Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cipation when we approach the sleds, it is evident that no speed records will be broken
today.
There are a hundred-plus dogs, according to Francine, ranging in age from seven and a
half months to 13 years. There is one Iditarod veteran, “Kobuk,” Francine says proudly.
“He's mine.”
Francine gives us our pre-mush briefing, which consists mostly of “The musher has to
stay with the sled. If you fall off, don't worry, he'll wait for you to catch up.” Yeah, I've
heard that before.
Ken, Chase and I ride with handler Steve Zirwes, a bronzed young man from Michigan,
who when asked how he got this job replies simply, “I said yes.” It's his second year on
the glacier, and at our first stop on the circular trail he points out a mountain that looks
maybe half a mile away he snowboarded down. “Distances are pretty deceptive up here,
that's actually a couple of miles away and that's a pretty steep hill. It took me about eight
hours, seven up and one down. I wouldn't do it again without a snow machine.” It's obvi-
ous that he just hates this job, which seems to be pretty much the consensus of the eight
people who rotate in and out of the base camp.
I sit in front of Steve, the dogs kicking snow in my face as they trot up the slope. Well,
mostly they trot. Max and Mink are being broken in as leaders, and Mink is constantly
looking over his shoulder at Steve, tangling everyone in the traces and bringing us to a
halt. Steve finally trades him out with Bruno who, despite a tendency to abandon the trail
in favor of a more direct approach back to camp brings us home safely, where Lucky is
just touching down.
Ken grins at me. “We don't get a lot of this in Virginia,” he says.
Lucky, ever the showman, tells us as we lift off the glacier that he has a surprise for us,
something we'll “never see again in your lives and something you can only see for four or
five weeks out of the year.” He hangs a right into a steep valley full of hanging glaciers, a
left over a shallow mountain tarn at 2500 feet that he says the crew is going to swim in be-
fore they break camp in two weeks, and hangs another left to reveal a red, white and blue
lake. No, no one's been up there with a paintbrush. “The white is snow, of course,” he
tells us. “The blue comes from meltwater on snow or ice, and the red is algae, the algae
that feed the iceworms that come out at night.”
