Once Again, No Joy For Linda A Bloody Hand Injury Forces Veteran Musher Out Of Iditarod
On the big hill that drops like a luge run through the thick spruce forest north of Finger Lake before dumping out on the frozen surface of Red Lake, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race came to an end for Linda Joy on Monday - though she wouldn’t realize it until Tuesday.
Joy’s team was barreling down the hill just before dark when her sled went squirrelly in deep, sugar snow. She stabbed at the brake with her foot and then lost control. The sled tumbled. The team stopped. Joy righted everything and kept going. It wasn’t until she got down onto Red Lake that she stopped the team so she could fully assess the damage to a hand apparently flailed by a loose snowhook during the tumble. The sight was not pretty.
“I looked at my hand, and said, ‘Oh, oh,”’ she confessed Wednesday after being discharged from Providence Alaska Medical Center. “Both fingers were scalped right down to the bone.”
At the time, Joy considered the injury more a nuisance than a problem. Joy dug a first-aid kit out of her dogsled, wrapped her hand the best she could and set out for the Rainy Pass checkpoint 30 miles ahead. The hand was nothing to worry about, she figured - nothing more than a bloodier replay of last year.
In 1996, on this notoriously tough stretch of trail climbing the rough-and-tumble foothills on the south slope of the Alaska Range, the grandmother, then 42, was pitched off her sled into a spruce tree.
She pulled into Rainy Pass with the imprint of that tree still marking the right side of her face. Her eye was black and swollen shut. Her cheek and lips dripped blood. Those injuries and others, including a smashed knee, eventually conspired to force Joy out of the race at Unalakleet. She figured this year’s trip had to go better.
“As I passed my black-eye tree, I said ‘Ah-ha, I beat you this year,”’ the Willow musher said. “Quitting didn’t even enter my mind.”
Possibly a little confused by the shock of the hand injury, Joy planned to push on to Rainy, get a few stitches to hold the tatters of skin together, and keep going.
It was a overly optimistic thought, which she started to realize during the several stops she made to redress the hand that was filling her mitten with blood. By the time the trail approached the checkpoint, Joy knew she was in trouble.
“When I got into Rainy,” she said, “I was shocky and hypothermic.”
A doctor who just happened to be visiting the checkpoint put 50 stitches in Joy’s hand. She was still thinking she could go on somehow, but finally gave up when she discovered she couldn’t care for her dogs adequately with only one functional hand. She decided her race probably was over. The doctor agreed, and an Iditarod official ordered Joy withdrawn from the competition. She was quickly loaded onto a plane and sent to Anchorage so doctors could work on the hand. Wednesday night she wasn’t sure if she would regain full use of two fingers.
“Do you think maybe somebody’s trying to tell me something?” she asked. She was thinking about abandoning the Iditarod in favor of middle-distance races, although the pull of the 1,100-mile trail to Nome remained strong.
“I seriously wanted to go on,” she said. “It was so beautiful, and this dog team was so well-trained and conditioned. But I figure, man, if I ever do this again, at least I’m going to know how to do it with only one hand, one eye, one knee and half a brain.” xxxx SEAVEY IN FRONT Mitch Seavey found himself at the front of the pack Wednesday. With the top teams resting just 38 miles behind him, however, Seavey knew he wouldn’t be on top for long. “I’m not actually No. 1. I just got here first,” Seavey said after following the trail through the rolling Kuskokwim mountains to the ghost town of Ophir. He arrived at 8:35 a.m., leaping past former champions Doug Swingley, Jeff King and Martin Buser, who were taking their mandatory 24-hour layovers in Takotna. He still has to take his 24-hour layover. Meanwhile, the race had its second dog death, a canine named B.J. in the team of musher Wayne Curtis, who was 44th. Peryll Kyzer of Willow reached Ophir 20 minutes after Seavey. Ramey Smyth of Big Lake arrived at 10:48 a.m. They also still have to take a 24-hour layover.