Dogs on Ice in Alaska

"We're about a thousand feet away from him," Lucky says. "You get any closer you'll scare them, and if you scare them you'll change their habits, and that's bad." He points out a hole that a grizzly bear has dug in the side of a mountain. "He was after a parka squirrel," Lucky says. "I could walk into that hole standing upright."

We are hovering 2,000 feet above sea level, Lucky in the right seat of a Eurocopter AS350 helicopter, on our way to the top of Godwin Glacier, and it's one of those gorgeous Resurrection Bay days when, as Lucky says, pointing south, "Look. Look right there. See it? That's Hawaii." Godwin Glacier Dogsled Tours is the brainchild of Lorraine Temple, who used to mush professionally and has helped train teams for the Iditarod. "For years I ran a B&B in Homer and people kept telling me they wished they could see mushing in the summer," Lorraine told me. "Then, six years ago, I hired on to run a glacier dogsled tour out of Juneau with Libby Riddles," the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Lorraine came home to the Kenai Peninsula and began scouting for a location to do the same thing. "It isn't easy. Everything is a national park or a protected wilderness. The Godwin Glacier is really the only place on the Kenai available to do this kind of thing."

Godwin Glacier is in the Chugach National Forest and the business operates under a special use permit, which means that each summer it hauls dogs, cook tent, sleeping tents, dog houses, dog harnesses, dogsleds, dog food-everything-in and out again. Everything. Lucky tells us he hauled out eight barrels of dog poop the previous day. There are five passengers on board. It's a full load, but Lorraine has scored big time by getting a pilot with 11,000 hours in helicopters from Prudhoe Bay to Papua, New Guinea, and he has done his homework for this job. He points out the still-evident effects of the 1964, 9.4-magnitude Good Friday earthquake, and tells us, "The Resurrection Bay fjord is 17 miles long, and after the tsunami it was 45 feet deeper for 45 minutes." We fly over a large collection of blue-roofed buildings. "Ladies," he says, "you've heard what women say about the men in Alaska-the odds are good, but the goods are odd? Well, right down there are some of the oddest goods you'll find. It's the only maximum-security facility in the state of Alaska." As we climb, the Harding Ice Field comes into view in the west. This sheet of Pleistocene ice is, in places, a mile thick. It used to cover most of Alaska and now, at 30 miles wide by 90 miles long, is the largest ice field in North America. "And there is Chocolate Drop," Lucky says, pointing to a mountain shaped like a Hershey's Kiss that I am more used to seeing from Kachemak Bay. Everyone except Lucky is speechless. He hangs a left and there is Godwin Glacier, an immense river of ice calving at the foot, fissuring on the corners and, on top, smoothing into a vast basin of snow, the rim of the bowl made up of sharp crags. A little over the top on the Prince William Sound side, two more peaks rise into view, and Lucky points out how clean the snow is on one peak and how dirty it is on the other. "That just happened," he tells us, "a volcanic vent has opened up on the peak on the right and is giving off some steam and ash." It's only seven miles from the base camp. The difference in the two peaks is striking enough that I wonder nervously if we are about to take a front-row seat at the next Mount St. Helens. The dog lot is a tiny collection of tents on skids and 11 rows of dog houses on the vast glacial expanse, and when we land we are met by Francine Bennis, a musher who is gearing up for another run at the Iditarod in 2004, and who complains bitterly about the heat of the day. Sled dogs like cold-the slowest times posted in the Iditarod are consistently during years when the winter is the warmest-and while the dogs send up a chorus of anticipation as we approach the sleds, it is evident that no speed records will be broken today.

There are more than a hundred dogs ranging in age from 7 and a half months to 13 years, Francine says. There is one Iditarod veteran. "Kobuk," she says proudly. "He's mine." Francine gives us our pre-mush briefing, which consists mostly of "The musher has to stay with the sled. If you fall off, don't worry, he'll wait for you to catch up." Yeah, I've heard that before. Ken, Chase and I ride with handler Steve Zirwes, a bronzed young man from Michigan who, when asked how he got this job, replies simply, "I said yes." It's his second year on the glacier, and at our first stop on the circular trail he points out a mountain that he snowboarded down. It looks maybe half a mile away. "Distances are pretty deceptive up here, that's actually a couple of miles away and that's a pretty steep hill," he says. "It took me about eight hours-seven up and one down. I wouldn't do it again without a snow machine." It's obvious that he just hates this job, which seems to be pretty much the consensus of the eight people who rotate in and out of the base camp. I sit in front of Steve and the dogs kick snow in my face as they trot up the slope. Well, mostly they trot. Max and Mink are being broken in as leaders, and Mink is constantly looking over his shoulder at Steve, tangling everyone in the traces and bringing us to a halt. Steve finally trades him out with Bruno who, despite a tendency to abandon the trail in favour of a more direct approach back to camp, brings us safely home, where Lucky is just touching down.

Lucky, ever the showman, tells us as we lift off the glacier that he has a surprise for us, something we'll "never see again in your lives and something you can only see for four or five weeks out of the year." He hangs a right into a steep valley full of hanging glaciers, a left over a shallow mountain tarn at 2,500 feet that he says the crew is going to swim in before they break camp in two weeks, and hangs another left to reveal a red, white and blue lake. No, no one's been up there with a paintbrush. "The white is snow, of course," he tells us. "The blue comes from meltwater on snow or ice, and the red is algae-the algae that feed the iceworms that come out at night." It's not even 10 minutes from the Seward Airport to the camp, but this distance is counted more in time than in miles. It's a different world up on the glacier, where the hand of man is very lightly and only temporarily laid. You understand Robert Service's "alone in the great unknown" a little better after a trip like that. I would have liked to have stayed there a while, to have felt the ponderous movement of ice beneath my feet, reshaping the earth as it went. Comments in the guest book range from an enthusiastic, "This is 1,000,000,000 times better than everything in the rest of Alaska!" to the always classic "Wow!" Couldn't have said it better myself. Dana Stabenow is the author of 19 novels and lives in Anchorage. She can be contacted through her Web site at www.stabenow.com.

13 June 2005