Alaska Dispatch

RUBY -- The bad luck that haunted musher Emil Churchin for more than 500 miles north along the Iditarod Trail finally caught him four miles shy of the Yukon River. His Iditarod dream died there in the dark Sunday night, although the painful realization that his race was over would not come until after yet another night spent camped along the trail in the 40-degree-below-zero cold that brutalizes both dogs and people.

Musher and team would rise half-frozen and stiff Monday morning and struggle two miles toward the top of the last hill outside of this old gold mining town of 150 to 200. They were not a pretty sight to watch on a morning with a friendly sun shining on the spruce trees thick atop the rolling hills back from the mighty river locked in ice.

No dog wanted to lead. The males in the team were all more interested in a bitch in heat than moving on down the trail. Churchin limped among the gang, moving this dog to the front, that dog to the back, trying to find some combination that would work. His efforts to snap and unsnap dogs were hampered by a bulky bandage on one hand.

The bandage covered the spot where he'd sliced his palm near to the bone while trying to cut off an earlier bandage covering a split finger. The limp was the result of a hamstring pulled early in the race. The confusion in the dog team was the fault of simple rookie mistakes made daily almost from the beginning of Churchin's attempt at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

The rookie musher spent so much time caring for his dogs that he forgot to care for himself. He forgot to drink and let himself get dehydrated. He found it impossible to sleep and left himself in the stupor of sleep deprivation. All of this contributed to the decision to make one long push on the 75 miles of trail between the Iditarod halfway point of Cripple and the Yukon.

It was a march too far. It went on too long. Only a couple of miles shy of the top of a hill that marks the drop into this village, the dogs decided they'd had enough. They declared their own break.

Had Churchin known how close he was to the top of the hill, he could have taken the lead dogs and walked them over the crest. But for the bad hamstring, he could have walked the team all the way into town. It was not far, and it would have been better for everyone than a lengthy camp out in the bone-numbing temperatures. But Churchin did not do these things. Instead, he cut some spruce boughs to form beds for his dogs and settled in to wait until they were ready to get up and walk over the hill on their own.

"My toes got very cold,'' he said. "The dogs were shivering all night," despite being swathed in coats and bedded on those spruce boughs.

When worried Iditarod race judge Kevin Saiki and Ruby checker Jimmy Honea went out from the village on snowmachines early Monday to determine what had been keeping Churchin for almost 24 hours on the 75-mile run from Cripple, Churchin was still waiting for his team to rouse itself. Saiki told the Anchorage musher the time had come to see if he could get the dogs going on his own.

A couple were anxious, barking and yanking against their harnesses. Most seemed confused, unsure of what the musher wanted them to do. It took Churchin quite a while, shifting dogs around all the time and finally zipping the problem-causing bitch into the sled bag, before he got the team moving, and even then it was a slow, stop-and-go walk and trot to the top of the hill where the dogs seemed to be reborn.

Once over the crest they loped down the slope, around a corner and up the hill into the village. Churchin seemed buoyed by their performance then, but any optimism he could muster was destined to die after a phone conversation with Iditarod race marshal Mark Nordman. The conversation was conducted in private, but it was clear what Churchin was told. He was so far behind the rest of the mushers in the race -- more than half a day -- that he had two choices: He could scratch on his own, or he could be withdrawn.

Churchin elected to scratch, and then the tears flowed and flowed. He could not stem them no matter how hard he tried.

"Two years of my life and all of my money,'' he said. "This is where I was going to turn my life around, and I failed. Every step of the way I knew everything I did wrong, and I did it again and again. It is the story of my life."

It is not, actually, the story of Churchin's life. He is a 42-year-old man with a digital imaging job on the North Slope. By all modern standards, he is successful. He earns a good living.

"I'm making the best money I ever made,'' he said. "That's how I fund this. God, I could have built a house with all the money I spent on this. I maxed out my credit cards. If I had finished, I could have had some post-race fundraisers."

Now, he said, "I think about all the people that donated. I got several thousand dollars from family and friends."

He felt he'd let them all down. He was in a dark place. He was supposed to have made it to Nome. He was supposed to have shown he could do what so few ever accomplish. He was supposed to have lived the dream that began not long after Iditarod veteran Jim Lanier from Chugach introduced Churchin to sled dogs.

Churchin bought into the dream with everything -- heart, soul and bankroll. It was painful beyond belief when the dream came crashing down.

"I need to stop blubbering,'' he told Saiki, but he could not. The sense of grief was so deep.

Everyone in the checkpoint tried to counsel him that it was better to have tried and come up short than never to have tried at all. Churchin was buying none of it. In time, he might, but in the moment, he could not.

"The year I worked with Jim Lanier, he broke his foot on day two of the race, and he finished 40th," Churchin said. "I think Jim Lanier is going to be embarrassed to be associated with me. Any other musher would have this team in the top 30. This won't be a good memory.

"I wanted that (finisher's) belt buckle."

He was sure there would never be another chance to go to Nome. The Iditarod is too expensive, he said; the training too time-consuming, his bungling such that no competent musher would ever want to work with him.

"If you look at my race, it's all there," he said. "It's just a prime example of how not to run the race."

Saiki put a hand on the musher's shoulder.

"We're gonna go to McGrath, get you washed up, talk," Saiki said. Things would be better, Saiki promised. He explained how he, too, had scratched from an Iditarod, and he had survived. Churchin wiped more tears from his eyes.

Far north on the trail, past Iditarod champions Lance Mackey and Jeff King were closing on Nome. They made the Iditarod look so easy.

"I have a newfound respect,'' Churchin said. "How can Jeff King and Lance Mackey be so far ahead? I don't know how they do it."

Then he put his head in his hand and cried some more. It was hard to wrestle with how a race so seemingly simple could become suddenly impossible.

Craig Medred's Iditarod coverage for Alaska Dispatch focuses on the "back of the pack" mushers trying to reach Nome. His coverage will document the real life struggles of ordinary people when they cash in everything to chase their dream of becoming an Iditarod dog musher. The stories are a prelude to the forthcoming book,"Graveyard of Dreams: Dashed Hopes and Shattered Aspirations along Alaska's Iditarod Trail." Click to pre-order a copy.