How Iditarod rookie Moon crashed out

DALZELL CREEK -- All across the windswept valley of the upper Happy River and on into Pass Creek, a snowy trail told the tale of the struggles of Pat Moon and his team of huskies. In the days before the start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the snow had fallen heavy in the valley, and the snowmachines that went before the race to break the trail left a ditch for mushers coming behind.

For the front runners in The Last Great Race, the ditch was a sidewalk, but by the time Moon got there, things had changed. The winds whistling down from Rainy

Craig Medred photo

Pat Moon along Dalzell Creek after the sled crash that bloodied his face and knocked him out of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Rainy Pass can be seen over his left shoulder still filled with blowing snow.

Pass blew snow sideways across the valley, and the trail began to fill. When the 33-year-old rookie from Chicago started the trudge to the 3,350-foot gap through the Alaska Range, the trail was half to three-quarters drifted in, which was about as bad as things could get.

In a few places, the runners of Moon's dog sled would still fit level in the ditch, but in many places they would not. One runner would end up 18 inches to two feet high on the side of the ditch filled with hard-packed, drifted snow while the other runner would sit down low in the ditch.

On the flats, this was a nuisance. On the many side hills the trail crossed, it was a problem. Moon's sled would invariably tilt on its side and then slide into the willows along the trail. Thus the musher bounced and banged his way north like a pinball.

A strong driver might have been able to manhandle the sled through this terrain, but Moon was weakened by illness. Since the age of 15, he'd suffered with ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the intestines and kidneys. Then came the cancer -- non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He started chemotherapy last summer, then put it off in order to run the Iditarod.

"My wife," he would say later, "encouraged me to do it for the kids."

Moon, along with his wife, Melanie, has paddled the Amazon River and sometimes works as an inspirational speaker for youth groups. The Iditarod was his dream, he said, and his wife encouraged him to pursue the dream to set a good example for the kids and others. That they did well.

Despite the wind and bitter cold, despite the health problems, Moon and his team smashed and bashed their way up and over Rainy Pass into Pass Fork. When they started down, the trail was better there out of the wind, and trailbreakers for the Iditarod had done a masterful job only days earlier clearing it of brush. Fresh snow had only added a finishing touch, smoothing over ice bridges and covering rocks.

Craig Medred photo

Iditarod race judge Kevin Saiki consults with injured musher Pat Moon about what to do with Moon's team. Saiki eventually guided the dogs a half-dozen miles down the difficult trail through the Dalzell Gorge to the Rohn checkpoint. They were flown to Anchorage from there. All were fine.

Moon looked to have it just about made on one of the notoriously worst stretches of trail along the 1,000-mile Iditarod route from Anchorage to Nome -- and then came a lone spruce tree. It was the first of many that fill the valley where Pass Fork meets the Dalzell. It rose strong and erect just down from where an old avalanche had wiped out an earlier forest.