing in the 2019 Iditarod have mushed, or are mushing, into the mountainous Alaska range. When mushers say these are the most technical sections of the trail, they mean it is an area where mistakes can be especially dangerous, and expert sled driving is of the utmost importance.

So, the Rainy Pass checkpoint on the frozen alpine Puntilla Lake, is a spot many mushers stop to prepare for the often tough trail ahead. But, not last years second place finisher Nic Petit, who stayed only a few minutes, long enough for race officials and veterinarians to check out his team and gear. In fact, looking at Petit’s checkpoint times on Iditarod.com, he hasn’t stayed more than a few minutes at any checkpoint in the face, except for Rohn, where he stayed a whopping 20 minutes. Instead, Petit has opted, as mushers will do sometimes, to avoid the hubbub of the checkpoints and camp his team out along the trail. They pick up straw, they pick up supplies from their drops bags, and they take that along with them down the trail and just do their own thing. That’s why, after having the lead earlier in the race, severals teams passed Petit on the way from Rohn down to Nikolai. That is a village on the upper Kuskokwim River, roughly 250 miles into the 1000 mile race.

While Petit rested from Rohn to Nikolai, the race GPS tracker shows the defending champ, the Norwegian by way of Willow, Joar Leifseth Ulsom, passed Petit’s team, as did several others, including Bethel’s Pete Kaiser, Montanan Jessie Royer, and Two River’s musher Aliy Zirkle. Ulsom was the first to arrive in Nikolai a little after 6:30 Tuesday morning. And, remember, the race just started Sunday in Willow with the race clock ticking, at the restart, so they’re covering a lot of ground here very quickly, as they do. And we’re looking forward to hearing more about how it went for the team’s runs from Rainy Pass to Rohn and Nikolai. While the race reached Nikolai Tuesday morning, we’re going to go back to Rainy Pass, where as Iditarod mushers make their way over the Alaska range, they find the last checkpoint for supplies and a rest at the Rainy Pass Lodge on Puntilla Lake. As Alaska Public Media’s Zachariah Hughes reports, it’s a good place to pause, maybe reflect, and definitely to prepare before heading towards the most technical sections of the trail.

[sounds of dogs and supplies moving]

Zachariah Hughes: Sarah Stokey pulls onto Puntilla Lake with a team of dogs that has been gradually climbing the Alaska Range.

Sarah Stokey: Hi

Unknown Voices: Bib number?

SS: 52

Voice 1: Perfect. We’re going to give you your bags here

Voice 2: Are you going to stay or are you going to rest? SS: I’m going to stay

V1: She’s gonna stay, ok

ZH: Stokey grabs three heavy drop bags full of supplies, and parks her dogs for a rest. She’s in good company, except for Nic Petit and Pete Kaiser, who flew through mid-morning, almost all of the teams at the front of the pack are taking a break. Checkpoint at the Rainy Point Lodge has a festive atmosphere. Frozen lake is covered with planes and helicopters that bring tourists for day trips, the rustic wooden building is ringed with picturesque mountain peaks. It’s not where Matt Hall would have chosen to stop, but he wanted a veterinarian to check out a dog’s toenail problem.

Matt Hall: Little noisy, but they rest good.

ZH: Hall came off the Yukon Quest a few weeks ago, and likes camping out with his team beyond the hubbub of checkpoints, but he knows that enough teams are likely to stop here that he can keep toward the front of the pack.

MH: It’s definitely an advantage, being toward the front early on, just because of that, you know, you get 20,000 dog feet over it, and 50 sleds, and it starts getting softer and softer, then as the heat of the day comes on to.

ZH: Hard packed, smooth trail that gets punchy and pulverized after heavy traffic is slower and more effort for the dogs. In the cool, early hours before many mushers had gone over, Linwood Fiedler says the trail heading up toward the Rainy Pass checkpoint was something to behold.

LF: I don’t think I’ve ever seen it better. It’s certainly one of the best trails ever. Yeah, I mean, it’s the Iditarod trail, but boy it’s pretty good shape.

ZH: Fiedler also wants to take advantage of the midday warmth, rest his dogs while the bright sun and relative warmth soften the trail.

LF: It’s just gonna get warmer and warmer and warmer, when it’s like this, 5 degrees, going up makes a huge difference. I mean, it’s just, you can just see that team kind of wilt [laughs] I mean, they’re like a car with no antifreeze in the radiator

ZH: After the lodge, the route keeps going up, until it hits Rainy Pass itself, it weaves back and forth, over a river, enveloped by steep mountain peaks on both sides. This year, trail crews had to build 20 bridge crossings over sections of open water. From Puntilla Lake, it’s 35 miles up and through the pass to the Rohn checkpoint. It’s a kind of dog driving that requires some finesse.

Jessie Royer: I’d have to say, my team is pretty controlled anyways.

ZH: Jessie Royer is in a good mood as she straws her dogs. It’s not just the pass that’s challenging, she says, what follows is the drops and turns of the gorge, and the bumps of the tunnels. Royer’s approach is to rest and charge her dogs, before embarking on the hours over the pass, but keep them moving, winding down their power, until all the technical stretches are behind them.

JR: I don’t stop until we get out of it all, so I do it all in one run. Cause otherwise, if you don’t if you stop in Rohn, you’re leaving with a fresh team right away on the buffalo tunnels, which is even worse. Buffalo tunnels is always worse than the gorge.

ZH: It’s a stage in the race when there’s strategy not just in reading the trail, but in using a dog teams relative restedness or fatigue to help navigate perilous terrain. From the Rainy Pass Lodge on the Iditarod Trail, I’m Zachariah Hughes.

Casey Groves: So between Rainy Pass and Nikolai, is the checkpoint of Rohn. To get there, the teams navigate some pretty treacherous sections, reaching the races highest elevation of 3,160 feet. I mean, it’s a mountain pass. You’re going on some pretty narrow trail, and there’s mountains and ravines, there are twists and turns, ups and downs, there’s some mushing on the edge of the ravine - it’s intense. If you want to get a look at it, I encourage you to google “Jeff King Dalzell Gorge”. The first video that should come up is from a very low snow year in 2014. Those sections of trail destroyed some sleds and destroyed some mushers dreams of reaching Nome that year. I first saw those sections of trail that same year, in 2014, from the safety of a helicopter. That was my rookie year on the Iditarod. But as a rookie, in the race, it must be daunting to hear the stories and then finally get up into the pass and see what you got yourself into. And, Jeff King’s a four time champion. He’s very experienced musher. He’s run the Iditarod as much as anybody competing in the race these days. But, in addition to the really competitive slate of mushers in this year’s Iditarod, which includes five past champions (King, one of them), nearly one in five Iditarod mushers this year is brand new to the race. As Ben Matheson reports, the ten rookies each set out on the trail with a deep range of skills and experiences.

Ben Matheson: 21 year old Martin Apayauq Reitan is coming off of Yukon Quest, in which he took home Rookie of the Year honors. But, he had a tough time managing his sleep during the race, something he wants to improve upon in his second 1000 mile race.

Martin Apayauq Reitan: We need to have a good time, and we’ll see if I’ll be able to race or if I’ll oversleep again, and then, you know, I’ll have to adjust my expectations, but I’ll try my best and have fun.

BM: Reitan lives on the north slope of Kaktovik, where, among other things, he guides polar bear viewing expeditions. After the race, he’ll skip the jet and instead mush his team north, to Kotzebue, where his dad will run the Kobuk 440. After that, it’s hundreds of miles north to and to the east, to Kaktovik, the same epic trip he made two years ago with his dad. Mushing is also a family affair for Jessica Klejka, who grew up the oldest of 7 kids running dogs in Bethel. Her passion for mushing also overlaps with her professional life - she’s a veterinarian. But Klejka says her professional knowledge can cause her to overthink things with her dogs.

Jessica Klejka: And so I see something happen and, you know, like if I toss a dog a piece of fish and he doesn’t eat it right away, I start going okay wait, what’s going on, why doesn’t he want to eat the fish. And I start smelling the fish, like is it okay, and - but for the most part I think it’s very advantageous because I get a lot of calls from mushers the last few weeks before Iditarod, asking a lot of questions, and it’s kind of fun.

BM: For more than two decades, Ed Hopkins from Tagish Yukon Territory, has been running the Yukon Quest, notching several top five finishes. But, after watching his wife, Michelle Phillips, running the Iditarod in recent years, he says the Iditarod temptation became hard to ignore.

Ed Hopkins: Actually, you get the itch, and I got the itch

BM: His team has already completed a 1000 mile race this year. Phillips ran the team to a 4th place finish in the Quest last months. Hopkins says the race-hardened dogs know more about the trail than he does.

EH: I’m a rookie in a lot of senses, like I don’t know some of the little hidden things that are out there that give advantage to a lot of other people, so, I’m just gonna go and do my own thing pretty much.

BM: Norwegian Niklas Wikstrand has worked with Pete Kaiser in Bethel for a few years, and gotten his race experience in brutal, Kuskokwim river conditions, and he’s been on a specific schedule to get the dogs the right racing experience.

Niklas Wikstrand: Going a little slower, rest enough, and that’s our teams main goal, to rest and run quite conservative, and make sure that as many dogs get to Nome, and just keeping the dogs happy and healthy.

BM: As the rookies navigate the races most technical and steep sections in the first couple days in the race, they’ll be one step closer to joining the elite club of Iditarod finishers. I’m Ben Matheson, in Anchorage.

Casey Groves: These rookie standings are definitely subject to change as teams leapfrog each other here in the race. At least check, Ed Hopkins was leading the rookies in 32nd place; then Richie Beattie in 34th; Sebastien Dos Santos Borges in 37th. There’s Jessica Klejka, who we just heard from, in 38th place; Niklas Wikstrand in 41st, Blair Braverman in 42nd, Ryan Santiago in 46th, Alison Lifka in 47th, Martin Apayauq Reitan in 48th, and bringing up the rear, in 52nd place, Victoria Hardwick.

At least check, all the rookies in this years race still yet to reach the checkpoint of Rohn, and I want to mention Rohn real quick. It’s not really a community or anything, they’ve listed it at population zero, it’s basically just a cabin or a roadhouse they call it, and definitely the population swells when it’s an Iditarod checkpoint. They’ve got veterinarians there to checked the dogs, they’ve got race officials - and of course, they’ve got mushers coming in. And, different Iditarod checkpoints have totally different flavors. Some are hectic, full of visitors and volunteers; others are literal ghost towns, nestled quite deliberately in the middle of the wilderness.

The Rohn checkpoint is the latter, with hardly any amenities or distractions. The volunteer staffers have to find ways to amuse themselves, in the lulls, when there are no mushers - it might be a little boring, they’re trying to entertain themselves. This year, as Alaska Public Media’s Zachariah Hughes found out, they are throwing axes.

[sound of an axe hitting wood, men cheering]

Men’s voices: Aha! That was it? That was the bullseye, dead center, that’s perfect!

Zachariah Hughes: Like, what’s the right technique for doing it? Like, when you’re giving someone an introductory lesson, how do you explain it?

Man’s Voice [Unknown]: Uh, normally I ask, you know, right or left handed. If you’re right handed, you want your left hand on the bottom, right hand on top, you know I try to keep everything in a straight line and use your whole body.

ZH: What are you guys doing right now? MV: Axe throwing? Yeah, we’re axe throwing

[sound of an axe, throwing]

MV: [loudly] Yeah! That was it, that was perfect

ZH: The Rohn checkpoint is mostly just a cabin, it’s in a clearing in a pretty wooded area, just after the Dalzell gorge, near a river, they’ve got some arctic ovens set up, some snow machines, there’s an outhouse, but - mostly it’s a one room cabin from 1910 that the Parks Service maintains. Nowadays, it’s a shelter cabin.

Woman’s Voice: We find something to do, we tell our stories

ZH: Throw weapons

WV: Well, we don’t allow guns out when the mushers are here, but pre and post race we do a little target shooting. But, I asked Mark to bring an axe, because I’ve always wanted to do this. I’ve never done this before.

ZH: Oh, and you guys knew each other before this?

WV: I met him last summer at the lumberjack show.

ZH: Mm.

[sound of axe thudding]

ZH: The volunteers here have to be a little bit more hardy than at other places, because they’re left out here mostly unsupported, it’s basically camping.

WV: Well, there’s nobody lives here year round, so we all come out for Iditarod, because we like dogs, we like going to remote places in Alaska, meeting people from all over, and it’s a satisfaction of helping people get down the trail, whether it’s snow machining, or walking, or mushing dogs, so it’s a good camaraderie feeling of Alaska.

ZH: Do you like throwing the axe? WV: Yeah, it feels good. You should give it a try.

[sound of axe thudding, woman yells “nice!”]

Man’s Voice: And when you release, you want kind of to release high so the axe carries down into the target, because it’s heavy

ZH: Do you guys always do this every year, out here? MV: This is my first year, so no, I don’t think so? But maybe from now on [laughs] I got started in college as a collegiate sport, so it’s called the woodsmen’s team in college, and so I competed collegiately. Me personally, I ended up doing well enough at the end of my four years, I was able to go pro, and then I competed professionally and also did lumberjack shows.

ZH: Is that what brought you up to Alaska?

MV: Yeah, I did a show for Great Alaska Lumberjack Show in Ketchikan Alaska, I did that for four years, one of my good friends, Tina Sheer, owns a show in May, and she’s the one that did a show at the Alaska State Fair, and she’s actually worked the Rohn checkpoint too, in the past.

[axe thuds]

Casey Groves: I still have a lot of questions about Zach throwing axes. And, that’s a contrived segue to today’s listener question! It’s actually two related questions in Aaron Knight’s language arts classes out in Unalaska

Alyssa; My name’s Alyssa, I’m also from Unalaska, and my groupmates are Michelle, Natalie, and Alyssa-Marie, and our question is have any of the mushers got hurt, and did they have to stop participating in the race?

Aaron: Hi, my name is Aaron, my groups are Matius and Zach, what happens if the dogs got hurt?

CG: Thanks for listening, and thanks for the great questions everybody. So, what happens when there are injuries on the trail? Here’s our trail reporter, Zachariah Hughes, with the answer.

Zachariah Hughes: If the dog’s hurt, his or her musher will leave it at a checkpoint. The veterinarians take care of it and the Iditarod takes over, they’ll take groups of dogs who are hurt, or dropped, or sick, and move them back to Anchorage, or somewhere where a handler or somebody who knows the musher picks up the dog and takes care of it for a while. Mushers, unless they’re really really hurt, will keep going. One time, Aaron Burmeister broke his knee coming down the Dalzell Gorge, and he finished the Iditarod hundreds of miles later, limping over the finish line, but he made it. So, other times mushers will fall of their sleds and crack ribs and maybe withdraw or maybe keep going, they are pretty tough and it’s really up to them, if they’re hurt, if they want to keep trying to finish the race.

CG: Thanks for getting that answer to us Zach, and as always I want to remind the listeners that you can send your questions to iditarod@alaskapublic.org. The best way to do that and maybe get on the podcast is to open up your smartphone, find that voice memo app, record your question in your own voice, and send that to iditarod@alaskapublic.org and that’s the best way to get your answer. Well, everybody that’s all the time we have for today, our theme music is by the band Sassafrassh, I’m your host Casey Groves, and until next time - happy tails.

Linwood Fiedler: You just gotta be ready to be game on and not be sleepy [laughs] so.

ZH: How are you gonna do that?

LF: How am I gonna do that? I’m gonna try and take an hour nap here. [laughs]

ZH: Out here, like in the sled bag?

LF: You know, I may lay down with them, or I guess there’s a little cabin we can get in if we want.

ZH: But you don’t have like an exoskeleton for the gorge?

LF: [laughs] No. My head hits a tree, is what’s gonna happen.

ZH: Well I hope you make it out in one piece, thanks a lot man, take care

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