Return to Feature Coverage This article is part of a selection of feature coverage articles.

Road to Rondy is bumpier for some mushers

Published on February 17th, 2010

By VICTORIA BARBER

Courtney Moore, 25, has mushing in her blood.

Her mother Lorene Moore, a Koyukon Athabascan, grew up with dogs - like everyone did in Tanana back then. She helped train her brother's team and even raced, and won, a women's event when she was eight months pregnant. Courtney's father, Pat Moore, mushed since 1965 and was president of the Tanana Dog Mushers Association for about 20 years.

They didn't hang back when introducing their daughter to the family pastime. Courtney Moore was four days old when she first met the sled dogs at her family's fish camp, and she's been around them ever since.

She started racing when she was old enough to stand on the back of a sled and hold the handlebars, taking first place at the Tanana Carnival children's race at age 4. It wasn't always a smooth ride (the next year, when she was five, "I distinctly remember falling off and getting soaked" Moore recalled) but that didn't stop her budding career as a musher. For Moore, racing dogs is just hard to resist.

"Racing is a better high than any alcohol or drug," Moore said. "The feeling of me and my dogs going the fastest we can around a race, the reward that my hard work to get there is paying off . . . it's pretty thrilling."

It's a thrill felt by probably every competitive sprint musher across the state. Moore will join over 30 of them at Open World Championship in Anchorage, the cumulative event of the sprint mushing season. Together they will run the 25.5-mile drag race through Anchorage at breakneck speed.

But it's the trip to get there that makes Moore different than almost everyone else in the field. Because while mushing began before people could get around with roads, Moore and 20-year-old New Stuyahok musher John Hanson are the only competitors this year from off-road towns.

Hardest part of trip

For Moore, it means that the hardest leg of her trip to Rondy is the first - the one where she has to get the food, equipment and 18 sled dogs from Tanana to the last stop on the Elliott Highway, Manley Hotsprings. It's a two-hour trip if everything goes smoothly.

"That's happened about twice," Moore said.

To get to Manley, Moore loads her dogs into a 14 foot by four foot, open-topped box covered with a tarp that she drags on a sled behind her snowmachine. Someone else, often a relative, drives a second snowmachine dragging another box loaded up with all her food and gear.

Then it's 60 miles to Manley on a trail that leads down a mining road, over a series of lakes and down and up a steep river bank.

A lot can happen in 60 miles of Interior winter, a region where 60 below is expected "at least once a year."

Last year it snowed over four feet just before Moore and her father made their return trip home. The wind was blowing so hard they couldn't find the trail, and they got stuck more than 20 times. While righting her sled, two of Moore's dogs got caught in lynx traps. Her dad got so stuck he had to dig out a four foot radius around his snowmachine using his hands so Moore could tow him out - that alone was "maybe a two-hour ordeal," Moore said.

It took 11 hours for them to reach Tanana.

This year her cousin drove with her to Manley. They made it in four and a half hours, but both sleds flipped over on the way. Her snowmachine hit glare ice and slid out of control, her box with the dogs sliding behind her until she hit a jagged upswell of ice. Then the box jackknifed the snowmachine and tipped over. She loosed a few of the dogs and righted the sled but "that's the least of what happened," Moore said.

Her cousin's sled flipped and bent its hitch. Moore was able to beat it back with an ax and tie it down with some rope but the worst of it was his windshield was broken. By the time they reached Manley it was too late to save her cousin's face from frostbite.

The reason Moore keeps making the trip to Manley and back is a dream - to win in an open race.

Her dream is the reason she quit school three years ago to train her racing team, when she was just a semester shy of a degree in biological sciences at University of Alaska Fairbanks. That year she was four seconds away from her goal in an open race in Willow. Last year her dogs got sick and she missed her chance again. Just one more year, she agreed with her father. She'd give it one more year and then she'd go back to school.

Last racing try

But if Moore doesn't make her first place finish at the Open World Championship this time, she says she won't try again. Even with sponsorship and community support, she estimates it takes $20,000 to $25,000 a season to race the dogs, which she largely pays for with her earnings as a carpenter and help from her father.

"Sprint mushing is something of a dying sport," Moore said. "Unless you have top dogs and can do other things with them - sell them or breed them - then you're not going to make it back at the end of the year."

Rural mushers like Moore have to contend with more than just the other teams when it comes to winning. Traffic, crowds, cheering and tunnels are just some of the conditions that Moore can't replicate in training.

And the top dogs are changing, Moore's father added. They aren't generally the ones that can survive the winters of Tanana.

"My dogs look a little chubbier and hairier than most you'll see at Fur Rondy," he said. "I don't want to build another little house so I can put all these short haired dogs in there that are winning races."

But for one last time Moore and her team will taste the thrill of charging through the streets of Anchorage against the fastest teams in the state. After all it took for her to get there, she's earned it.