Yukon and Alaska: the Yukon Quest by Richard Newton

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Whitehorse is quiet. Traffic lights wink at near-deserted streets. Snowy sidewalks show only yesterday’s footprints, made indistinct by the icy stirrings of the wind. I trudge for three blocks before a passer-by passes me by. Wild beard. Dew-dropped nose. He greets me, and I attempt to wish him a good morning but receive little help from my chilled lips. “Gu mmnun,” is the best I can manage.

Down on First Avenue, things are different. Here are the first tangible indications that this is no ordinary Sunday morning in the capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory. Men with smudged breath are constructing a spectator stand under the Cyclopean stare of a German TV crew. A yellow banner is being winched into position. Eventually it stretches over the road, its big red lettering revealing all: YUKON QUEST. The world’s toughest dog sled race.

“It’s cooled off a bit,” says Ned Cathers, sporting a frosty beard. “That’s good news. It’s been too warm these last few days.” Time has marched on. With the start of the Quest just half-an-hour away, a sizeable crowd has gathered. I am standing with Ned beside his truck as his daughter, Jennine, hitches up his starting team of 10 dogs (he will pick up four more dogs at Carmacks, 150 miles into the race). “It was eight below yesterday,” I say, muffled behind a scarf. “You reckon that’s too warm?”

“The dogs like it cooler than that. Oh, it’s comfortable for the musher if it’s just below freezing. But, the dogs prefer it down under minus twenty. So we try to get a balance in there; an overlapping comfort range. Today’s just about right.”

He stoops over his sled, checking its contents. Again. Preparations must be thorough when you have two weeks of mushing ahead of you across a thousand miles of white wilderness. The distant finish line is in Fairbanks, Alaska.

“What are you taking with you?” I ask. “Come see,” he says in his clipped Canadian accent. “I’ve got some food for the dogs and myself. A little bit of water. An alcohol cooker, dog dishes, sleeping bag, axe, snow shoes, promotional material. Extra clothes and stuff.” He zips it all up. Not for the last time. There will be further checks before he sets off, 14th in a field of 22.

At ten past two the first starter is ready. The cold is really beginning to pinch now. I have found a vantage half-a-mile down the course, close to where the trail takes a sharp right onto the frozen Yukon River.

“Who’s starting first?” asks a spectator standing behind me, throwing the question open to all-comers. I know the answer: “Jumm Wwssmm.” Jim Wilson, the race favourite.

The German film crew buzz overhead in a hired helicopter. They have direct interest in this race; one of the competitors is a compatriot fulfilling a long-standing ambition. I am sure that he is having second thoughts now. Each of the mushers will endure unimaginable hardship over the next fourteen days. Some will succumb to frostbite (fingers and toes are often lost) and there may be tense encounters with wild animals. In 1993, an imperilled musher killed a charging moose with his axe.

That incident didn’t go down well with the animal welfare groups who have waged a campaign to ban this race. The Quest is unnecessarily cruel to the dogs, they argue, and frequently claims canine lives. Indeed, this year, partly due to a sponsorship shortfall as a result of the adverse publicity, the race came close to cancellation.

But, these are dogs born to run. At the start line, they appear genuinely eager to break the trail. A posse of vets will follow the teams by air to tend to any problems. As the organisers are quick to point out, the medical contingencies for the dogs are far better than for the mushers.

Now, at last, the waiting is over. The 12th running of the Yukon Quest is under way. The big crowd cheers each team as they set off at two minute intervals. The Quest is becoming a popular spectacle for tourists, who will follow the early stages by aircraft. Few will watch the entire race; as it progresses, the field will string out. There may be more than three days between the winner and the last team home.

Once all the teams have left Whitehorse, a rag-tag convoy of vehicles hits the Alaska Highway, bound for a bridge across the Yukon River. Many of us sidle down a steep, snowy slope onto the frozen river to wait for the teams to come by. They are an hour into the Quest by the time they reach us. The early pace of the dogs has settled; they plod along the river, harnessed shoulders straining with the weight of the sled, tongues flapping.

Ned slithers past. I make some unintelligible noise that is supposed to mean: “Good luck, Ned.” He waves a begloved hand, guides his team around a bend in the river, and is gone. That’s the last I see of him.

The gelid air cocoons the teams in the intensity of their own efforts. For two weeks it will just be the panting of the dogs, the rumbling sled, the musher calling directions: “Gee. Haw.”

Loneliness will bite soon. The mental struggle will be every bit as tough as the physical one. Solitude and fatigue often conspire to conjure vivid hallucinations. Mushers watching their dogs’ feet to check for signs of lameness claim to have seen the paws kick up bright colours in the snow, “kinda like the Northern Lights”. Other competitors become convinced that they have a passenger riding with them and, compensating for the imagined extra weight, turn their sleds over on tight corners. That can be a disaster, because the dogs don’t always stop.

There are no such trials in store for me; just another five days in the North. A warm sequence of hotel rooms in Juneau, Alyeska ski resort, and Anchorage. A succession of tucked-up nights, with the TV flickering, and me thinking about the mushers out there somewhere, in the snow, trying to sleep on their sleds with their dogs lying huddled beside them.

Then, I’m not even in Alaska. I’m back in England, and they’re still out there. And, I wait for news.

Eventually it arrives. Frank Turner of Whitehorse has won the Quest, with Jim Wilson in second. On the home leg, Frank phoned McDonald’s in Fairbanks to order take-away hamburgers to be waiting at the finish line for his dogs. But he changed the order an hour out, shouting to a radio operator: “No Big Macs! Steaks at the line!”

But what of Ned? I discover that he got as far as Dawson City, the halfway point, where his wife, Mar, was waiting for him at the checkpoint with a slice of lemon meringue pie. By then, though, he knew that his race was over. “The dogs were in excellent condition, but their heads were screwed up. They weren’t happy, so I wasn’t happy.” He therefore announced his retirement from this, his eighth Quest.

He added, with irony as thick as winter fog: “It’s just a dog race, you know.”