Iron-Dogging The Iditarod Trail Area Snowmobilers Find Tough Sledding Behind Dog Mushers

The Iditarod sled dog trail isn’t just for sleds powered by Purina. A snowmobiler can do it, too, as long as he doesn’t mind pounding his machine over barrel-size hummocks and camping out at 40 below zero.

“I’ve been to Alaska 66 times, and this is the trip I can’t get out of my mind,” said Bob Jones of Kettle Falls, Wash.

Riding the 1,100-mile wilderness route from Anchorage to Nome is and endurance test that chokes the enthusiasm of seasoned snowmobilers. But until this winter, Jones had barely ridden a snowmobile, much less owned one.

“The trip was just an idea that struck me as challenging,” he said.

Although a few snowmobilers follow the fabled sled dog race each year, the feat has never caught on. “We know of only about a dozen that did it this year,” Jones said. “Now we know why.”

Some days they rode up to 200 miles without seeing a sign of human habitation.

They slept in tiny backpacking tents in temperatures that plunged to minus 42 degrees.

Gas ranged to more than $4 a gallon.

The trail is for the dogs.

None of this caught Jones by surprise. “I pretty much knew what we were getting into,” he said.

Nevertheless, Jones, 56, convinced his son Dick, 34, a taxidermist from Eagle River Alaska, to go with him. Then he sold the idea to Jim Knight, 55, of Deer Park.

Jones bought a snowmobile for $7,000 last winter, then went to work designing sleds to carry the gas, camping gear and repair supplies.

“You can’t buy a decent sled, so we had to build them,” he said. “Then I found out I’d have to buy a welder because nobody up here has the kind you use on aluminum. This was starting to get expensive, and I wasn’t even out of Kettle Falls.”

Meanwhile, he practiced his snowmobiling, logging about 600 miles during the winter - “not one foot of it on a groomed trail,” he said.

He took the training seriously, right down to the night he buried his snowmobile up to the handlebars deep in the Kettle Range near White Mountain. “Local riders rescued me at 1:30 a.m.,” he shrugged.

He’d sunk nine grand into the trip before he hopped into a pickup for the four-day, 2,261-mile endurance drive from Kettle Falls to Anchorage on the Alaska Highway.

The 23rd running of the Iditarod dog sled race started March 4. The snowmobilers began four days later so they wouldn’t interfere with the mushers.

The original plan was to overtake the dog sleds in the easier open terrain near the end of the route and be in Nome to see the top finishers. “Boy, were we dreaming,” Jones said.

Dog sleds are better designed for the trail than snowmobiles.

Iditarod trail organizers told Jones that recreational snowmobilers are likely to average only 10 mph over the entire course.

“Truth is, you can barely average that speed,” Jones said. “There are narrow tunnels through thick timber and willows where both your skis are rubbing against wood at the same time.”

He admits to being lulled toward overconfidence after reading about the Iron Dog snowmobile race that’s held each year before the Iditarod.

“It’s the longest winter sporting event in the world,” Jones said. Snowmobiler’s ride in two-machine teams on specially built sleds on a course that runs from Anchorage to Nome and back.

“The winners this year did the 2,279 miles in 59 hours of riding time with only three 6-hour breaks,” Jones said.

“They need a lot of money to rebuild the machines to take the punishment; they have to have the will, and they have to be totally nuts.”

Out of 17 pairs entered this year, only four finished.

“There was more bailing wire and duct tape on those sleds than original parts,” Jones said.

“They averaged 40 mph over cliffs, through bogs and God knows what kind of weather. We averaged about 7 mph.”

Powered by a team of dogs, Montana rancher Doug Swingley beat the 58-musher Iditarod field in a record nine days.

Jones’ party was on the trail 11 days and covered about 1,250 miles, including side trips to reach cabins or refueling points.

That doesn’t account for the week in the middle of the trip when they didn’t ride at all.

A blast of arctic weather that paralyzed the Alaska interior with temperatures colder than 50 degrees below zero forced the snowmobilers off the trail.

“An Arctic Cat dealer told us we’d break our machines to pieces if we rode them over that terrain when it was that cold,” Jones said. “It was a little uncomfortable, too. You can get a bit chilly camping out at that temperature, especially when you know there’s not another human being for 100 miles in any direction.”

The dog sleds were over the Alaska Range and into the relatively balmy 30-below-zero coastal weather when the big chill hit, he said.

“We finally holed up at a roadhouse in McGrath,” Jones said. “But at $40 a person a night and with beers running $3.50 a pop, we couldn’t afford to stay there long.”

Indeed, with no end to the deepfreeze in sight, the snowmobilers figured it was cheaper to fly home and work a few days than to stay in McGrath.

“I came back to Kettle Falls and watched the weather chart in The Spokesman-Review until the Fairbanks temperatures warmed up to 10 below,” he said.

After eight days, they flew back to McGrath, where they found their snowmobiles sitting on the street just as they had left them.

Later in the trip, the snowmobilers shacked up in one of the rustic public cabins that dot the Alaska bush.

The temperature was 18 below zero that night when a native came to the door looking for shelter.

” He’d had a fight with his girlfriend and was driving his snowmobile from one village to another when he got stuck in a slush hole,” Jones said. “An ice jam caused a creek to overflow on the trail.

“He worked an hour to get out of there. The average person would have died, but natives who live up there are pretty resourceful. He ended up tying a rope around a tree and wrapping the other end around the track so he could use the snowmobile like a winch.”

The native admitted making one mistake.

“He’d filled his boots with water and decided to take his boot off to dump the water out. Before he could get the boot back on, his sock froze solid. He was lucky the cabin was nearby.”

Jones is a rugged, handsome and likable guy who probably could talk himself safely through Iraqi borders. His gift for gab apparently paid off when he avoided another night of camping at Elim.

“There’s only a few houses in the village and we rolled in there at 11 p.m.,” he said.

“The natives there never see outsiders except during the Iditarod. The kids came out and told us we could stay in the fire station for $20 apiece. That sounded pretty good since it was still below zero. The fire station wasn’t much. They don’t have a firetruck - just a dog sled with hoses piled in it.”

Following the Iditarod trail was a wild adventure that was virtually void of wildlife.

During the entire trip, the only notable wildlife Jones noticed was a coyote along the Alaska Highway and a moose near Anchorage.

“The snow was too deep and the weather too nasty,” Jones said.

The most common signs of life along the trail were booties shed by dogs in the race ahead.

“After doing the trail on a snowmobile, I’m absolutely in awe of what the dog sledders do,” Jones said.

“We were in McGrath watching live television coverage of the first finishers.

“This is a big deal in Alaska. Great big Alaska men were crying when these guys crossed the finish line,” Jones said. “They knew what the mushers had been through.

“The dogs get mandatory rest breaks, but by the time the feeding and repairs are taken care of, there’s little time for the mushers to rest.”

At a bar in Nome, Jones met a musher who said he trains 345 days a year for the Iditarod.

“He said he felt like a rag hanging on a barbed-wire fence at the end of the race,” Jones said. “But once he’d had a hot meal, shower and a good night’s sleep, he wished the race would never end.”

Jones had similar feelings.

Indeed, a couple of Nome residents talked the Jones party into postponing its departure a day to take a 140-mile snowmobile tour.

“I called my wife and told her I didn’t know whether to go on the ride or check into a mental health center,” he said.

From Nome, he paid $130 for air fare back to Anchorage, plus $335 for each snowmobile and sled to be shipped back to Anchorage by air freight.

“Once you have a snowmobile and a sled, the expenses aren’t too bad,” he said, indicating that he and Knight are seriously considering doing the trip again next year.

“It’s the most beautiful snowmobile trip in the world, but it isn’t easy,” he said.

“My son put it in perspective when he said that 500 people climb Mount McKinley each year, but only 15 snowmobilers do the entire Iditarod trail.”