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The Quest for Yukon Gold
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10581 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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2 / 1986 |
2,574 Words |
| Author
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Ron Dalby
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What's a thousand miles? In terms of time it's a couple of days in a car or a couple of hours in an airliner. In terms of distance, it's about equal to a straight line between Washington, D.C. and Omaha. Such measurements, however, mean little to the thirty or more sled dog racers lining up in Fairbanks, Alaska, on February 22 to start the third annual running of the Yukon Quest.
For them a thousand miles is the distance from Fairbanks to Whitehouse, Yukon Territory, Canada, via Angel Creek, Circle Hot Springs, Circle, Eagle, Dawson and Carmacks. In history books those tiny towns figure prominently in turn-of-the-century Alaska and northwestern Canada.
Whichever man or woman with a team of up to twelve dogs can cover the 1,000 miles in the shortest time will win $15,000, an amount that works out to more than $1,000 a day on the trail. It takes about twelve days to complete the race.
Winners earn their money. Temperatures along the route will hit twenty, thirty and even forty below zero. Mushers and dogs will move up the Yukon River into the teeth of an Artic wind howling at twenty, thirty, fourty mph or more. Wind chill factors--temperatures actually experienced by the body--can easily sink to 100 degrees below zero. Each of the twelve dogs in a team will consume ten to fifteen pounds of high-protein food every day of the race to maintain its strength.
Veteran musher Joe Runyan of Tanana, Alaska, won in 1985. He called the Yukon Quest a unique race, one which required strategy and planning. "The distances were so far and the loads we're required to carry are so heavy, it's a completely new kind of challenge," he said.
It's fair to say that Runyan moved to Alaska just so he could raise and train sled dogs. He commercial fishes during summer months along the Yukon River--partly for dog food and partly for cash--but he devotes his winters solely to raising and training dogs. There's about 100 animals in his kennel these days."
Runyan lives in Tanana, not exactly on the beaten path in Alaska, or anywhere else for that matter. To get to Tanana one must first drive or fly to Fairbanks, then hop on a small commuter airplane or charter an even smaller plane and fly another hour or so to the west. No roads lead to Tanana; it's at the confluence of the Yukon and Tanana rivers, almost right in the geographic center of the state. But for Joe Runyan, it's a great place to train a long-distance sled dog racing team. He and his dogs can run for miles in every direction without fear of interruption.
Besides 100 or so of man's best friends, Joe has a wife, Sherri, and a couple of kids. Both kids have their own two-dog teams and resent even the suggestion that they do without their small teams. "We'd have to walk," they say when asked about getting rid of the dogs. In that sense, their upbringing is much like their father's.
Joe Runyan grew up working with pointers and hounds in Oregon; his long experience with dogs shows in his handling of his team. He describes dog racing as "kind of an exercise in balance and harmony. It's a full-time job for anyone who's serious about it." Joe is definitely serious about it, and so are
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