Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tents, dog houses, dog harnesses, dogsleds, dog food, everything in and everything out
again. Everything. Lucky tells us he hauled out eight barrels of dog poop the day before.
There are five of us on board, me, Ken and Chase Butler, father and son from Virginia,
Colin, a folksinger from Scotland and his manager, Julia. It's a full load, but Lorraine has
scored bigtime by getting a pilot with 11,000 hours in helicopters from Prudhoe Bay to
Papua New Guinea, and he has done his homework for this job. He points out the still-
evident effects of the 1964 9.2-magnitude Good Friday Earthquake, and tells us, “The Re-
surrection Bay fjord is 17 miles long, and after the tsunami it was forty-five feet deeper
for forty-five minutes.” We fly over a large collection of blue-roofed buildings. “Ladies,”
he says, “you've heard what women say about the men in Alaska, the odds are good, but
the goods are odd? Well, right down there are some of the oddest goods you'll find. It's
the only maximum security facility in the state of Alaska.”
As we climb the Harding Ice Field comes into view in the west, a sheet of Pleistocene
ice in places a mile thick that used to cover most of Alaska, and now at 30 miles wide by
90 miles long is the largest ice field in North America. “And there is Chocolate Drop,”
Lucky says, which is a mountain shaped like a Hershey's kiss that I am more used to see-
ing from Kachemak Bay. Everyone except Lucky is speechless with awe.
He hangs a left and there is Godwin Glacier, an immense river of ice calving at the foot,
fissuring on the corners, and on top smoothing into a vast basin of snow, the rim of the
bowl made up of sharp crags. A little over the top on the Prince William Sound side two
more peaks rise into view, and Lucky points out how clean the snow is on one and how
dirty it is on the other. “That just happened,” he tells us, “a volcanic vent has opened up
on the peak on the right and is giving off some steam and ash.” It's only seven miles from
the base camp. The difference in the two peaks is striking enough that I wonder nervously
if we are about to take a front-row seat at the next Mount St. Helen's.
The dog lot is a tiny collection of tents on skids and eleven rows of dog houses on the
vast glacial expanse, and when we land we are met by Francine Bennis, a musher who is
gearing up for another run at the Iditarod in 2004, and who complains bitterly about the
heat of the day. “You've heard of SAD? Well, there is also MAD. Grrrr.” Sled dogs like
cold to run in, notoriously the slowest times posted in the Iditarod are during years when
the winter is the warmest, and while the one hundred-plus dogs send up a chorus of anti-
