FINGER LAKE -- This was to have been the year for Kirk Barnum in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

No, the Seeley Lake, Mont., musher wasn't expecting to win. That would be a little too much to ask for anyone's second Iditarod. But the 41-year-old Barnum was planning to be in the hunt. He had veteran dogs. He'd trained hard. And he fit the mold for the prototypical musher of the 21st century: lean, small-boned, almost jockey-like and with a wealth of outdoor experience.

A forester for 20 years, Barnum's job was cruising the timber of the West to size up trees for lumber companies. When he wasn't doing that, he was on the runners of a dogsled. He ran a variety of races Oustide and then, for the first time in 2008, the Iditarod.

 

His 67th place finish as a rookie wasn't overly impressive, but the time was good. He finished in 13 days, 10 hours and 19 minutes -- fast enough to have won any of the first eight Iditarods. Barnum believed, too, that he could do better, much better. He had, after all, invested 15 years of his life in the quest.

 

A native Californian, he first started running dogs in 1995. By 1999, with the addiction firmly rooted, he moved to Montana to become one with his canines. Soon he had a kennel of about 50. He'd raised most of them himself. They were, he said, good dogs, strong dogs. He had faith in them. He liked them, and he enjoyed riding behind them.

He came into Iditarod 2010 thinking an 11-day race eminently doable. An 11-day race would have put him up there in the top 20 or close to it. And things looked good early.

"When we left Skwentna," Barnum said here Monday, "there was a rooster tail (of snow) behind me and a smile on my face."

Going out of Skwentna, Barnum was less than an hour behind three-time and defending champ Lance Mackey from Fairbanks, and little more than half an hour behind four-time champ Jeff King from Denali Park. Barnum was, indeed, in the hunt.

And then it was over.

Fifteen miles out of the checkpoint, a little more than 100 miles into the 1,000-mile race to Nome, one of his dogs started to falter. Barnum decided he'd best put the ailing dog in his sled. That triggered an avalanche of disaster.

"I tried to pack her," he said. "I felt like it was the right thing to do, to put her in the sled bag."

With the trail blanketed in fresh, new snow, however, the additional weight of a rider in the sled had serious consequences. "It slowed me down to about three mph," Barnum said.

Suddenly, he went from running with the Iditarod leaders to being in among the also-rans, which brought on a whole other set of problems. Back-of-the-pack teams do not operate with the same precision as those at the front. Three times, Barnum said, he found his team tangled up with other dog teams when they tried to pass. Straightening things out took time he didn't have to spare.

"It got worse and worse," he said, "and that was hard on my morale."

By the time Barnum reached this checkpoint, Finger Lake, he was 67th among the 71 teams in the race, and resolutely matter-of-fact about his plan to quit the race

I've been to Nome," he said. "I've got my (finisher's) belt buckle."

There was no sense pushing the team up the trail to merely collect another buckle -- if he could even get the team up the trail. He was relying, he said, on one 10-year-old lead dog he'd never expected to go all the way to Nome, and "my other lead dog has chronic wrist problems." Several other dogs were in that same predicament.