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anamuseinglife · 6 years ago

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Iditapod: Mushing the Mighty Yukon

Alison Lifka: So very rustic and not technical but it worked!

Ben Matheson: Whatever works! I mean, you’re here

AL: Yeah!

[theme music plays]

Casey Grove: Welcome to the Iditapod, a podcast about the Iditarod where we are all about rustic and not being too technical. We are a production of Alaska Public Media, and KNOM in Nome. I’m your host, Casey Grove, that was Iditarod rookie musher Alison Lifka you just heard from. Before we fix up our sleds and get out on the trail, here’s a word from our sponsor.

[ad plays]

CG: Well, it’s the weekend. We told you Friday about Nicolas Petit, the Girdwoods musher, being the first to be at the Yukon River, winning that five course meal. And right now it’s Saturday, we’ve seen some leapfrogging at the front of the pack. As I’m recording this, Bethel’s Pete Kaiser has been in the lead for a bit. Petit’s team is right behind him heading up the Yukon River out of Eagle Island. Jessie Royer and Joar Ulsom, the defending champ, not far behind. We’re going to hear more from Ulsom here in a minute about how he is carrying the ashes of a friend of his and a former Iditarod musher, Rudy Demoski, out on the trail, that’s coming up. Ulsom was the first out of the Grayling checkpoint last night. It looked like mushers were a little bunched up there, and taking rests before setting out for Eagle Island. We had heard that planes were unable - again, for the second year in a row - to get drop bags into Eagle Island, and so mushers may have been adjusting their plans in Grayling and staying there longer than they had anticipated. The front of the pack mushers are all spread out between Grayling, Eagle Island, and Kaltag, and when they get to Kaltag, they’re gonna start heading west towards the coast where they reach the edge of Alaska, the coast of Alaska. We have more in this upcoming story from Alaska Public Media’s Zachariah Hughes about the trouble in Eagle Island. He was in Anvik, again that’s the beginning of the Yukon River portion of the Iditarod. We’re going to jump right into his story, where he talked to Nicolas Petit about how Petit has been camping out more in this year’s Iditarod.

Zachariah Hughes: Unlike previous years, Petit has mostly blown through checkpoints, opting instead to rest his team along the trail. [to Petit] How has it been for you, camping out at checkpoints along the way? Nicolas Petit: I didn’t have to deal with this, no offense, but we’re tired people and we’ve got a lot of work to do.

ZH: Is it more for you or more for the dogs?

NP: The both of us.

ZH: The ride to the Iditarod checkpoint was rough, with barely any snow and vicious tundra tussocks that kept nearly bucking him off of his sled.

NP: That was the roughest trip to Iditarod I’ve ever been on. Jokingly saying to myself, we’re at tussock level number five, probably close to the highest rating, you know?

ZH: Even with a group of reporters, vets, race officials, and spectators, Petit was so focused on his dogs that his baggy, overwhite pants kept falling to his knees as he walked up and down the line. He seemed to hardly notice, until the task at hand was over and he would hike them back up to his belly, until they dropped again. In the tribal hall next to the checkpoint, Petit sat down at a folding table to a five course meal of steak, scallops, salad, and bison chili, prepared over two camp stoves.

NP: [to people] Excellent, 2019, I’ll carry on.

[champagne pops]

ZH: Petit left for a nap, but he didn’t sleep long. He pulled out of Anvik after about four hours. Weather along the Yukon has been messy. As the next wave of mushers came in, race judges had to give Jessie Royer and other the bad news that the second year in a row, there were problems getting supplies to the checkpoint in Eagle Island.

Woman: Did you hear, um, they still, they don’t have the food to Eagle Island yet.

Jessie Royer: Oh, I just asked them in Shageluk, and they told me they did. There’s no food-

Woman: As of right now. But they’re making the effort to bring it down from Kaltag.

JR: Oh.

Woman: By snow machine. So.

JR: Okay.

Woman: So by the time you get to Grayling -

JR: I’m doing my 8 in Grayling, so

Woman: You might want to grab a bag

ZH: Although there was straw and fuel available, Iditarod crews were trying to carry in mushers drop bags with food and other supplies. Last year, weather shut down the Eagle Island checkpoint, prompting mushers to load up on supplies for the long run between Grayling and Kaltag. Now, with a similar situation, mushers are having to adjust their plans on the fly, as they begin moving north up the Yukon. In Anvik, I’m Zachariah Hughes.

Casey Grove: Well, one of the Iditarod’s pioneers is taking one last run. Joar Ulsom is carrying the ashes of longtime musher Rudy Demoski to spread along the trail. As he prepared to pass through Demoski’s hometown of Anvik, Ulsom says he’s humbled.

Joar Leifseth Ulsom: It’s an honor to do that.

CG: Demoski was a familiar face along the Iditarod trail for decades, and was instrumental in starting the Kuskokwim 300 out of Bethel. Demoski died last year at the age of 72. During Leifseth Ulsom’s rookie race in 2013, he met Demoski, who was running his final race. He was nicknamed “The Happy Musher” and Leifseth Ulsom says Demoski came to Willow a lot, to help him train dogs.

JLU: He would just sit, and have fun in the side by the side, and look a the dogs and tell stories from the old days. And yeah. I think the main thing I learned from him was just to enjoy life. He was just such a happy guy, and even the little, the smallest thing would get him fired up and laughing, and all the way to the end, you know, he was just super happy.

CG: Demoski’s roots with the race could be traced all the way back to the beginning. He ran the 2nd Iditarod, and placed 4th as a rookie. Now, back to this year’s race. The moves that we’re seeing at the front of the pack and other mushers making their way up the ranks right now, that all was setting up back when they were taking their 8 hour rests, or planning them out anyways. That dangerous chase pack of mushers was setting themselves up to capitalize on any opportunity that may come up. Speaking off Pete Kaiser, for example, he was leading the Iditarod as I record this. It’s been this cat and mouse game between Nicolas Petit and Joar Ulsom, and you’ve got teams like Pete that have been building up and building up and they’re now moving into the lead of this race. And this pack that’s chasing, that’s sometimes overtaking Petit and Ulsom, all of that shaped up before the Yukon River, back when those musher’s were planning their 8 hour breaks. KNOM’s Ben Matheson has more.

Ben Matheson: Pete Kaiser had one of the fastest runtimes Friday into Shageluk, but what he’s focused on is consistency.

Pete Kaiser: One run you’re fast and then the next run, you’re not. So, we’re trying to string more of those together in a row now, and try and get some more consistency, because the first half of the race for us has been real up and down and real inconsistent.

BM: Kaiser has often been conservative in the early parts of the race, and waited to make a big push with a more rested team. Matthew Failor got into Shageluk to time his 8 hour break to avoid the heat of the day. He’s being extra careful to prepare his team for the big runs ahead, including the longer stop in Iditarod.

Matt Failor: That gave me five hours of rest there, when other mushers were staying for four, and then I’ll stay here for 8. So I’m starting to bank rest to build up for this last leg, if you will. So, I don’t know. I’m not really thinking about other mushers, but trying to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to do, right.

BM: The Yukon trails are well traveled by local snow machines, but there’s snow in the forecast that could shake things up, if the trail becomes marginal. Mushers will never speak openly about their exact plans for getting their teams to the coast, but last years Rookie of the Year, Jessie Holmes, says he has a few tricks up his sleeve.

Jessie Holmes: These dogs have the ability to go long and fast, so, I haven’t used that quite yet. I used it one time and that’s what I did all the rest and implemented all the rest for, so I could try to make big moves and if they’re suitable and the dogs are ready for them and I made one already.

BM: Fresh off his 24, Holmes made a long run from Ophir to Iditarod to climb the standings across the rugged terrain. The race is switching from the rolling hills of gold rush country, to the wide plains of the Yukon River. Paige Drobny arrived into Shageluk in the 9th position, and is eager to hit the river.

Paige Drobny: They really like trails that they can move on, and we haven’t had that for a little bit. The run into Iditarod when we would hit some ice or a road like this, then they would just get cruising along really fast, um, seems like that makes everybody really happy, than the bumpy trails where they’re constantly getting pulled on by the sled, we’re pulling and pushing constantly, I don’t think it’s probably very comfortable for them.

BM: And as more teams finish their breaks, they’ll run with fresh legs throughout the night. With KNOM, I’m Ben Matheson, in Shageluk.

Casey Grove: We’ve got more from that interview that Ben conducted with Paige Drobny, that’s posted as a bonus, extended interview here, and I may have said in the intro to that recording that she arrived in Shageluk in 10th, I think Ben said 9th, I’m not sure which one was right but she was in the top 10 either way. Also looking at posting a long version of the Martin Apayauq Reitan interview in a little bit, Reitan, he is one of the mushers who has had to do some serious sled repairs. For these Iditarod mushers, sled problems can really upend a race. They can also give a critical edge. Some mushers try out new designs or even modifications made out on the trail to give them an advantage; others have to try to patch up malfunctions and damage that has occurred out on the trail with just about anything they can find. It’s really a struggle that inspires some creative resourcefulness. Again, here’s Alaska Public Media’s Zach Hughes, with his reporting.

ZH: Jeff King likes to experiment with his equipment.

Jeff King: Pulling a Jeff King… magic trick.

ZH: He’s cranking a wrench, and augering bigger holes in wide, runner plastic that he hopes will help him float on top of powdery, deep snow. This takes a lot more effort than swapping out regular runner plastic, but he’s tried it in the past and been pleased with the results. His sled bag though, that is new. King tinkered with a design that doesn’t have zippers or velcro, and that lets him open the bag from behind like a hatch while he stands on the runners, almost like he’s checking a baby in a stroller.

JK: I love it! Really love it, because I had no idea how often I want to get in my sled and I didn’t because it’s such a hassle to get in there. I just flip it up while I’m hauling [bleeped] down the trail. Yeah, I’m in in all the time. Really like that.

ZH: So far this race, King’s equipment story is one of success. That’s not the case for everyone. And rookies in particular face a challenge when their gear breaks down, because for many, there are inevitable problems they didn’t anticipate or build a contingency plan for. Martin Reitan hit trouble early in his run during the Alaska range. A stanchin, one of the load bearing pieces of the sled’s frame, broke.

Martin Apayauq Reitan: I had to go and chop down a tree and, uh, lash it on with string.

ZH: Reitan rode his tree patched sled to the next checkpoint, then shored it up some more.

MAR: That took like three hours. To do it nice.

ZH: It was enough to get him past the Dalzell Gorge, and the burn. It sort of had to. Reitan hadn’t sent equipment down the trail for these kinds of repairs, nor did he out a backup sled in case his got busted. And, even after he finishes the Iditarod, this same sled has further to go.

MAR: And I have to bring that sled to Nome, because we’re going to Kaktovik after.

ZH: Reitan and his father planned to mush their team all the way from the Seward Peninsula all the way back to Kaktovik, on the eastern side of the north slope. But, he wasn’t too bothered about the situation. Alison Lifka, another rookie, was trying to sort out sled troubles of her own during her 24 hour rest in Takotna.

Alison Lifka: There is a certain downhill that I lost control of the team and veered off the trail a little bit, and found the stump.

ZH: The stump bent a runner and tore away a big chunk of the sled.

AL: And it’s one thing to run a sled with the back part of the runner broken, but when it’s the front part it just destroys the structural integrity, so it was like just collapsing as it ran.

ZH: Lifka gerryrigged a splint, but the sled kept warping. At Nikolai, she had some good luck, Another musher, Shaynee Traska, had just scratched, and let Lifka take her sled. But the situation was not ideal. Lifka could barely fit all of her equipement, and there was no seat to rest on. Which wouldn’t be such a problem if she hadn’t injured her back when she crashed her sled into that stump.

AL: It’s just sore and stiff, and it’s, it’s just me trying to make my next - what is it, 600 more miles? - more comfortable.

ZH: Lifka was hoping to borrow a bigger sled that another musher had left behind. Race rules allow competitors to exchange equipment with one another. And if that didn’t work out, she had been advised to try tying an upside down bucket to her runners with twin from a bale of straw. But, she said, that wouldn’t help with the storage problem. In Takotna, I’m Zachariah Hughes.

Casey Grove: There’s one very important piece of equipment out there that helps a musher stay sane mushing over hundreds and hundreds of miles. That is a way to play music. And apparently, Matt Hall out of Two Rivers, he had to buy some headphones during the race this year for that very reason. He was at a checkpoint purchasing some headphones. It might be more music, podcasts, books on tape - they kind of do it all. You hear about mushers having their friends load up iPods with different tunes that they’ve never heard before that surprise them in shuffle mode as different stuff comes up randomly. At the Takotna checkpoint, Zach spoke with two mushers. We heard from them here a minute ago, Martin Reitan as well as Meredith Mapes, who finished the Iditarod in 2018. This year, she’s not a musher in the race but helping out at different checkpoints. It turns out that they are both very big Harry Potter fans - Martin, a self-described Gryffindor, listens to the Harry Potter books on tape and by his 24 hour rest, was on the 3rd installment. Meredith Mapes, on the other hand, self identifies as Hufflepuff, whatever that means. Both insist their house values align with dog mushing, something Zach, who knows a lot more about this, asked them about. And this is a disclaimer for people like me: if you already have no idea what any of this terminology means, because you signed up for a mushing podcast not a Harry Potter fan club podcast, you should probably skip ahead about two and half minutes. Here is Zachariah Hughes with Martin Reitan and Meredith Mapes.

Martin Reitan: Well it depends, you know, you could be… you could be a Slytherin about it and play mind games with people and stuff, but uh… you know… sometimes you’ll do, if there’s a bad weather but you think you could do it, but then the weather’s really bad and you just do it, that’s pretty, it’s a little bit stupid but it’s also brave? That’s a very Gryffindor thing to do. And yeah. Obviously I have to be brave to even start a thousand miler.

Zachariah Hughes: Meredith, you have finished a thousand miler, but you identify as a Hufflepuff, do you think Hufflepuff is a good mushing house?

Meredith Mapes: I would say so, I think that the Gryffindors and the Slytherins and the Ravenclaws are more for the front, because they’re the ones that have the strategy and the guts and the glory, and some of the stupidity as well, as Martin was saying. And then the Hufflepuffs are those like me that are just there to have fun, to be at the back of the pack, and enjoy what they’re doing while they’re out there travelling with their dog teams.

ZH: What are, your Harry Potter litter, what are their names? MM: The three that I still have are Hagrid, Luna, and Nymphadora, but she gets called Dora most of the time.

ZH: Not Nympho.

MM: Yeah. Exactly. [all laugh]

ZH: And what, so, have you made your way through books 1-3 so far, while you’ve been listening, or did you just start at 3?

Martin Apayauq Reitan: Um…. I started listening from Book 1, so I’m on Book 3 now. I’ll probably have time to listen to all of them, but I’m mixing it up by listening to music and some other books too.

ZH: Is it also Harry Potter themed music? MAR: No [Meredith laughs] It’s quite a lot of jazz, and Arctic Monkeys, and a whole bunch of other stuff

ZH: And Meredith, did you listen to music last year, or books on tape? Or just the sound of silence?

MM: I usually listen to books on tape when I’m training a lot, mostly Game of Thrones is what I’m listening to, but I do have Harry Potter as well. And last year in the race, I listened to music on one run, on the first run on the Yukon River out of Grayling, and then after that I was just enjoying it too much, I didn’t want to mess with what I was listening to with the dogs, and with Alaska.

ZH: Now, at any point, did you scream from your sled runners “Winter is Coming” while you were mushing through a storm, last year? MM: I did not, I did not, but it would have been a good opportunity.

Casey Grove: Well now, well you know more about that. And we’d like to spread knowledge around here, that’s why we take questions on the Iditapod. This one is from Ruthan, University Heights Ohio, she writes, “is the race named after one checkpoint, or is the checkpoint named after the race? I assumed the checkpoints reflected the nearest settlement name.” And she’s asking this because there’s a checkpoint in the Iditarod called Iditarod. I’m going to let Zach Hughes answer this question.

ZH: Hey, great question. So right now, I’m standing on the Iditarod River, which goes past the checkpoint of Iditarod, on the Iditarod sled dog race, through the historic gold mining town of Iditarod in the Iditarod mining district. All of which is to say, the name has a lot of different overlapping meanings, and actually the race is named after the Iditarod trail. So, this is kind of confusing, but back when they struck gold in Iditarod, and it was the largest settlement in all of Alaska, population wise, they hoped they’d haul gold, freight, passengers through a trail that went from here all the way down to Seward and up through different overlapping trails to Nome. So, in 1973 when the race was getting started, they decided that this long, cross Alaska sled dog race would go through the historic Iditarod trail, and one of the routes that they go through - the Southern route, which we’re running this year - goes through the ghost town of Iditarod, which, looking around, I can tell you is indeed a ghost town. There’s dilapidated buildings all over the place, from back when this used to have rooming houses and churches, and a bank, and now it’s mostly just an Iditarod checkpoint with just a few buildings on a river.

CG: Thanks for that answer, Zach, from the checkpoint of Iditarod, in the 2019 Iditarod. As always, on the Iditapod, we like to take listener questions, you can send those to [email protected]. You can type them out in an email, you can also record them in a voice memo - most smart phones have an app to record voice memos - you can record those there and send those into, again, [email protected]. And you can maybe get in the podcast, and it’s always good to ask questions. And, I have some questions. I guess there are some major weather issues happening out on the race and we don’t know how that’s affecting the mushers, but also our crew out there, trying to get from checkpoint to checkpoint, the last email I got from our reporter Zach Hughes was that there was some trouble flying between some checkpoints, that Ben was trying to get to Unalakleet, and might have to skip Kaltag, we may not hear from mushers again until Unalakleet, and everybody’s just trying to be safe out there is the main thing. It’s hard to tell when you look at the map of the race, or the GPS tracker that there’s a lot of weather happening on the ground. Might be snow, wind, we’ve heard reports that it’s been pretty warm, and folks out there are getting wet just from sweat, or rain at some points. I guess Zach, he’s at Unalakleet, he found a sauna, he sounds pretty happy about that. We will be back tomorrow, we will have another episode of the Iditapod, we will explain how daylight savings time changes affect, or do not affect the race. And we will have an interview with Kristen Knight Pace, she’s an Iditarod veteran who is sitting out the race this year, but who has a new book out this year called “This Much Country”, we have a nice chat, I talked to her husband Andy Pace for a minute too. And whatever else we can rustle up in the Iditapod. Our theme music is by the band Sassafrass, I am your host Casey Grove, and until next time - happy trails.

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