The Iditarod Trail on hydraulic wheelskis (full version!)

Editor's note: This article was first published in Water Flying Magazine.

The Iditarod dogsled race is an annual end-of-winter event in Alaska, and last year I spent a week following the race in a Cessna 206 on skis. There were four of us in the party. Alice Rogoff put the expedition together, she owns the airplane and uses it to travel around Alaska in connection with the Alaska Native Arts Foundation (alaskanativearts.org). Writer Christopher Buckley and photographer Sydney Lockhart were on the trip to write about it for Forbes Magazine. I was along to make sure nothing bad happened, which basically meant making sure that at no time would this unwieldy skiplane get stuck. It had all the ingredients of a good adventure, and the plan was to follow the trail wherever it leads, which would presumably be to Nome.

The various parts of the Iditarod trail have been in use for centuries as a network of winter trails used by the Athabaskan and Inupiaq peoples. It formally took its present form in the early 1900s when gold mining was going strong in Nome and interior Alaska. The gold fields were supplied by boat in the summer months, but in the winter, when the Yukon river froze up and the Norton Sound coast became icebound, an overland supply route was needed. For that purpose, a survey established the present-day Iditarod trail as a winter route between Nome and the ice-free port of Seward. In what perhaps had a certain resemblance to a northern version of the Pony Express, dogsleds brought mail, supplies and news north, and then carried gold from Nome on the backhaul. The larger sleds had 20 dogs and carried a thousand pounds.

When the airplane came onto the scene, it gradually began to replace the dogsled on the mail routes, and by the late 1920s, the use of sled dogs for carrying the mail on the Iditarod trail came to an end. Today the Iditarod trail has become the setting of the "last great race," the annual dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome, and since I've made my living flying the mail in Alaska, I couldn't help noticing the connection of the trail as a mail route. Flying to points along the trail while dogsleds simultaneously traveled the old mail route contrasts the new and old ways of providing transportation in bush Alaska.

While the Iditarod race is a tribute to earlier times, it is also a great thousand-mile tour of the Alaska landscape. The race picks up the historic trail just north of Anchorage. From there it passes through the alluvial river country of the Susitna Valley, crosses through the dramatic mountains of the Alaska range, comes out onto the upper Kuskokwim valley, passes through the gold-rush ghost town of Iditarod, then travels for a while on the Yukon River, and emerges onto the arctic coast of Norton Sound where it alternately traverses sea-ice and a desolate windblown frozen arctic landscape until it arrives at Nome. The trail is only usable in the winter, as much of it crosses rivers and swampy tundra that is impassible in the summer. While I'm sure nothing compares to seeing these thousand miles of Alaska landscape by dogsled, touring it by air is not a bad way to go either.

Flying with a nose ski

During the first days of the race, we did some day-trips out of Anchorage to the Susitna Valley checkpoints, which gave me a chance to get used to the airplane on skis. The skis are FluiDyne hydraulic wheelskis. On land, the wheels protrude through an opening in the ski, and bungee chords hold the skis up to allow operation on the runway. For operation on snow, a plate hydraulically slides back to close the opening in the ski. The wheel rides up on this plate, which has the effect of extending the ski for landing on snow. The skis are generally extended or retracted in the air, but this can be done on the ground as long as the surface is not abrasive. It is really an ingenious arrangement, but the skis are neither light nor aerodynamic. All the cables, hydraulic lines and other components produce enough drag that the airplanes climb and cruise performance almost exactly match what it had on amphibious floats.