Husky News

Cliff Roberson straggled into this tent checkpoint early Monday afternoon, exhausted and running 70th in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Roberson, a Corvallis, Ore., neurosurgeon, was trailing far behind the early front runners, including Norway’s Kjetil Backen, who was the first to leave the checkpoint at Rainy Pass 50 kilometres up the trail.

One day after the start of the 1,770-kilometre race, Roberson was already being slammed. His dogs had run him ragged, racing in all directions and forcing him to ride the brake for 80 kilometres.

“They’re so full of beans. They’re like a runaway train,” Roberson said, smothering salve on his dogs’ feet while rising winds stirred up the deep snow. He would have to drop a female dog, Vinnette, because of a sore shoulder.

Temporarily miserable, maybe, but the 60-year-old Roberson is just happy to be making a trek to Nome on Alaska’s western coast. It’s been 13 years since he finished his third Iditarod. Something is driving him to relive an unforgettable experience before he gets too old.

“I feel there’s enough fire in the belly for one more,” he said just before Sunday’s start in Willow.

He’s running what he says is his final race. The venture is a reluctant gift from his wife, Suzanne Roberson.

“It’s so, so expensive and so frivolous,” she said, standing on the frozen Willow Lake to see her husband off. “But he works hard and he needs this.”

“It’s a disease,” Cliff Roberson said, laughing.

Roberson acknowledges it’s hard for some to understand the whys of running the Iditarod: why someone would spend thousands of dollars preparing for the race, why someone would want to sleep on frozen ground, at minus-60. Then there’s all that time training in Alaska since October with retired Iditarod racer Vern Halter and the Willow musher’s dogs.

“You don’t actually want to be at 60-below. You want to do the event and hope it’s not 60-below,” he said. “It’s just unbelievably exciting to travel across Alaska with a dog team.”

The Iditarod was launched in 1973 to commemorate a 1925 run by sled dogs to deliver lifesaving serum to Nome.

The modern trail covers two mountain ranges, the vast frozen Yukon River and treacherous ice. Challenges include blinding blizzards, long stretches of frigid overflow, the numbing cold. It’s an extremely difficult journey with tremendous emotional ups and downs, said Roberson, who last ran the Iditarod in 1995.

For him, the mystique of the race runs the whole course, from bonding with the dogs to basking under the dancing northern lights. There are jagged mountains and dense woods, the wind-scrubbed Bering coast before the final stretch to the finish line under Nome’s burled arch

“To really see Alaska, this is the only way to do it,” Roberson said.

A couple years before he turned 60, Suzanne Roberson asked her husband what he wanted for the milestone birthday.

He took months to figure it out. Conventional gifts like a new car or exotic vacation didn’t do it for him. Slowly it dawned on him that only the Iditarod felt right. He took a while to tell his wife what he really wanted.

Then it was her turn to stall. Beside the money and time involved, she also worried about the race itself.

“He tells me stories about how sleds can do these cliffs,” she said. “And I say, ‘Cliff!”‘

But she relented, seeing how he had no second choice.

“The Iditarod is my first five selections,” Roberson said.

The race is fluid at this point, and much will likely change as each musher takes a mandatory 24-hour layover and two eight-hour rests. Roberson said he would be content to come in among the top half of the field.

Halter said he wouldn’t be surprised with that showing, citing Roberson’s meticulous care of his team.

“There are teams ahead of him now that he might see behind him later,” Halter said. “I’d be happy if he’s just happy and his dogs are happy.”

Meanwhile, a Quebec musher won the 400-kilometre Can-Am Crown on Monday, tying the record of four victories in the race.

Martin Massicotte, of St. Tite, Que., crossed the finish line in Fort Kent, Maine, at 1:30 p.m. ET, followed six minutes later by Andre Longchamps of Pont Rouge, Que. The 2006 winner, Matt Carstens of Whitefield, N.H., came in third.

Massicotte’s victory in a time of 35:32:24 allowed him to tie Andrew Nadeau, the only other four-time Can-Am winner.

Three-time winner Don Tibbs of Millinocket, Maine, was left to try again next year. He finished in fourth place.

The dog sled race across the wilderness of northern Maine kicked off Saturday with thousands of spectators at the start line in Fort Kent. Police Chief Kenneth Michaud says it was the largest crowd he had seen in the 16 years of the race.

Mushers competed in difficult conditions, including a snowstorm that slowed progress with a foot of fresh snow on Saturday, said race marshal Georges Theriault. Temperatures also dipped to 10 to 15 degrees below in some locations, he said.

All told, 81 teams were competing for US$40,000 in cash prizes in the 400-kilometre race and two shorter races held over the weekend.

Source: The Canadian