Unheard voices
Back of the pack musher GB Jones
By Jlona Richey
I’m from Hungary. I am a Hungarian Gypsy. I met my husband at a Non-Commissioned Officers club in 1972. In 1991, we realized our dream, sold most of our stuff and headed North to Alaska, following the call of the Yukon and beyond and the voice of Robert Service.
We met Joe Redington SR in 1996 and have been involved with the Iditarod in some form or other ever since. We have met and followed many mushers and a lot of the ‘back-of-the pack’ guys and gals, shared their victories, their challenges, heartaches and setbacks.
Arctic Kennel
The dogs all barked a welcome when I arrived at Arctic Kennel in the old township of Knik, near Wasilla. Arctic Kennel is a small kennel with no big name sponsors, a grassroots mushing outfit running on mostly heart and hope.
A tall, lanky musher lives there in an old motor home. He has no running water, just electricity. His camping conditions are rugged at best. He hauls water in the summer, melts snow in the winter.
“Mushing is a life style, you see.” He grins, and pushes his baseball cap back. “You don’t just run the race and go home, resting on your laurels. No, it is a total commitment to the dogs - the athletes, the wheels, so to speak, on the long trek to Nome.”
We walk down the trail a bit, where he has a dogcart ready to hitch up. This is a means to give rides to tourists and earn a few dollars, but also a good way to teach the dogs to pull and work as a team. With the cart, the four-wheeler and the sled, the dogs build the muscles they need to become the true athletes these huskies are, the dogs of the Iditarod. GB has thirty-five dogs. They are his friends, comrades, his companions.
He picks the dogs he wants to make up the team and lays out his gang line. He harnesses his dogs and positions them where they work best or need more training. The enthusiasm in the kennel is incredible: every dog wants to be chosen, the by-passed ones howl in protest.
GB Jones
GB Jones appeared on the Iditarod horizon out of nowhere. He was an athlete, very well muscled, lean, but at six feet and five inches a tad tall for a musher. He hit a few overhanging tree branches on his first race, and his bloodied face made headlines in the Daily News. Shorter mushers rode right under these branches and were never touched.
Jones is a retired Army Ranger, a kayak and mountaineering instructor and a globetrotter. He is a native of Utah, and was raised by a Mormon farming family, but settled in Anchorage in 1976, an employee of Delta Air Lines. He did not much care for the customer service field and with the support of his brothers he leased a strip of land on the Iditarod Trail in Knik, Alaska, and bought a dog team from Raymie Redington, a son of Joe, the race founder.
GB fishes, hunts some, and farms to produce a large portion of his dog food. The vegetable farm supports his simple needs.
Alaska called him and he has come home to roost. He taught himself to mush by trial and error and he triumphed. The wilderness called him. His team of huskies has crossed the finish line in Nome, a challenge he had set for himself and the team and one challenge well met.
It is a deep-seated, burning passion to have a dog team. It takes a commitment of 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is also not cheap to feed and care for 30 or more dogs, keep a supply of veterinary items, racing harnesses, booties, and food and water. One has to become a virtual social recluse, if one goes it alone with little or no help. Jones is a bachelor, so there is no family in the immediate vicinity to live and work on the premises.
Obstacles on the trail
By now GB has been on the starting line four times. He scratched twice and finished twice. He is tenacious and he clings to his dream, undaunted by all the obstacles in his way.
He is a man of discipline and routine, of forging ahead and going strong into the face of adversity. There is no such thing as failure. Life throws you lemons, make lemonade, mush on.
He did just that. In 2005 his sled was stolen in Fairbanks, too close to the race to make, build or buy another one. He used a modified sprint sled in a pinch, but after reaching Skwentna, he knew that this sled would not get him to Nome. He stayed at the checkpoint in Skwentna for a long time, mulling over the reality. He did not want to let his sponsors down, and he did not want to let the dogs down. It took courage to quit. He did not like it one bit. His pride, his ego wanted him to go on, but this was not an option.
Meanwhile, the world encroaches, bills need to be paid, the routine of every day living must go on.
Knik
Meth labs practically in the back yard, gang activity, violence, senseless killings abound even in this once tranquil corner of the world. Progress rushes on with giant steps. The Knik area, sleepy, half-forgotten for decades, suddenly became a major region of population boost. The cause for this?
A bridge is being considered, and a ferry route is being established between Anchorage and Point McKenzie. Major development is enveloping the only mushing community in the northern part of South Central Alaska. Mushers from Eagle River to Willow are impacted by the encroachment of civilization. Traffic will become more of a hazard to dog teams crossing roads, and many trails are no longer usable, because subdivisions are built on them, and the new people complain about barking dogs.
Struggle against commercialization
Joe Redington SR and Dorothy Page, the founders of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, wanted to bring back what was lost with the advance of the motorized sled, the snow machine. Dog teams were going by the wayside, facing the fate of carriage and draft horses, to slowly slide into oblivion, relegated to being a curio, a tourist thing, a quaint antiquity.
The Iditarod is now an internationally accredited race, sporting fields of 80 mushers and more. But it has now become a race for sheer speed. Dogs are downsized, bred for speed and endurance. Gone are the freight dogs of winter, the Inuit Dogs, the Siberians.
Mushing will go on in the Great Land, but the ‘back of the pack’ Iditarod mushers will disappear. The enjoyment of the trail, of visiting in the villages, the achievement of successfully mastering the many-faceted aspects of the trail, will be lost, and the Iditarod will become strictly a business like the Indy 500.
But ‘back of the pack’ mushers will continue to exist. Like the old sourdoughs from Robert Service poems, the shoestring crowd and the novice crowd of mushing will still face the adversities, fight for their trails.
Mushing will not die out. There are many young people still getting into the sport, and watching them compete at the Junior Iditarod is a terrific experience. Dog mushing teaches courage, teamwork, innovation, survival and endurance. No wonder there is now a Teacher on the Trail, bringing the Iditarod to classrooms nation wide.
The message here is clear. Any undertaking to be done well requires sacrifice and a degree of failure, with the grit to allow for adversity and carry on in spite of it.
We need to go back to the basics, back to simple values, away from the overload of technology, away from the stress. We need to get away from the crowds, the noise, the civilized world and experience the one with nature, the one with earth. We need this in order to stay spiritually and mentally fit and maintain our humanity.
Jones penned Winning the Iditarod, although he has never won the race and will probably never win it by crossing the finish line first. He has won the Iditarod by winning his own race, by making it on his own pace.
GB has no good leaders raised at the moment and the puppies are still too small to consider for the 2006 race. The southern route comes up again in 2007, and that is what he focuses on.
Alaskan photos by Jlona Richey are available on her site tracksofalaska.com.
