Anchorage, Alaska. They breed them tough here. And few tougher than musher Tim Osmar.
Tomorrow Osmar sets off with his 12-dog team and sled on the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest run from Canada's Whitehorse to Yukon. When he completes the trek across some of the most hilly, barren landscape in this continent, in temperatures likely to fall below 40 C, he will give himself a 10-day rest.
Then, all being well, he will join the starting line for Alaska's most famous race, the Iditarod - 1,100 miles from Anchorage to Nome in the Alaskan north west.
Why? "I'm just as broke as can be, and two cheques are better than one," he told the Anchorage Daily News. The Quest's prize fund of $125,000 pales beside the $525,000 fund for the Iditarod, where even a sixth place can take home $31,000. Last year's Iditarod winner, Montana's Doug Swingly, took home the equivalent of $108,000.
But the truth is that Osmar also wants a place in the record books in a land where the great mushers are all familiar names. If he wins the Iditarod he will be part of the second father-andson pair to win the race. And if he completes both races, he will be only the fourth ever to complete both in one year, joining a legendary list that includes the likes of Iditarod record holder Swingly, a three-time winner, who last year at the age of 46 took five hours off his previous record to complete the course in nine days and 58 minutes.
"The record was not important", Swingly, the first non-Alaskan winner, told reporters at the finish. "I already had the record, but if I could get an eight-day race, that would be a milestone in Iditarod history." Or there's Rick Svenson, the five-times winner, who in 1997 lost the closest race ever by one second to Dick Mackey, after a final sprint down Nome's main street. Or Norman Vaughan who completed the race in 1990 at the age of 83.
Or there's Libby Riddles, the first woman to have won the Iditarod, who in 1985 triumphed by famously setting out in one of the final legs of the race into a blizzard with winds gusting up to 60 miles an hour to keep her lead. None of her male rivals moved beyond camp until the storm died down. "I only allowed one thought - to keep my lead at all costs, taking it inch by inch if necessary," she would write in her book Race Across Alaska. "It was grim. I could not see one trail marker to the next. . . It was very slow. For some idiot reason the dogs trusted that I knew what I was doing." The race took 18 days that year.
Her feat was surpassed by Susan Butcher who has won the race four times, and this year 10 women are among the 74 entrants. No concessions to the gentler sex though, and the Yukon Quest, seen by some as the tougher, and established partly because of the rejection by some mushers of the commercialism of the Iditarod, has yet to see a woman winner, although Fairbanks's Aliy Zirkle is tipped this year.
But it is the Iditarod, the faster-run of the two races, which has firmly gripped the country's imagination as the greatest endurance test in the world. And already nearly 2,000 volunteers who will man communications points, help with dogs, marshal crowds and break the trail, are already being allocated their tasks for the race which begins on March 3rd. In the days before that the volunteer pilots of the "Iditarod Air Force" will ferry up to 900 dogs to the start line from all over Alaska and beyond. The race, which has been run in its current form since 1973, owes its origins to a desperate dash in 1925 to bring serum to Nome where an outbreak of diphtheria was threatening the town's children. In a relay organised by telegraph the serum reached the town from Anchorage seven days after its doctor appealed for help.
TODAY top mushers are effectively sponsored professionals who face huge costs - not least the transport and feeding of the hundred or so dogs that many of them own. Of the top 25 to 30 Iditarod mushers, says Dave Sawatzky, a coal miner who owns and trains 20 dogs, "I'm the only one one who also works 50 hours a week". He has abandoned the Iditarod this year for the Quest, gambling that his chances are better. He is one of the favourites.
But the year has not been all plain sailing for those preparing for either race. An unusually mild and late winter has seen sharply reduced snowfalls in parts of the country making training impossible and forcing the cancellation of several races. That is a particular blow to the "rookies", first-timers in the Iditarod, who must complete two races totalling 500 miles in the previous two racing seasons and now have found that some of them can't qualify.
Ominously, whether directly related or not to this year's unseasonal warmth, UN scientists this week warned that global warming may be melting the Arctic's permafrost, causing it to release greenhouse gases that could in turn raise temperatures even higher. "This is very alarming," said Dr Svein Tveidtal, a scientist with the UN Environment Programme. "The Arctic is an area where temperature changes are going to cause tremendous problems." Apart from contributing to a vicious circle of increased greenhouse gases and hence further warming later, scientists have also observed that heavier snowfalls in the Brooks range of mountains may disrupt migration and calving patterns for species like the caribou.
The disintegration of the permafrost could also cause serious damage to buildings, roads, pipelines and other infrastructure in Arctic areas.
For thousands of years, the permafrost has mopped up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored it in its soil, mainly because the decomposition of dead vegetation is extremely slow in such low temperatures.
However, with rising temperatures in the Arctic, microbes decompose dead plant matter at a higher rate, releasing carbon dioxide that then adds to the problem of global warming, a process that scientists say there is evidence is already underway.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
