My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

Like other racers from the Seward Peninsula, Garnie’s dogs excelled in the coastal wind, as his former partner Libby Riddles proved with a famous charge into a storm. Joe had come within an hour of winning the Iditarod himself, something no Eskimo musher had ever done. This year he hoped the change of scenery and the cheap dog food available in the Interior would enable him to correct that previous affront.

Armstrong was finishing his paperwork with Doug Swingley, our Montana meat supplier. Thirty minutes stretched to an hour. I could imagine the questions starting to circulate in the newsroom. “So, any bets on what time Brian will make it in?” But there was nothing to be done. I had $1,866 of meat in that truck: 3,000 pounds of ground beef, 900 pounds of liver, and 600 pounds of lamb.

Deadline Dog Farm’s meat was in the very front of the truck, so I had to help clear out everybody else’s load before I could begin collecting mine. Stacks and stacks of frozen 50-pound blocks were passed out, forming new piles in the waiting pickups. Minutes ticked away, and I fought the urge to scream.

I finally rolled into work four hours late and physically destroyed. I was exhausted and close to the breaking point, but luckily nobody said a word, and it was a quiet shift. All I had to do was swing by the cop shops, write up the crime blotter, and slap together a graph on historic weather records. Another day in training.

By January the time demands of my race preparations were out of control. Dan Joling, the managing editor, agreed to let me cut back to contributing a single weekly column for the duration. The column, “Off to the Races,” described what it was like to be a rookie preparing for Alaska’s Great Race. The Associated Press distributed a condensed version statewide. Of course, my pay dropped accordingly, but time was the currency that mattered at this point.

One day in mid-February, less than three weeks before the race, I found a message waiting at the News-Miner. Virginia, the newspaper’s business manager, wanted to see me. There had been a mistake, she said. As a part-time employee, I no longer qualified for free health insurance. To maintain my medical coverage, I’d have to come up with several hundred dollars in premiums.

“Cancel it,” I said.

I wasn’t the only one putting dogs ahead of the job.

A year before, Jon Terhune, an abrasive oil company machinist from Soldotna, had approached his plant manager at Unocal Chemicals. Advising the manager of his wish to enter the next Iditarod, Terhune asked what could be done. A month of unpaid leave was subsequently approved, so long as the machinist took the time off in conjunction with his vacation. In July, on the first day entries were accepted, Terhune signed up, becoming the twenty-fourth musher on the list.

The former army paratrooper was a dour man, with little patience for fools. One day in 1969, Jon, his first wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Heidi, had thrown everything they owned in the family’s station wagon and left the East Coast for good. Traveling westbound out of Albany, they saw cars on the other side of the highway backed up three lanes deep. The Terhunes learned from the radio that the traffic was caused by people heading to a big music festival. Nancy wanted to turn around and join the procession to Woodstock.

Her husband refused to even consider it. “That’s the reason we’re leaving,” he said, pointing to the traffic. “It’s getting to be a rat race.”

After settling in Alaska, Terhune began raising malamutes as a hobby. He got into mushing in the mid-1980s, running castoffs from Harry Sutherland. After Nancy died, Terhune found an outlet in the sport. Dogs offered companionship with none of the hassles people inevitably brought into his life. Breeding a few dogs, buying a few more dogs, Terhune gradually built a racing kennel. In 1990 he ran the Kusko 300, a grueling race through Eskimo villages in the Kobuk Valley. It was hellish. All the other rookies dropped out. Terhune spent ten hours searching for the trail in a whiteout and slipped far behind the veteran racers. But he never considered giving up. Not Terhune.

On the home stretch Jon was so tired he fell asleep on his sled, and his team trotted right past the finish line in Bethel. Startled spectators and race officials scrambled after the snoozing racer, whose team continued on its own to the far side of town.

A year later, Terhune entered the Kusko a second time. He viewed it as a final Iditarod tune-up. Instead, the race almost ended his Iditarod hopes. For starters, it was too warm. The race had to be rerouted around open water, and the opening miles crossed tundra stripped of snow by the sun and the rain. Conditions worsened as the trail dropped down on a river. There, wet, slick ice threw Terhune’s dogs into a panic. Even worse, Daisy, a recently purchased young leader, was in front. Dandy, the musher’s favorite, most dependable lead dog, was running inside the team. It was a protective move: Terhune wanted to spare her from the pressure. But the strategy backfired tragically when Dandy fell on the slick ice. She dragged in a tangle of lines while Terhune battled to slow his runaway team. But he couldn’t plant his hook in the hard river ice. Afterward, he spent 20 minutes trying to revive poor Dandy. To no avail. His lead dog was dead.

Terhune scratched from the Kusko. His girlfriend, Dawn, hoped he had learned his lesson. She hoped he was ready to give up his Iditarod obsession. Dawn figured wrong. Though traumatized by Dandy’s loss, Terhune wasn’t accepting defeat. He chose to protect his team for the bigger challenge ahead. Three other dogs were hurt. If he didn’t quit, he wouldn’t have enough left to run the Iditarod. He’d invested far too much, endured too many nights on the trail preparing for the coming trip. And he owed it to Dandy to try. Drop out? Each setback further steeled Jon Terhune’s resolve.

In February, as he prepared to take his vacation, the machinist reminded his supervisor of the promised leave. The message was relayed upstairs, where the plant manager had changed his mind. Terhune’s leave was officially denied. He appealed through Unocal’s grievance committee, but the decision was upheld. Terhune was a ten-year employee. He sent the company a letter reminding them of the prior arrangement and reaffirming his intent to run the race.

Unocal officials responded by offering to extend the machinist’s vacation by a couple of days, but the request for unpaid leave was again denied. The machinist was ordered to report back to work the day before the Iditarod started. Terhune had a hunch they were calling his bluff, convinced that no one would walk away from a $50,000 job.

“You want to know where I am?” he told his boss at Unocal. “Look in the fucking newspaper.”

On my visits home, I always put on a slide show for friends and family in Washington, D.C. After I moved to Alaska, those shows inevitably featured recent sled-dog races, conveying my growing appreciation for the sport. Over Christmas one year, my brother Coleman relayed a message from his father-in-law.

“If you want to run the Iditarod,” he said, “Mr. Brown told me to tell you not to let money stop you.”

Occasionally I’d daydreamed about entering the sled-dog races I covered for the newspaper, but I’d never given it serious thought. Certainly not the Iditarod. Did Brown realize that it would take the better part of a year to get ready? That it would cost at least $10,000? That I might not make it to Nome?

Coleman smiled, daring me to do it. “I think you ought to talk to him.”

For the hell of it, I worked up a budget and arranged to meet Brown at the Kennedy Center cafeteria for lunch.

A retired foreign service officer, Bazil Brown, 59, was a man of broad experience, sensitive to the fleeting adventure our lives represent, and haunted by a son’s death and his own bouts with emphysema. Reminders of mortality had led Brown to reflect on the experiences that had brought him the most satisfaction.

Aside from his family life, he told me over lunch, one of his most gratifying experiences resulted from a spontaneous decision he had made at a party, many years before. That night the young diplomat recklessly agreed to invest in a new play. It was called Sleuth, and it turned into a huge hit. The play was followed by a movie with the same name. By getting in on the ground floor, Brown reaped continuing financial rewards. His involvement also gave him a backstage introduction to the theater community, a world he would have otherwise missed.

Brown saw my possible entry in the Iditarod in a similar light. He told me he was prepared to put up $10,000 to make it happen.

I couldn’t accept the offer. Not yet. There was a lot to consider. I would be putting together a racing kennel from scratch, something that might easily cost closer to $15,000, possibly even $20,000. My life as a reporter was already hectic, involving weeks, sometimes months on the road. I had to decide if I was ready to commit to the months of training that would be necessary if I were to have even a chance of driving a dog team over mountains,