ROHN -- For the first time in 20 years, the mayor of Rohn will be missing from this outpost deep in the Alaska Range when the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race rolls into the timber that surrounds the lone, one-room log cabin on a spit of land where the Tatina and South Fork Kuskokwim rivers converge.

This is where Minnesotan Jasper Bond has for two decades volunteered his services as caretaker, cook and counselor for Iditarod mushers. He has faced the unpleasant task of helping to convince some that it would be unwise to proceed on down the trail, and he has counseled others to get their act together and get moving toward Nome.

In another time and another place, the masters-degree-holding potter from Sauk Rapids, Minn., might have ended up a musher himself. But he saw enough of the Iditarod race early on to recognize the cost and personal sacrifice involved in putting together a dog team capable of going 900 miles from Willow to the finish line beneath the burled arch on Nome's Front Street.

Not that the urge to travel the trail behind a team of huskies ever totally went away.

"A few years,'' Bond said, "I would have traded my share of the family farm to do the race.''

He managed to restrain himself. It was not easy. The Iditarod is one of the loves of his life. His wedding anniversary comes at the start of March just like the race. For 20 years, the race has won out over the anniversary. The situation changed this year only because his wife this week goes into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., for serious surgery.

Bond will be there with her. Nonetheless, he flew in here before the start of the Iditarod race to make sure the checkpoint was properly set up.

Mayor and sheriff for Alaska's wilderness

For most of 11 and a half months of the year, Rohn is a 280-square-foot, wood-floored, wood-heated, Bureau of Land Management public-use cabin that sits lonely, deserted and hiding in the spruce trees just a little north of a seldom-used gravel airstrip in a valley between the jagged peaks of the mile-high Terra Cotta and Tea Colli mountains.

For two weeks out of the year, Rohn becomes a bustling hub of activity supporting first the Iron Dog snowmachine race, then the Iditarod Trail Invitational human-muscle-powered race, and finally the Iditarod dog race.

Though the Iditarod flies Bond and sidekick Terry Boyle, the sheriff of Rohn, into the valley to support its race, the two men have over the years provided the foundation for a group of volunteers who materialize to support all sorts of crazy folk moving north along the Iditarod Trail in February and March.

Bond and Boyle helped save a gang of Boy Scouts who ended up in the Kuskokwim River one year when the ice was bad. They helped Iditarod mushers search for lost dogs other years. They coordinated the rescues of various people injured along the trail.

Bond well remembers when Englishman Carl Hutchings, a cyclist competing in the Invitational, stumbled into the cabin with his face bloody after a nasty crash in the Dalzell Gorge six or seven miles to the south. The bleeding from the gash in his face was bad, Bond said, but what was more startling was the off-kilter nature of Hutchings' face. Bond and Boyle were afraid the cyclist had seriously cracked his skull.

As it turned out, Hutchings just has a somewhat crooked face.

Satisfied that he hadn't totally smashed his noggin, Bond called for an airplane to come get the racer, who was flown to McGrath where a health aide closed the gash with eight to 10 stitches.

"Then he flew back,'' Bond said, "and off he went.''

A bit of an adventurer himself, Bond clearly admires those like Hutchings who pursue their crazy passions along the Iditarod Trail whether under their own power or with the aid of dogs. Bond has gotten to know some of them well, and he has cultivated a small family of friends -- airplane pilots, veterinarians, radio operators, dog handlers and checkers -- who converge on this checkpoint every year for the Iditarod. This year, knowing Jasper had put in 20 years but would be leaving Rohn before the real excitement started, checker Stephanie White from Michigan staged a little party to honor him.

Bond was given a gold pocket watch. White bought and paid for it herself.