Colleen Easley

It’s Saturday and the mushers of the Iditarod are progressing nicely up the trail.  The leaders are Lance Mackey, Hans Gatt, and Jeff King.  Unfortunately 12 mushers have already scratched which leaves 59 teams in the race.  By Sunday afternoon all the official Iditarod staff will be in Nome preparing for the winner’s arrival.  It’s hard to guess this early, but we’ll likely see the winner in Nome sometime late Tuesday or early Wednesday this week.  Many people think the race is over once the winner is in Nome, but the race isn’t finished until the last musher crosses under the burled arch in Nome.  That probably won’t happen until about Monday or Tuesday the following week.

Today was a beautiful, but cold sunny day so I decided to take a little time away from the hotel to go out for a walk.  The cold wind was blowing in my face so I pulled my fur ruff around my face to block the wind.  I didn’t have any peripheral vision so I had to be sure to look both ways when crossing the street, and keeping my footing on the ice was also a challenge.  I was walking down a dead end side street when I saw this funky mailbox post.  If you look closely you’ll see that there is a strap holding it in the current position, but by releasing the strap the mailbox can be extended out towards the road for when the snowplows have piled snow up in front of the post.  I suppose this saves the homeowner some time because here in Anchorage if you don’t shovel out in front of your mailbox, the postman will not deliver the mail.

As long as the weather continues to be sunny I hope to get outside for short walks more often now that the work load in my room has evened out and my volunteers are getting the procedures figured out.  I’m always on a short lease; however, as long as I have my cell phone with me.

Nikon D90
with Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR II Zoom Lens
at 32mm, 1/250s, f/5.6, ISO 200, Auto White Balance (subject was in the shade which made it harder to avoid the blue cast. I should have tried pre-set white balance.)

Retractable Mailbox

We finally had a nice sunny day here in Anchorage.  As the afternoon progressed I was looking down from my 4th floor office window and saw that the sun was making some nice shadows on the airplane tracks on Lake Hood.  I thought about heading outside to take a photo, but then thought I’d try a shot through the window first because I didn’t think the shadows would show up as well from ground level.  As it turned out, I never did go outside – the 4th floor shot turned out ok.

There aren’t many tracks because very few planes have been landing on the lake.  As I mentioned in one of my previous posts there is some concern about the thickness of the ice, so most planes are using the regular airstrips.  Usually when there is more traffic, there are groomers who drive around the lake to pack down the deep snow for the airplanes, but since ice conditions are questionable, the groomers are not working and the few planes that do come in have to plow through deep snow leaving these interesting patterns in the snow.

Nikon D90
with Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR II Zoom Lens
at 135mm, 1/1250s, f/5.6, ISO 200

Dropped dogs are dogs that have been dropped from mushers’ teams in checkpoints along the Iditarod Trail.  Most of the dogs that are dropped are just tired, but some might be ill or injured.   A team can only travel as fast as it’s slowest dog, so if a dog is not running well, the musher will drop him/her in one of the checkpoints and continue on without that dog. Veterinarians are also examining all the dogs in all checkpoints, so vets can also make recommendations to mushers if they think a dog needs to be dropped.

Each musher starts the race with a maximum of 16 dogs.  They must have at least 6 dogs still pulling in harness when they cross the finish line in Nome in order to be a qualified finisher.  No extra dogs can be added to the team and once a dog is officially dropped, it cannot be reinstated in the team.  The average number of dogs in a team reaching Nome is probably going to be around 10-11 dogs, plus or minus.

If mushers decide to drop a dog they must wait until they are in a checkpoint.  If the dog is having a problem between checkpoints the musher will likely carry that dog in their sled bag until they can drop it in the next checkpoint.  All the dogs have number tags on their collars as well as a microchip in their ear so there is no question about identifying the dogs that are dropped.  A Dropped Dog form is filled out for each dog being left behind in a checkpoint and is signed off by one of the vets.

Once a dog is dropped, there are vets and volunteers in the checkpoints to take care of the dogs until they can get them flown back to Anchorage.  Pilots of the Iditarod Air Force often load up their small planes with a dozen or more dogs to bring them back to town.  The dogs are then placed on a chain line behind the Millennium Hotel where they are cared for by volunteers of the Dropped Dog Department until their handlers come to pick them up.  If it looks like the handler won’t be here on the same day, volunteers will transport the remaining dogs to the Eagle River Corrections Facility where they will be cared for by prison inmates who have earned that privilege for their good behavior.  Handlers then know they have to go to the prison to pick up their dogs.  We often joke a little here at headquarters that the dogs going to Eagle River are going to “doggie jail.”

In the past couple days the IAF has transported over 100 dogs back to Anchorage.  Dogs that were actually dropped take priority over dogs from scratched teams but dogs from the 9 (so far) scratched teams are also flown back by the IAF.  This photo is of one of the dogs that was waiting for his handler to come pick him up.  It was a cold day in Anchorage so to help keep the dogs warm and comfortable they make a bed of straw and cover them with a nice warm blanket.  When I showed this photo to one of my friends she said it reminded her of the big bad wolf in Red Riding Hood when he dressed up as the grandmother.

Every time the Race Stats department publishes a new standings log we send it out in PDF format to key personnel here at headquarters and the checkpoints up the trail.  It also goes downstairs to the phone room where volunteers are taking questions via phone from the public.  They make copies for people who walk in looking for information and they take one copy out to post on what we simply refer to as “The Board” in the lobby of the hotel.

The Board is a huge bulletin board that has a map of the Iditarod Trail on the left and a giant chart to show the progress of each musher on the right.  In the center section there is a cork board where press releases, scratch reports and other important data is posted.  It is the responsibility of the phone room supervisor to keep that board updated.  Each time a standings log is published the new data is transcribed to the chart so that visitors to the hotel can see at a glance the progress of each musher.

The same information that locals can find on the board can be found at the Iditarod website at www.iditarod.com.  Visitors to the site can find the current standings, read about the history of the Iditarod, keep up with current press releases and visit the Iditarod store.  For a small fee fans can become an Iditarod Insider and gain access to dynamic content such as videos from out along the trail and the tracker data being sent by the GPS units on each of the musher’s sleds.

Today I was hoping to get a photo of some of the dropped dogs that were being returned to the hotel from the trail, but the circumstances of my race stats department never allowed me to get outside while the dogs were there.  I’ll try to get that photo another day, but for today, I’m posting a picture of “The Board”.

Nikon D90
with Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR II Zoom Lens
at 18mm, 1/60s, f/4.0, ISO 200, on-camera Nikon SB-800 Speedlight

The Board - Iditarod Headquarters

Another Iditarod department that is staffed 24 hours per day is the Communications department which is located right next door to my Race Statistics department in the Millennium Hotel.  ‘Comms’ enlists over 100 volunteers to staff their Anchorage office as well as the checkpoints along the trail.  Their primary responsibility is to set up the technology along the trail so that communications can flow efficiently between checkpoints and headquarters.  They are also the people who are sending me the musher in and out times and dog counts for each of the checkpoints so I can keep the stats updated.

I think one of the hardest things for people outside of Alaska to understand about the Iditarod is the fact that we can’t just pick up a phone and call to many of our checkpoints.  Some checkpoints are in such remote wilderness locations that there are no land lands or cell phones at all.  Someone asked me today if mushers are allowed to carry cell phones and I almost laughed, because not only are there no cell phone towers along the route, but with our frigid temperatures, the phones would likely freeze and be inoperable in a matter of minutes.  So basically when a musher is in-between checkpoints there is no way of communicating.  They have GPS tracking devises mounted on their sleds that allow us to track them over the Internet but these units are not designed for navigation assistance.

For today’s Iditarod, email is the main method of passing information back and forth between checkpoints and headquarters.  Some checkpoints are located in villages that have highspeed Internet connections, but in the more remote checkpoints we depend on computers connected to satellite phones.  For the most part, communications are pretty good, but often can be challenging; depending on conditions.  In the 16 years that I’ve been working this race I’ve seen communications evolve from ham radios, to regular land lines, to fax machines, to dial-up Internet, and then finally to highspeed Internet, satellite phones and pagers.  Some of the villages now even have cell phones.  Although it remains difficult for Comms to maintain a reliable communication link to some of the remote checkpoints, it’s truly amazing how well they manage considering the harsh conditions that our trail personnel have to deal with.

Today’s photo is of the Communications office here at the Millennium in Anchorage. Barbara (on left) is the supervisor and like me, lives in the hotel during the race.  She has her dog, Cody staying with her and he spends a lot of time in the Comms room too because when she leaves him alone in  her sleeping room we hear a lot of howling coming from her door!

Nikon D90
with Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR II Zoom Lens
at 18mm, 1/60s, f/4.0, ISO 200 with on camera Nikon SB-800

Iditarod Communications Office