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| For anyone interested in Alaska, the mystique, and the race from Anchorage to Nome, this is the book. Makes a great gift. Available at this web site. |
Excerpted from the book "Iditarod, The first Ten Years."
Carl Huntington only finished the Iditarod trail Sled Dog race once. But in that one race he set himself apart. He established at least two statistical records that have stood for 40 years and a distinction that has never been equaled and probably never will be. Taken together they form one of the great ironies in sled dog racing.
Carl Huntington only finished the Iditarod trail Sled Dog race once. But in that one race he set himself apart. He established at least two statistical records that have stood for 40 years and a distinction that has never been equaled and probably never will be. Taken together they form one of the great ironies in sled dog racing.
In a career short by mushing standards and at a relatively young age, he took on the top racers in the biggest races of the day and at 26, beat them all. Then he challenged the longest sled dog race and won it going away. After that he went back to the shorter heat races and again won championships.
How does a man in his 20s challenge established competitors day after day and best them?
Part of the answer is heritage. He grew up taking care of his father Sidney’s dog lot. His uncle Jimmy Huntington won the World Championship at Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage and the North American in Fairbanks in 1956. Another uncle, Cue Bifelt, won those races in 1960.
Another, larger part of the answer is something less tangible, something people associated with dog training and sports have tried to articulate over the years without much luck, and that is an innate connection with dogs, the kind of connection that creates a bond between dog and man and makes dogs want to run a thousand miles across Alaska. Most people who know dogs and were fortunate enough to have met Carl recognized he had that special connection perhaps stronger than anyone.
Carl could read a dog and think like one. Longtime musher Donna (Gentry) Massey put it this way: “He understood the processes of his dogs’ minds so well, that he could accurately predict how they would respond to certain situations. It was an ability to think like a dog faster than the dog could.”
Another of his competitors said, “He could take your dogs and beat you with them.”
He also had an eye for quality. His wife, Puddings, said, “He took dogs that were absolutely beaten and turned them into beautiful animals and lead dogs.”
One of those was his leader Tex. In the early days of modern competitive sled dog racing, it was common practice for mushers to fly to villages and look over dogs, borrow, buy or lease the ones they liked. Tex came from his uncle, Cue Bifelt, in Huslia.
“She was a ‘scrap’ dog that was running around in Huslia, when Carl had gone up there to pick up dogs,” Puddings remembers, “His uncle Jimmy threw her in the airplane and said to ‘take her and see what kind of dog she would make besides getting into trash cans.’” Later after other mushers showed interest in the dog, Carl paid his uncle for her.
Carl had seen something in that dog beyond the scrap heap and then was able to bring it out of her. Through all of Carl’s unique accomplishments, Tex led his teams.
Carl first came to the attention of the broader general public when he began entering the larger races around the state in the early 1970s, particularly the World Championship at Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage and the North American Championship in Fairbanks.
Beginning right with that first race on the larger stage, he impressed mushers and spectators alike demonstrating a connection and savvy with and about dogs that surprised even the best of his competitors. A story goes that before one of those early races Carl approached race marshal Dick Tozier in the week prior to the start. He had looked over the trail and wanted to know how much help he could accept at two particular street crossings.
Keep in mind Carl and his dogs came from Galena a town of maybe 500 souls on the bank of the Yukon River about 300 miles west of Fairbanks. They had seen nothing like Anchorage crowds and traffic, or the confusion of city trails, streets and sidewalks. Galena consists pretty much of one main street. Carl’s dogs were more used to steering around trees than cars and fences and crowds and had probably never seen more than 10 people in one place at any one time. But Carl knew his dogs well enough to recognize the two places along a 25-mile trail that would give his leaders problems and wanted to know how much help he could accept to get them back on the trail. Here was a young man who had brought a dog team from a tiny village in the broad expanse of Bush Alaska to a metropolitan center with all its distractions, and he was so closely attuned to his dogs he could see which two of those distractions would confuse his leaders.
Whatever he was told about help, it turned out, those two crossings were the only ones where his dogs had trouble along the trail. That happened on the first day of the three-day race. The leaders passed those two spots with no problem in the two subsequent heats.
He first entered the Fur Rendezvous race in1971. Two years later he won it, in the process beating three mushers whose combined championships eventually totaled 17, among them Dr. Roland Lombard who was Carl’s personal racing hero.
He returned to the Anchorage race in 1974 having picked up a generous sponsor in Atlantic Richfield Co. He finished seventh that year, then the sponsor changed the game, asking him if he would run the Iditarod. A big sponsor like that is not to be ignored and Carl and Puddings discussed it.
Early on Carl believed Rondy dogs, as they were called at the time, could run the Iditarod competitively despite the preference most drivers had for larger dogs in the longer race. Carl figured he could change their training a little in the two weeks before the race and then give it a try.
The Huntingtons had only those two weeks between Rondy and Iditarod to catch up on preparations other mushers had been making for months. They decided they would do it and while Carl trained dogs over the month, it fell to Puddings to round up the equipment and feed that would be needed for the long race.
“We discussed it and decided to, so then for two weeks of training and preparing 40 beaver carcasses with cooked rice in each package for the dog meals, we got ready,” Puddings recalls.
“I remember him saying that he could take his five-gallon can, put snow in it to melt for water and throw the beaver-rice dinner wrapped in tin foil into the can to warm up for the dogs. He said a hot meal is better and digests easier for them. And if he got hungry he could eat with them too. As you know beaver meat is a specialty in our diet. It worked. He had learned from his dad and uncles the most sustaining meat and appetite was beaver meat for the working dogs and the cooler temperatures.”
Training for the dogs didn’t change much. From the beginning, Carl believed the same dogs could run both types of races and he would approach the Iditarod, not as a long race to Nome, but a series of shorter races between checkpoints. He planned to go fast when he was moving, against the prevailing thought at the time, but he anticipated the speed would allow him longer rest stops to allow the dogs to recover, and eventually let him outdistance the competition.
As they rushed to prepare for the race, the Huntingtons thought through, prepared, for everything they could think of, but there was one aspect of the race Carl could not control, one that would work against his strategy.
That uncontrollable influence began during the first days of the race. After the start Saturday March 2, the mushers pushed across the Susitna River Valley into winds reaching 50 mph. Two feet of snow fell as they approached Skwenta, making progress slow and miserable. Those winds hounded them until they began the climb into the Alaska Range. Finally Tuesday they enjoyed their first windless day.
By Wednesday, Carl was running with the leading teams and had moved into fifth place among names already familiar in the second year of the Iditarod: Dick Mackey, George Attla, Jerry Riley and Warner Vent.
For perspective, on Wednesday in the 1974 race the leaders had not yet reached Ptarmigan Pass in the Alaska Range. In 2012 by Wednesday the leaders were leaving McGrath and they had one less day to do it, having started from Willow the Sunday before rather than Saturday.
For the next couple of days the frontrunners enjoyed clear skies and temperatures around minus 10, almost perfect weather, but it wasn’t to last.
In the Ptarmigan Valley the mushers ran into what might have been the worst storm ever to hit an Iditarod race. Driver after driver had a horror story to tell of deep, blowing snow, temperatures near the bottom of the thermometer, nights in snow pits and days barely making any headway as they slogged along on snowshoes breaking trail ahead of their teams.
By the time the leaders reached the Rohn Roadhouse, they reported “a living hell” in the pass with temperatures near negative 50 overnight and winds whipping over the pass at 50 mph. Rayme Redington and Dan Seavey said they’d packed trail on snowshoes for 20 miles. Carl also helped break trail on snowshoes in the pass, and when he reached Rohn in fourth place, he was limping badly.
“He had an arthritic knee that acted up from time to time,” Puddings recalled, “and he fell on it, I think he said coming down Hell’s Gate out of the pass. But what really got to it was the snowshoeing he did going through the pass, as they did not have trail blazers those days. He told me he snowshoed about 14 hours one day breaking trail in front of his team and other teams.”
The knee would plague him for the rest of the trip, but it never seemed to slow him down.
From Rohn the trail took the mushers out onto the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River, a section notorious for overflow, water running on top of the river ice as deep as 10 inches in places during the 1974 race. Nevertheless, the lead teams passed through Farewell Saturday, just a day after leaving Rohn and nine days into the race. More recent races have been won in eight days and a few hours.
After Farewell the trail took them through forest and muskeg of what is now known as the Farewell Burn. In 1977 a wildfire scorched 361,00 acres leaving little but stumps, burned falldowns and underbrush. But, in 1974, it was a forest of spruce and birch for the most part.
Snowmachines had packed the trail from Farewell to McGrath and that gave Carl the kind of race he wanted. He opened the team up and reached McGrath in third place about 6 p.m. Sunday March 10.
For a while the weather and the trail held up and by early Tuesday Carl had passed Ophir among the leaders and was approaching a place called Bear Creek on the way north toward his home country along the Yukon River.
From Bear Creek Herbie Nayokpuk and George Attla took off first with Carl following among a larger group of mushers two hours later. But then the good trail ended. He caught the two leading mushers on that trail, but 30 miles from Poorman the three ended up slogging through deep, drifted snow. Again the snowshoes came out at least until they reached that checkpoint.
The race sped up again after Poorman and George Attla led it into Ruby on the Yukon River with Carl right behind him. More telling was that Attla had taken more than 14 hours along the 60 miles of trail, while Carl took fewer than 10. Attla reached Ruby with 11 dogs, Carl with just seven.
He left Ruby an hour behind Attla but beat him to Galena, probably helped by his dogs knowing the trail and heading for home. Again Carl had the kind of trail that favored his strategy and he wasted no time. Shortly after he left Galena, a moose sabotaged his effort. Three miles out of town, Nugget, a dog he had borrowed from Emmitt Peters and who shared the lead with Tex, spotted the moose on the Yukon River and took the team on a three-mile detour chasing the animal before the driver could bring them back under control. Still, he never lost the lead at this point despite fast teams driven by Herbie Nayokpuk and Jerry Riley chasing him.
Within two days he reached Kaltag. But on the trail toward the Bering Sea coast once again the elements betrayed him and allowed others to catch up. Carl had to snowshoe about 15 miles ahead of the team uphill to the divide in the Beaver Mountains that separates Interior Alaska from the western coast, reaching Old Woman first, but losing precious time just as the race was approaching the final sprint into Nome. He drove into Unalakleet in the middle of the afternoon Tuesday, March 19, still going with the seven dogs he had in Ruby, six of which had raced at Fur Rendezvous just a few weeks earlier.
Ahead the weather began deteriorating. Two days later Nome would record a temperature of 47 degrees above zero with melting snow forming rivers in the streets. Between Unalakleet and Nome vicious ground storms had begun pounding the coast.
New to this area of Alaska, Carl admitted later he made up his strategy as he went along, confident that he could beat any team he had seen, but wary of elements beyond his control.
The first of the ground storms hit as he left Unalakleet and continued as he crossed Norton Bay ice on the way north from Shaktoolik to Koyuk. Overall he pushed on alone through three days of sporadic whiteouts. With dogs used to running among trees, the wide open white with just a stake every so often made it difficult for them. But Tex and Nugget were up to the task barely crawling along, making agonizing headway in a storm and eventually reaching the shore of the Seward Peninsula. Carl told a reporter later there were times he couldn’t make out the stakes marking trail even though they were only about 200 feet apart.
As he approached Nome he ran for almost 18 hours straight, stopping only to feed or snack the dogs. The team encountered whiteouts and obscured trail all along the coast. He lost precious time when he couldn’t find the trail for a while between Elim and Golovin. Carl credited his leader, Tex, for always finding her way.
At Safety, about 27 miles from Nome, he was handed notes, some of them from television and other media people asking him to wait there for a while so he could arrive at the finish line in daylight which would be better for photography. After 20 days on the trail, Carl had no patience for any more delays and he drove on toward the finish.
Carl hobbled onto Front Street in Nome shortly after midnight Saturday, March 23, the 21st day of the race, on a knee one observer described as swollen to the size of a cantaloupe.
He finished the Iditarod, with six dogs and the slowest winning time on record in 20 days, 15 hours, 2 minutes and 7 seconds. Warner Vent, a top contender in several Iditarod races, came in second almost a full day later.
Carl's winning time has lasted since then as the slowest ever, but that should be put into a perspective other than its relationship to other Iditarod races which obviously were run under different conditions any of which could change an outcome. Perhaps it is better to compare Carl's feat with his contemporaries, the people he was racing against, including several future winners. Once again in this comparison Carl Huntington stands alone. He won the race by the largest margin ever in the history of the Iditarod, almost a full day, 20 hours and 16 minutes, ahead of his nearest competitor. Even the racers who set major speed records in subsequent Iditarods most often had a competitor only an hour or two behind them.
Carl tried the Iditarod once more, in 1975, but ended up scratching. In 1977 he again won the Fur Rendezvous and North American races but after that slowly faded from the racing circuit.
In the subsequent years he was never far from sled dogs and racing, though. He was happy to point out to reporters and in letters to the editor, the heritage of the sled dogs based in the bloodlines coming out of the villages in Alaska’s Interior at the same time emphasizing how the Iditarod had become too expensive for mushers from Alaska’s Bush to compete.
In even years when the race ran through Galena Carl would often come to the checkpoint to look at the teams and talk with the racers he knew.
Joe May recalled such an incident, attesting to Carl’s unique connection with dogs: “He came down to the checkpoint to look at dogs ... like Jesus dropping by the Temple.
“He walked the length of my team with a critical eye, searching for things mortal dog mushers can't see, and finally stopped where the checker and I stood waiting with baited breath.
“Checker asked, ‘WELL?’ After an up and down scrutiny of my outfit … scorched pants, torn parka, frozen mukluks, scabby cheeks, ruined nose, bloodshot eyes, and bandaged fingers … with charitable certitude, Carl said, ‘dogs will make it … he won't …’”
Carl's life ended tragically, the only one among the winners of the first ten races who has not survived, though not the only Iditarod musher to die an untimely, unexpected or violent death. His legacy lives on, though maybe not as well acknowledged as it should be. Every time a musher talks about sprinting to Nome, keep in mind Carl Huntington saw that in 1974. Though he won with the slowest time in Iditarod history, he won it with what may have been the fastest dogs and the largest margin of victory. He set the stage for today’s eight- and nine-day races.
It was a strategy similar to the one Carl advocated that Martin Buser used to win four Iditarods and in 2002 set a record of 8 days, 18 hours, 46 minutes, a record that stood for nine years.
Forty years later Carl remains the only musher ever to win major heat races in Alaska and the Iditarod, a testament to his ability as a sled dog racer. And that is the great irony.
Carl Huntington, who advocated a sort of strategy used in shorter heat races, and is the only musher ever to win both types of races in Alaska, also holds the record for the slowest finishing time in Iditarod history, the latter tempered considerably by the record for the largest margin of victory. Can someone surpass any of those in the future? It's possible, but not likely. For one thing, trail preparation and grooming along the Iditarod have improved tremendously since those early years leading to faster times and almost eliminating the need to snowshoe, thus making an eight-day race more likely than one of 20 days. And, it seems in recent years the two types of racing actually have grown farther apart.
It is more likely that Carl Huntington will stand alone in the one category he carved out for himself, winning the major sprint races in Alaska and the Iditarod, and, too, hanging onto that slowest finishing time and the widest margin of victory records he set almost 40 years ago. And, though at the finish line he acknowledged the borrowed leader, Nugget, who the next year would lead Emmitt Peters’ team to victory, he would probably be the first to point out that the dog Tex he rescued from the trash cans in Huslia and trained into a racing leader, led his teams to every one of those successes.
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