THE GREATEST RACE ON EARTH
by Nathaniel "Nate" Yaekel

This installment of the logistics of the  Great Iditerod Race  is the last in my series, except for the running of the 2002 Race, an article that I'll write FOR our April PressPoints Newsletter. In this month's issue, we'll continue where we left off in the  February Issue.  

One or more communications personnel, stationed at every checkpoint, covers every aspect of the race. They use radios, telephones, or even fax machines, and run the race communications net. Operating at some locations in tents with generators and batteries, the communicators pass arrival and departure times from the checkpoint to Anchorage, relay logistics information along the trail, and handle personal messages. The communicators have saved lives on the trail by calling in emergency airlift to mushers who have had serious accidents or medical problems, which could include exposure, heart attacks, and hypothermia. Logistics staffs are located at the major hubs (Anchorage, McGrath, Unalakleet, Galena, and Nome). These can include half a dozen people, ranging from a logistics coordinator to dog handlers. The race pilots also base out of these hubs, which provide fuel, communications, and a safe place to tie down airplanes in the face of rapidly changing weather.

Headed by the race marshal, a staff of race judges works the entire trail. Former mushers who have extensive experience running dog teams, they are selected with great care, as they have to pass on questions of race rules and conduct, including disqualifications if necessary. There is also an overall race manager, who is the single person most responsible for the staging of the race. Selected ahead of time, he is one of the tiny cadres of full-time race employees. During the race, he and the race marshal usually have dedicated   IAF airplanes  to move them wherever they need to go along the trail.

The most enviable job of the entire race is to ride high-powered snow machines from Anchorage to Nome at race expense. Chosen on the basis of their credentials, these teams of several volunteer trailbreakers must be of the highest caliber. Some parts of the trail, while routinely used for village-to-village snow machine traffic during the winter, are still in need of inspection grooming for the race. Sometimes the mushers themselves broke the trail. As the lead mushers could be penalized for wearing out their teams, that entailed risk. So, to keep it all fair, and to add to the safety margin, the race organization breaks and marks the trail.

The highly experienced trailbreakers use special long-track snow machines that trail thousand-pound sleds to pack the trail and to carry trail marking supplies (usually four-foot pieces of wooden lath with colored reflecting tape that the mushers can see at night with their miner's headlamps). Much of the actual trail construction work is done by local volunteers at least a week or two before the trailbreakers arrive and only on occasion must they clear brush, trees and build temporary bridges over open streams. Trailbreakers try to stay no more than six hours or so ahead of the lead teams; any farther ahead and the wind could drift the trail shut behind them. On the other hand, they can't drop so far back that they hinder the mushers, although the weather sometimes gets so bad that the trail breakers and mushers alike must hole up and wait it out. A team of trail sweepers on similar machines brings up the rear of the race, picking up trash and dropped equipment and often shepherding the "red lantern" musher along the trail.

And at Nome, a large staff of volunteers does all of the million and one things needed to bring the "greatest race on earth" to an orderly and enjoyable conclusion. This includes Meanwhile, in Anchorage, a volunteer staff hundreds strong does things like staging various pre-race banquets and social events, dealing with the media, sorting mushers' food for shipment, picking up and caring for dropped dogs returned from the checkpoints, manning public information booths and hotlines, operating concession stands and souvenir shops, purchasing supplies, soliciting donations, coordinating with sponsors, working with city and state agencies, not to mention the federal BLM, running a taxi service for race personnel, acting as trail guards for sections of trail in populated areas, and dozens of other functions associated with a major sporting event.

And at Nome, a large staff of volunteers does all of the million and one things needed to bring the race to an orderly and enjoyable conclusion. This includes handling the worldwide media blitz and running the massive dog lot at the west end of Front Street where teams that have finished wait for their plane rides home. Nome volunteers also puts on the extravagant Awards Banquet in the Nome Convention Center, routinely attended by 2,000 people or more, where every musher gets a chance to speak and the awards are given out. Every finisher is entitled to a banquet and a chance at the podium to receive the coveted belt buckle and finisher's patch. Since not all of the mushers are finished by the time of the main banquet, the volunteers also put on a smaller but no less popular Red Lantern Banquet for the latecomers.

Because the race lasts more than two weeks (only the top teams make it in under ten or twelve days), the turnover of volunteers is continuous. In keeping with the nationwide and multinational flavor of the race, volunteers come from all over the Lower 48 and abroad. To accommodate individual schedules, people filling positions along the trail must be periodically move ahead to high traffic areas or onto hubs for their ride back to Anchorage as the race progresses. The IAF runs what amounts to a mini-airline before, during, and after the race, moving hundreds of race volunteers from checkpoint to checkpoint. Even within the IAF, pilots rotate back to their regular jobs during the race, so that there are never more than ten or a dozen airplanes actively working the trail at any given time.

All the public ever sees of the race is the mushers and the big finish in Nome. The real race is the drama that occurs every year behind the scenes, and eventually someone may seriously undertake to write about it. (I know that I can't but Iditarod Air Force pilot and author Ted Mattson is already planning a book about the IAF.) No other single event (not even politics) captures Alaskans' enthusiasm so completely and enlists their support so wholeheartedly as the Iditarod, I can safely say. Indeed, the race and everything about it is one of the few things that unite Alaska's normally fractious and independent-minded people for a single purpose, if only for a few weeks each year.

No one who has ever run the Iditarod--or even part of it--would ever trade their experience of it for anything else. The volunteers who make everything run so smoothly year after year in the face of daunting odds would undoubtedly echo this sentiment. It is truly a journey of personal discovery for all concerned--the rookies, the veterans, the perennial contenders, and even the volunteers--and every year the race is different in a thousand significant details. It is truly the Last Great Race on Earth and there is nothing even remotely like it anywhere else.

On Wednesday, February 27, I'm off to Alaska for the 2002 start up of the running of The Iditerod. While I can't stay there for two plus weeks, I'll come home then fly back again in mid-March for it's conclusion.

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