Spooky, horrific and nerve-racking were a few of the words mushers in the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race used to describe the wade to the finish line in Bethel on Sunday and Monday.
Overrun by a tropical storm that came roaring north across the Pacific Ocean over the weekend, mushers watched the trail for the popular 300-mile sled dog race go from snow to slush to water over the course of 24 hours -- and pin two mushers down 50 miles from the finish line.
"Flotation devices wouldn't have been that bad of an idea,'' said dog driver Paul Gebhardt of Kasilof. "I was kind of nervous about getting through that stuff. It's not a smart thing to stand in the middle of a river in water.''
Most of the Kusko course is on the frozen surface of the Kuskowkim River. Mushers running into standing water on the river ice can't know for sure whether it is water over ice or an opening in the river itself.
Race officials assured mushers the ice was safe, but Gebhardt said he sometimes found it difficult to convince himself. All it would take, he noted, was one hole where the ice had gone out beneath the water and a musher and a team could perish.
"It's definitely life-threatening circumstances,'' he said.
A two-time runner-up in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, Gebhardt said he was chatting with Kusko winner and former Iditarod champ Mitch Seavey from Sterling in Bethel on Tuesday, and Seavey observed "that we should just be grateful to be here.''
That appeared to be not only the reaction of many of the mushers who finished but their loved ones as well.
"... The stories are pretty horrific,'' Kathy Chapoton, wife of four-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser of Big Lake, wrote on their kennel's Web site. Her husband was running the race along with their 18-year-old son, Rohn, who was contending for victory until the swimfest near the end.
"When I asked Martin what happened, his initial response was something like, imagine being in 50,000 acres of water, and it's pitch dark,'' Chapoton wrote.
She reported Rohn at one point found himself guiding his lead dogs through "thigh-deep water. The dogs were swimming and the sled was floating behind. He did find a dry spot and stayed there for one or two hours, contemplating how to get to Bethel.
"At one point, the dogs got tangled, so he let half of them lose but had to trudge back through water to convince the others to come, and his legs were getting cold. He said he never felt like he might drown, but recognized it was a dangerous situation.
"Some locals met up with him somehow and pointed him in the right direction, and he made it to Bethel just before his dad.''
Gebhardt repeatedly prai-sed Bethel-area residents for going out to look for lost dog teams, and for mounting a valiant effort to maintain some sort of marked trail.
"They drowned a lot of snowmachines, but all the living creatures made it OK,'' he said.
More than a dozen snowmobiles were reported to have been sunk in the battle of the "Kusko-swim,'' as Chapoton labeled the race. Snowmobile recovery efforts were still under way on Tuesday when Gebhardt flew home with his dogs to the Kenai Peninsula. The team, he added, had impressed him.
"They did really well,'' he said. "I was surprised. They listened well. They responded well.''
Sometimes, he said, they were marching through 150-yard-long stretches of water with nothing to guide them, and still they marched on.
"For the last 18 miles,'' Gebhardt said, "you were in water of some sort except when you went across the one little land portage'' in a bend of the frozen Kuskokwim River.
"The saving grace,'' he added, "was that the wind wasn't blowing.''
With the winds calm and the temperature above freezing, the danger of hypothermia for both dogs and mushers was minimal as long as they all kept moving.
Had the wind been blowing, pushing windchill temperatures well below freezing, dangerous hypothermia would have been more of a threat.
Luckily, Gebhardt said, the mushers and their teams never got a lot of wind and water at the same time, though they got both over the course of the two-day race.
It started on Friday with the temperature around 20 degrees and a coating of fresh snow on the trail.
"It seemed like it was going to be a perfect run,'' Gebhardt said.
But only miles into the competition, the winds started howling. Then came blowing snow.
"Then,'' Gebhart said, "it got hot and it melted the snow.''
As mushers came back down the Kuskokwim River toward the Bethel finish, conditions steadily worsened.
"From Tuluksak to Akiak, it was pretty wet, and they'd re-marked the trail,'' Gebhardt said, "(But) the water was never more than two or three inches deep.''
From Akiak to Akiachak, it got deeper and more foreboding. And from Akiachak on to the finish, it was a nightmare.
Given that all the snow was gone by then, Gebhart said, "we were trying to figure out how they marked the trail.'' He finally concluded someone must have gone out and cut holes in the river ice with a chainsaw in which to stick posts to hold markers.
That was good, he said, but there was one small problem.
"Sometimes the water would come up through those holes,'' Gebhardt said.
A rising tide being driven inland by gale-force winds offshore was forcing water upstream beneath the Kusko river ice creating so much pressure it sometimes blew the trail markers out of the holes and pumped more water onto the ice.
Both Gebhardt and Seavey reported passing markers moving in a current, which was more than a little unsettling.
Still, Gebhardt said, the Kusko turned out to be was everything a musher training for the Iditarod could have hoped for.
"I went out there with the intention of doing an Iditarod training run,'' he said, "and I got everything you ever wanted in a dog race.''
Some mushers got more than they bargained for.
David Tresino, a two-time Iditarod finisher, and Kyle Belleque spent all day Tuesday in the Tuluksak checkpoint, 50 miles from the Kusko finish line, hoping the water atop the Kuskokwim River would freeze or subside.
That was the forecast for today, race officials said, when the last two racers on the course hoped to make the final eight-hour push to Bethel.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
Kuskokwim 300
Sunday finishers
1) Mitch Seavey, 8:09 p.m.; 2) Ramey Smyth, 9:04 p.m.; 3) Ed Iten, 9:53 p.m.; 4) John Baker, 10:04 p.m.; 5) Rohn Buser, 11:45 p.m.; 6) Martin Buser, 11:53 p.m.;
Monday finishers
7) Paul Gerbhardt, 1:43 a.m.; 8) Jeff King, 4:34 a.m.; 9) Sebastian Schnuelle, 4:58 a.m.; 10) Dave Decaro, 5:20 a.m.; 11) Myron Angstman, 5:20 a.m.; 12) Melissa Owens, 7:40 a.m.; 13) Hugh Neff, 4:19 p.m.; 14) Mike Williams Sr., 8:39 p.m.; 15) Mike Williams Jr., 8:40 p.m.
Into Tuluksak
16) David Tresino, 11:01 a.m. Monday; 17) Kyle Belleque, 12:25 p.m. Monday.
Scratched
Gerald Riley, DeeDee Jonrowe, Jim Lanier, Jackie Larson, Jessica Klejka
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com