200,000 miles on a dog sled

Try to imagine this in today's world of space travel, fast cars, airplanes, trains, even round-the-world boats.  I spent the afternoon yesterday with a man who by our rough estimate has gone in the neighborhood of 200,000 miles driving dog teams.  That's eight times around the world at the equator.  Those miles include 20 Iditarods, seven Yukon Quests, several races in the range of 300 miles and thousands upon thousands of miles training as many as three teams a day. And then there was the one trip to the 8,500-foot level on Mount McKinley.

I met Sonny Lindner during the 1979 Iditarod.  He was quiet, focused, and didn't talk much, but had a winning smile and a good sense of humor.  It was after the race when my book came out that we became more like friends.  I remember a day we were driving around Anchorage and had stopped for gas.  A fellow came up to him hat in hand and asked Sonny if he would autograph the hat.  Understand that a guy like Sonny is Alaska's version of a sports star akin to NBA, MLB and NFL stars elsewhere.

After Sonny had signed the hat, the fellow asked him how he could get started in dog mushing and Sonny looked at me and said, "well the first thing is, you should read his book."  That answered one question.  As a writer you always wonder how the people you write about feel they were portrayed.  Enough of that.

In 1983, I was invited to Sonny's home town to participate in a fundraiser for his and another musher's racing efforts that year.  I was asked to bring something that could be auctioned off to help that process.  I found a photo I had made of Sonny during one race, had it printed at 11 by 14 size and mounted and took that along.  At the auction, one fellow paid $75 or $100 for it.  Surprised I asked him why he would pay that much for a picture of Sonny and the guy said he hadn't bought the picture for Sonny, he bought it because one of his own dogs was visible in the team.

During that party, Sonny invited me to go along on a trip to train dogs in the Alaska Range for a week.  I worried about my job for all of five seconds and off we went.  Next day we drove to Paxson where the Denali Highway meets the Richardson.  We stayed in a lodge there and ran his team a couple of times a day, Sonny in front with half the team and me following with the other half.

All the other dog teams I had ever driven were made up of the last five dogs in the lot, the ragtag ones that usually were left behind if something serious was involved.  This led to several adventures, as many off the trail as on while an inexperienced musher tried to impose his will on less than perfectly trained sled dogs.

A trained team of an Iditarod contender is a different story altogether. As we ran up into the mountains, nobody tried to jump off the trail, nobody attacked his teammate; all they did was paddle along, at a pace of about 10 or 11 miles per hour.  Only the quiet shush of the sled runners,  the breathing of the dogs and the slight crunch of the snow under their paws disturbed what otherwise was that perfect wilderness silence, and in that moment I finally realized what running dogs was all about. 

During our conversation yesterday, we looked over some photos from the race and there was a whole page of northern lights images. He looked at them, a couple in particular where the lights shined red and orange in addition to the usual green and yellow.  He said it was like that on the Yukon River during the Yukon Quest race this year and that he had strained his neck looking at the sky for so long as that perfectly trained team pulled him along on the river ice.

The more you hear, the more you learn, the easier it is to understand why someone might want to go 200,000 miles behind dog teams.