Clearing the Iditarod Trail

HAPPY RIVER VALLEY -- As Iditarod officialdom this past week promised a good trail to Nome for The Last Great Race, and the earnest scribes of the local media dutifully reported this proclamation as something of substance, J.R. Mellin from Palmer and a host of others were trying to make it so.

High in the Alaska Range on Thursday evening, Mellin had his hands grasped to the handles of the U-bar on a brush cutter as the spinning circular saw blade at its lower end attacked the brush filling the trail. He had a lot of work ahead.

To that proverbial question of March: "What does the trail look like?"

There was, for a good part of it, this answer: "A snowmachine track through the middle of a willow thicket.''

Mellin and buddy Dustin Ashcroft from Anchorage were among those assigned to chop a dog-passable trail out of the wilderness in the few days before dog teams began arriving.

"We used to be called volunteers,'' Mellin said. "Now we get paid $2 per mile.''

It's a token fee for what is hard work, slashing brush with that always dangerous brush cutter, clearing deadfall with chainsaws and muscle power, and chopping the frozen ruts of the Iron Dog snowmachine race out of the trail. The ruts are a nightmare for everyone. Dug sometimes feet deep to the width of a snowmachine track, they are just about impossible to straddle on a dogsled. One runner or the other invariably goes in, and then the sled tips over.

With good luck, nothing breaks. The sled simply gets dragged on its side for a distance. With bad luck, stanchions break, handlebars break, and sometimes mushers break.

Some of the ruts left from the Iron Dog this year were so bad they even prevented locals from traveling by snowmachine. They could get their skis on either side, but they didn't have enough track hanging down to touch snow and got stuck. To fix this, the solution is to chop the trail out wider with an ax, although local Mike Larsen said he has discovered that an old-fashioned Army "entrenching tool" works better. You chop the side out of the trail, dump them into the hole and go on.

Where the trail is bad, the efficiency of this method will allow one to progress at a speed as great as half a mile per hour. Roger Ashcroft, Dustin's father, was marshalling the forces north along the trail Friday to try to get the work done.

The mushers are the people who get the attention in this event, called the "Superbowl of Alaska" -- but it is the Ashcrofts, the Mellins and a nameless legion of others who make the race happen, whether they are the paid staff at $2 per mile or unpaid volunteers like Jasper Bond at Rohn, who was Thursday prepping the one-room, log-cabin checkpoint for the invasion of dozens of mushers.

A Minnesota artist, Bond was marking his 19th year as a volunteer at Rohn. He pays his own way to get to Alaska to do this. He supplies his own Iridium satellite phone so he can communicate to the world. And he hosts everyone with the warmest hospitality imaginable.

Forget the race, the Iditarod spirit lives in people like this.

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com