Huskies at the ready for Last Great Race

ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES SATURDAY, MARCH 4TH, 2000: TOM HUMPHRIESgoes to Alaska for the unique 1,100-mile Iditarod endurance race, as much spiritual journey as athletic challenge, where competitors like the legendary DeeDee Jonrowe discover what is outside and inside

DEEDEE JONROWE lives in Willow, Alaska, with one husband, two cats, two labradors and 86 Siberian huskies. Willow lies between Big Lake and Sheep Creek or more precisely, in the middle of nowhere. Huskies outnumber people. It’s a lifestyle, says DeeDee. But you’d guessed that already.

DeeDee’s addiction. They call it the Iditarod, the Last Great Race, an adrenalin cocktail of tradition, history, extreme sports and pantheism. This old land of gold diggers, desperados, Jack London and Dangerous Dan McGrew keeps in touch with its own harsh and epic history through the Iditarod, a 1,100-mile sled race through the wilderness.

DeeDee Jonrowe is 47 and this morning she gets her 20 dogs hooked up on a street in Anchorage and faces northwards into the wild and sets off on her 18th Iditarod race

In Anchorage, almost everybody looks as if they are a little down on their luck, as if they’ve run away from something. The wind howls from the Cook inlet, Mount McKinley stands ominous and distant, the broad streets have great scabs of ice skirting them half the year. It’s a hard town which takes its stern nature from the great white land it serves as gateway to. Once a year the wilderness visits.

Fourth Avenue is a no-frills artery fringed by struggling tack shops and greasy spoon cafes. At one end you can see the shark teeth peaks of distant mountains. This morning, though, Fourth Avenue is the centre of the Alaskan imagination. From just outside Blondies Cafe, 1,200 huskies yelp up the morning air, brush tails wagging and eager for the trail as they are mushed off into the Alaskan interior.

You would call it lunacy if it weren’t so austere. The mushers head into the great alone that is the Alaskan tundra, along frozen rivers, including the broad, majestic Yukon, through two mountain ranges and along the windwhipped coast of the Bering Sea.

The sleds bounce off snow berms, risk breaking on mogul fields. One belligerent moose on the trail can end it all for a musher.

It is 1,100 lonely miles. They ride through the nights because it is too cold to stop. They snatch sleep in those hours when the sun spreads its watery light around. Mainly, though, they just keep on keeping on.

The place names are part of the sweet poem of the wilderness. Anchorage to Wasilla. Knik to Yentna to Skwentna to Finger Lake (Pop. 2). Rainy Pass. Takotna. Cripple. Ruby. Galena. Shoktoolik. Golivin. White Mountain. Safety. Nome. And a lyrical necklace of little places in between.

The route from Anchorage to Nome is part historical, part whimsy. In 1925 when the Gold Rush was still swinging the children of Nome became exposed to diphtheria. The only serum available in Alaska was in Anchorage. No planes were available so the serum was sent to Nanana on the train and sped the rest of the way to Nome by a series of 20 mushers working in relay.

Before that the Iditarod trail had been a mail and supply route. Iditarod itself is one of a number of deserted mining towns along the sometimes eerie race route. The trail and the art of mushing was forgotten about until the Last Great Race was brought to life in 1973.

Today the Iditarod is a race, a supreme athletic challenge, a community festival and a central part of Alaskan culture. It unites newcomers and native Alaskans in a love of an old art. It keeps people coming to Alaska for the same reason they always have, danger and adventure.

One day soon DeeDee Jonrowe will win the Iditarod, the race she circles obsessively. She won’t be the first woman to have done so. During the 1980s when Susan Butcher was at her peak, they used to say that in Alaska men were men and women won the Iditarod but when DeeDee wins the big one the cheering will rend the Aurora Borealis. She will be one of the most beloved winners the Last Great Race has known.

People come to Alaska and the Great Race for all kinds of reasons. Mike Nosko mushed through the wilderness as a catharsis after his six brothers died, one after the other from alcohol-related deaths. Charlie Boulding just quit North Carolina to live a life of self-sufficiency and sled dogs in an isolated cabin near Manley. Next year Chuck King is racing to stave off the AIDS virus.

DeeDee Jonrowe came here because her father was a military man and she had no choice. She came, stayed and became part of the landscape, part of the essential spirit of the Iditarod.

“We were nomads. I was born in Frankfurt, we lived in Athens for a while, I started school in Ethiopia, ended it in Okinawa, graduated from High School in Virginia and then came to Alaska in July of 1971 and went to college that fall in Fairbanks.”

How can DeeDee best describe Alaska, its wilderness and its place in her soul? Perhaps by framing the picture within the parameters of deep personal loss. One night a few years ago she and her husband and grandmother were driving home to Willow from a sled dog symposium. On a dark Alaskan highway they collided head-on with another vehicle.

“My grandmother died in the seat next, to me. My husband Mike was critically injured. So was I. I was the only one conscious. My Labrador, who we had with us, died also. It was an extremely bad situation. Thirty below zero. Trapped in the car for an hour and half, one of those violent situations you have nightmares about. I had to deal with it, set a cell phone call for help.

“My husband couldn’t walk for many months afterwards, couldn’t speak even. His mother and brother had died violent deaths and he’d almost joined them.”

DeeDee ran the Iditarod race four months after the accident and came in fourth. It was something she had to do.

“I feel like my strength comes from being out there in the quiet. I’d had major abdominal surgery and lost six inches from my intestine so I was spooked about getting the handlebar in my stomach for 18 hours a day for 10 days or getting the dogs punching me in the stomach when they’d greet me. But the aloneness, the chance for that serenity and solitude and the chance to grieve properly after my grandmothers death and Mike’s operations called me. I had to do it.

“I went off into the wilderness in tears wondering what I was doing there. It was a lot of stress, a lot of figuring out why this was important. It was about beginning to take charge: of my life again, healing myself and getting back my time. I relate that to people now, people who come here in grief: This too will pass and the strength will come from living through each day.”

The race was the first time she had been separated from her husband since the accident. Through the miles her mind kept revisiting the fear he wouldn’t be there when she came back.

“But it humbles you and heals you, living as one with the animals, living in their rhythm , falling back on yourself and your thoughts, having to cope moving through the majesty of this world.”

Jonrowe fell for sled dogs as soon as she came to Alaska. Her first permanent home was in Bethel in Western Alaska and immediately she got herself a five-dog team and faced her first challenge. It was 1979 and the phenomenon of women who wanted to mush was unheard of.

She began competing with a little village race outside Bethel. Did okay. The race was run on the ice outside of Bethel rather than on an established trail like dogs run in the interior. DeeDee was the only woman in the race.

“They didn’t think any woman would try to run so they hadn’t made any rule against it. It took them till the next year to make that rule.” By then DeeDee had enough dogs to enter a 20-dog team in the Iditarod.

“Once we got competitive there was resistance. It’s a bit better nowadays. It wasn’t something they were real comfortable with. Guys didn’t appreciate it at all. They thought it might be a novelty but once you got competitive they got more abrasive. Once you got competitive it was too late for them to do anything about you being there too.”

The social environment was no surprise to her. She worked as a biologist for the state, driving boats hundreds of miles up and down the river, taking snowmobiles hundreds of miles into the interior just to count musk ox. Alaskan men held no surprises for her. Anyway her love affair was with the land and her dogs. All else was clutter.

This year’s is a key race for DeeDee. After a series of 11 top-10 finishes, including two second places, she had the unique experience of having her team quit on her last year when they were on the Yukon river. Her lead dog Commander became confused and overwhelmed by his task and just sat down. His despondency spread to the other dogs. They all sat down. Strike.

“The lead dog just became overwhelmed. I couldn’t convince him it was okay. In the end I just had to pull him off the river and take him home. He was out of his depth, competing at a level he wasn’t mentally equipped for. He works with a recreational team at a bed and breakfast now and he is as happy as can be.”

Her first withdrawal in 17 Iditarods hurt. Jonrowe spends as much as two years identifying those dogs who will lead the pack, moving them into different groups, putting them into different areas of development, moving them closer to dogs they are most talent-matched with, developing their personalities and bonding them to her.

She gets help from any quarter. This year she visited the horse whisperer Josh Lyons, learning how he works with the reinforcement of animals’ natural instincts.

“I’ve learned about building the dog’s confidence to the point where he thinks he is invincible, giving him tasks and challenges he will always succeed at. I’ve taken the dogs all over Alaska getting them used to the mountains, the ice of the rivers the wind chill from the Bering Sea, the storms, the endurance.”

And herself? Nothing is more vulnerable in the monstrous whiteness of Alaska than mere humans. Mushing is about courage and sense and survival.

“Yeah I’ve been scared out there and I will be again,” she says. “You are living off the edge, you are in over your head. It’s Alaska.”

This morning she leaves again. Her 18th great race filled with adrenalin and nerves as usual. She thinks youthful naivety was an asset. You can dwell too much on fears.

She has rebuilt the entire front end of her team, stocking it with new dogs. Her foodstuffs have been deposited at the 21 checkpoints along the way. Ten days of solitude and cold await her. Her annual purge of the spirit.

“This is more than just a sport,” says DeeDee Jonrowe. “This is a spiritual journey. This is why people came to Alaska in the beginning. To find what’s out there.”

And what’s inside.