'Yukon Alone'
by John Balzar

February 2, 2000
Web posted at: 5:58 p.m. EST (2258 GMT)

(CNN) -- The Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race is among the most challenging and dangerous of all the adventure contests in the world. In February, a handful of hardy women and men set out from Canada's Yukon Territory for Alaska's remote interior with teams of 14 dogs. Ahead of them lie 1,023 miles of frozen rivers, icy mountain passes, and spruce forests as big as entire states. Some mushers will try for victory. Many hope simply to finish. In the darkness of 17-hour nights, temperatures drop to 40 degrees below zero, and sometimes rescue may be days away.

CHAPTER ONE

'Mush-on' ... is the dog-drivers' rendering of the French-Canadian driver's command of marche on --to go -- hence, also the Alaskan verb "to mush," meaning to travel, in dog driving.
--James Wickersham, Old Yukon, 1938

Yukon Territory, Canada: latitude 61 degrees north - so far north that only a tiny skullcap of the planet exists above us. It is February and dark. The temperature has not risen above freezing in four months.

Dog mushers and their extended families -- spouses, children, dog handlers, and dogs -- now converge on the capital of the Yukon Territory. Crammed into wrinkled, coughing pickups, each with an electric cord from an oil-pan heater dangling out of the grille and each carrying a miniature plywood apartment building on the pickup bed, called a dog "box," with spaces for perhaps sixteen to twenty dogs, these teams crunch their way over the ice-covered roadways of Alaska and northern Canada. Destination: Whitehorse.

For observers, things are about to start in the world of long-distance dog mushing. For participants in the Yukon Quest, this is the culmination. All those hours, all that training, all this money. How much? So much there is nothing else.

Even by motor vehicle, travel is eerily lonely this time of year. There are only seven all-year highways in all of this part of North America, and they penetrate only a fraction of the gross topography. In summer, true enough, the Alaska-Canada Highway and its tributaries are the scene of great migrations of steel and pressed aluminum, the vacation herds. In winter you drive these same roadways for ten hours and arrive in the little truck stop village of Tok, Alaska, where the bartender asks, "See any cars out there?" Matter of fact saw four, plus one wolf and twenty-five moose. "Oh? What color wolf?" he asks.

Myself, I'm taking the easy way to the starting line. Already this year, I've covered the distance back and forth six times by car and bush plane, and during summer by canoe. Now I'm riding a charter bus with some Quest officials, a few reporters, and the veterinarians. It's a dark, fourteen-hour road trip, Fairbanks to Whitehorse, with three bottles of champagne, a tin of caviar, and a slab of smoked salmon in my satchel. Windows frost up inside the bus, the road is bouncy, the seats hard, the scene inside raucous. Among those on the bus is Stephane Deruaz, a thirty-eight-year-old veterinarian from the Jura Mountains of France. June Ryan, a specialist in the U.S. Army and a volunteer vet tech, is teaching Stephane to swear like a soldier in English. He looks proud of himself as he blurts out obscenities, the meaning of which he does not comprehend. The worse they get, the more June beams her approval, the harder we laugh, the prouder Stephane appears --like a third-grader spelling words without knowing their meaning. We're all acting like third-graders. The champagne bottle takes another round. And another. Nervous anticipation is one of the glories of any worthwhile journey.

We stop for coffee at a roadhouse just across the Canadian border, and we're yanked back to reality. The instant we step off the bus an icy wind bites any exposed flesh. There is no exhilarating brace to cold like this, just a flash burn. My thoughts go quickly to the realization that we will be without heated shelter soon. The giddy light-headed feeling of expectation collides with sober foreboding about the wilderness we're soon to enter. A sign says the temperature once fell to 83 below at this roadhouse.

In the end, all of us bus riders will be tired, stiff, and hungover on arrival, de rigueur it seems. What fun would it be to begin this thing in tip-top shape, anyway? Bring on the agonies.

The Quest is the toughest race in the world, according to its slogan. Few would dispute this claim, although from time to time nervous organizers worry among themselves whether to tone down their language for fear of scaring people off. But in this era of easy hype, if you can honestly make an unqualified statement like "the toughest in the world," could you possibly resist? Surely, any musher who ever completed the thousand-mile epic wouldn't relinquish the title. Are you kidding? The toughest race in the world! Just getting to the finish line without succumbing to fatigue, frostbite, or self-doubt; completing the trek without getting whipped by your own mistakes or knocked down by bad luck or being kicked in the teeth by nature; advancing around the clock for two weeks against extremes of weather and terrain without fouling that rare bond of trust you have cultivated with your animals -- that's the essential goal of most who attempt the Quest. When you sign up for the journey, you flaunt your daring. You proclaim your own physical toughness and mental durability, you assert mastery of bush craft. But mushing is unique: you also must acknowledge reciprocal dependence between yourself and these dogs for survival down the lonely storm-swept trail. Neither of you will make it alone.

Along with the mushers, a traveling road show of volunteer race officials will be hopscotching from checkpoint to checkpoint, spreading out down the length of the trail: a race marshal, three judges, eleven veterinarians, an assortment of vet techs, a timer, a handful of logistics facilitators, and me -- all of us sharing the ordeal of perpetual motion, cold, the sleepless thousand-yard stare, the rank smell of the trail, the stomach adrift from too much coffee and boiled moose meat. I know people who, thirty years later, can recall with clarity the agony of pulling all-nighters in college. The Quest will provide serious post-graduate work on the subject.

My happy-go-lucky plan to enlist once again as a vet assistant and shovel the dog yards, stick thermometers up dog butts, and otherwise try to make myself marginally useful has been dashed. I've been demoted. Down to the bottom of the volunteer ladder. I am now the Yukon Quest press liaison. The flack. Mouthpiece. Enforcer. My primary responsibility will be to manage the large contingent of reporters and photographers arriving from Germany, all expenses paid by a new race sponsor, the Frankfurt tire company Fulda. The press corps will now number more than fifty, when it used to be just a half dozen or so locals. All the old-timers up here are worried silly about the impact of this kind of press on the traditions of the race. They look to me for answers. I tell them I'm worried silly too.

Remember don't ask what they can do for you but what you can do for them....

Fateful advice.

I am issued a huge overparka, bright yellow -- the color of a daffodil, the size of a grain elevator. This, so people can spot me easily. They can. They chortle and call me Big Bird to my face. God knows what they call me behind my back.

"I'm getting ready to get nervous now," says Aliy Zirkle, a brawny, handsome twenty-eight-year-old former college track-and-field hammer thrower and a sometime wilderness biologist. She is one of four women running the Quest this year, all rookies. Aliy lives and trains in the outskirts of Fairbanks, in the mushing community of Two Rivers -- the densest concentration of mushers, sled dogs, winter trails, and expertise in the world. She is known for her oversize smile and for her swagger, the kind that strong, sexy women develop after a few years in the bush, where they are outnumbered ten to one by men who forgot what their mothers taught them about manners or combing their hair before dinner.

Parked in downtown Whitehorse amid a lineup of other pickups, Aliy is pulling restless, squirming dogs out of her dog box, hugging and encouraging them one by one, chaining them to the one-ton flatbed truck she shares with another Two Rivers musher, Jerry Louden, a shy but accomplished woodsman who, when not driving dogs, wheels a road grader and snowplow for the Alaska Department of Transportation. Aliy is striking and chatty, Jerry lumbering and mutely reserved. Between them is an age difference of eighteen years, a shared devotion to the remote outdoors, and a jointly managed kennel. When they travel together, salacious gossip is whispered behind them. I don't ask; I am fond of them both. And right now, they are facing serious matters, not gossip: which dogs to take and which to leave behind? Aliy and Jerry have spent months training and conditioning dogs. They have traveled more than one thousand miles behind their teams since summer. But only at this last moment are they making the final decisions about the last two dogs in the kennel: which of them goes in whose team? It is morning on race day.

Race day. The sun peekaboos through rolling hilltop clouds; temperature: zero. Everyone bundles up as if it's colder because of a cheek- reddening wind out of the north. Yukoners still calibrate and discuss that combination of temperature and breeze called windchill, as do Americans in the Lower 48. By that measure, it's something like 25 below. The local radio describes conditions as 'potentially dangerous.' As a rule, Alaskans do not calculate windchill, feeling no need to over-dramatize matters. If there is a breeze, zip up your parka. Meanwhile, clouds trundle low and leaden across half the sky, but distant hills up the trail are lit bright with the canted rays of a sun that never reaches high above the horizon. It seems almost inviting out there.

Am I losing my mind to say such a thing?

In a few days, I will break free from the crew of officials and mush a dog team myself along some of the loneliest miles of the Quest trail. We'll see how inviting it is. Perhaps the fascination I feel for the sunlicked hills in the distance is the same the rabbit has for headlights. Whatever it is, I cannot explain it.

In town, sawhorses and survey tape block off several streets of central Whitehorse. A population of twenty-two thousand lives in this orderly, functional clapboard community on the left bank of the Yukon -- 70 percent of the residents of the entire territory. The next biggest "town" up here is rollicking Dawson City, with less than one-tenth as many people. The Quest is just about the biggest winter event to hit either, and today hundreds of Yukoners in heavy boots and billowy parkas come to watch mushers stage their dogs and finish packing their sled bags. There is knowing fascination in the eyes of these onlookers. The townsfolk understand what lies in the wild out there, what a person requires by way of skill and luck to survive in the vastness beyond the city limits.

Not only are there ten more teams than last year, but the field of thirty-eight is the strongest in recent memory, with fifteen mushers likely to vie for the top ten. Any of a half dozen are thought worthy of a victory. The purse is $30,000 for the first to reach Fairbanks. Prize money ranges downward to $1,500 for the fifteenth finisher. I'm only partly interested in the Quest as competition, however. That's a sentiment shared by most of the people I've met -- including many mushers themselves. If it costs $20,000 to prepare for the journey, and that counts only the direct expense of dog food, equipment, and the like and does not include losses that a musher sustains for forgoing a real year-round, income- producing career, and furthermore, if only the first- and second-place finishers win more than $20,000 in prize money -- well then, surely there is more to long-distance dog driving than paying the bills. I suspect the right word is adventure. Although, as any musher will tell you, a winter wilderness endeavor like this, intense and complicated, is not easily summed up in a single word, even an elegant one like adventure.

"My goal? Really, I just want to see if I can do it. I think it's going to be damn, flipping hard. I want to see," says Aliy. "Sometimes I think it will be fun, but the truth is, I don't have any idea."

As a youngster, she made up stories about herself. Wild stories. It became habit. Then one day she was grown and she was on an airplane and someone asked where she had come from, where she lived, and what she did. She told the truth. It made her smile: Aliy's real life was a stranger story by far than those she once invented for herself.

Her German-American father had run a shoe factory. When Aliy was young the family moved from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico, following the migration of the footwear industry from New England to the Caribbean. Next came high school in St. Louis. "A mess, suburbia after hippieville and surfdom," she recalls. Later, she pursued a biology degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Halfway through, she interrupted her studies. She saw a magazine ad seeking help for a bird survey in King Salmon, Alaska, a coastal fishing town. Pay was three dollars a day. She stayed six months. Then she signed on for another bird survey, in Australia. Back to Penn: biology, track and field, summers working construction, weekends as a waitress. After graduation, she hiked the Appalachian Trail.

Alaska, as sometimes happens, gripped her hardest and wouldn't let go. In 1992 she moved to Bettles, population 45, an Interior Alaskan village north of the Arctic Circle. No road reaches Bettles. She was a summer seasonal biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the huge but little known Kanuti Wildlife Refuge, a vast breeding ground for North American waterfowl. She stayed on for winter. Her first sled dog was a present from a villager. He was an old trapline leader called Skunk. She took him for a walk and decided to let him run free. That proved a mistake. For ten days, the loose dog tormented Bettles and ruined Christmas for the villagers, raiding the local stockpile of holiday ham and turkey.

Aliy spent days setting live traps, which the dog outsmarted one by one. She paid out hundreds of dollars in damages. Finally, Skunk found a trap he couldn't fool.

"When I saw him in there I walked up and I said, 'Okay, if you growl at me I'm going to have to shoot you.'" Aliy recalls, "But he wagged his tail. So I had to keep him. He's in my dog yard now, he's my pet."

By chance the region around Bettles, lowlands south of the Brooks Range, is some of the best and most historic dog country in the Far North. Old-time breeders insist that almost every good dog carries blood from just a few native villages scattered along three hundred miles of the Koyukuk River downstream from Bettles: Allakaket, Hughes, Huslia, and Koyukuk itself. Naturally, as Aliy traveled the region and expressed interest in dogs, she picked up other people's rejects and some pups. She rescued a few more when the river flooded and villagers fled in panic, leaving dogs behind. Their owners let Aliy keep what she wanted from those she saved.

She did her duties for the government, then took time off to run her team, explore, trap, and camp out in the vast emptiness of the Alaska Interior. As she tells it, she learned the subtleties of mushing from an old lead dog that was also given to her, a dog now dead.

One spring night, she mushed into the Brooks Range, the northern-most mountains in America. She looked up and the sky served a dazzling delight for her. Night after night, the sky blazed. She returned and saw Time magazine, with a cover story about Comet Hale-Bopp. How surprising. The whole world was fascinated by something she figured only she had paid any attention to. She had been so far removed as to believe in the uniqueness of her encounter with the heavens, impossibly far from what others know as "reality," and the thought filled her with pleasure. Out here it is still possible to have experiences unscripted by science and the media. Once in a while, it is even possible to reawaken ancient feelings that one might actually discover something, a sensation that sustained the curious mind through millions of years of evolutionary history.

"I can't explain why I like it out there other than it's challenging," Aliy says. "It's about freedom, where you can grasp at life a little more. You want a hamburger? Go shoot a moose, don't go to Safeway. That's a cop-out."

She's not posing, either. I've been in her tiny cabin, where three wolf pelts dangle from a nail on the wall. One afternoon, she sorts through them. Which will it be for the fur ruff on the hood of her new mushing parka: silver, black, or brindle? She chooses the silver because the fur is especially plush. She cuts the skin and sews it to her coat by hand. Despite the marvels of modern fabric and gear, the guard hairs of certain northern furbearers -- wolf and wolverine prime among them -- are the most reliable cold-weather protection known for exposed skin around the eyes. The guard hairs shield against incoming wind and resist freezing into a blob from moist, outgoing breath. What is unspeakable Outside is lifesaving here.

Aliy looks like this: thick flaxen hair to her shoulders, dimples, and big, shiny matched teeth behind a contagious smile. She has a girl's small nose and a roustabout's square jaw. She owns two skirts and one dress. She is six feet tall with broad shoulders and doesn't feel the need for high heels. Most people wouldn't recognize her dressed like that anyway. Her hands are like Vise-Grips. When she speaks of others the quality she judges first is not success but toughness. Ten days before the Quest she brings her dogs to a veterinarian for a required prerace inspection. Two dogs erupt in a fight, and as she yanks them apart, I see she is nipped on the hand. I ask, How bad is the wound? She glowers and stuffs her bleeding hand into her 38-inch-waist jeans.

"Let's see, what else is there?" she laughs. "Cookies? I made some cookies once. Did I mention the cookie part?"

Two years ago she moved from the bush in Bettles to the woodsy Fairbanks suburb of Two Rivers. Well, it is a suburb in concept anyway. Two Rivers is a collection of cabins on dirt roads in the hills north of town, an area where trail dogs probably outnumber people five or ten to one. The want ads in the local newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, have a special category, No. 102 Dog Mushing. At the local convenience store, Skip's Cache, I stopped for a six-pack once and the cashier gave me the current road conditions: caution, the last motorist through reported a cow moose grazing on the shoulder about a mile ahead.

Here Aliy established Northwind kennels with Louden. Last year, as an unknown rookie in the Quest, Louden impressed everyone with his sixth-place finish. This year, with thirty-eight dogs in their yard, both Jerry and Aliy have entered. To bring in money, Aliy went back to waitressing and working part-time construction. In her spare time she went beaver trapping to stock some high-fat trail meat for dog snacks. She also dissected the carcass of a beef calf that had been a local teenager's 4-H project. In exchange for her report on the cause of death ("I am a biologist, you know") Aliy kept the meat for dog food. Her family thinks her life is terrific; her dad sent her a 40-below sleeping bag for the race and her grandparents paid her $800 entry fee.

Do you know where your daughter is tonight? Yes, out among the wolves and the stars at 20 below, with the sky dancing smoky green: the otherworldly light show of the aurora borealis. Athabascans say the aurora lights the trail to heaven. Why not? What better home for God than up in those shivering firmaments of pure energy? This father's daughter is at the doorstep of a cathedral that few can even imagine. Where is yours?

Copyright © 2000 John Balzar