I woke up at 6 to take care of my dogs and after having attended, with the other members of the expedition, to the presentation and my music for the students in a wonderful auditorium at the School where we were staying at, I and my Indian friend Tom Huntington made an interview for the local Radio station regarding our trip and our world of the Sleddog / Sports, wishing to be able to organize someday on the Serum Run route a stage Race with daily layovers in each village, to share with the locals and at its best the true spirit of our sport and honour so the memory of the Heroes of 1925. Yesterday then my friend Chris Rowe and her 10 dogs from Nome joined us to travel together until the end. In the meantime it started to snow hard again…but we left anyhow at 1 pm.
When I raced Iditarod in 1996 we ran this section of the trail in night time so I didn't have the chance to taste the beauty and the majesty of the Yukon in this portion. After 18 miles of snow storm finally the sky cleared up again and we reached the huge bluff of Bishop Mountain where in 1925, at the local village ( today abandoned ) George Nollner ( brother of Edgar who did the trip from Whiskey Creek to Galena ) passed the medicines to 21 years old Indian Charlie Evans . It is told that his team of nine dogs had to face temperatures around - 64. Their total time was a bit more than 7 hours.
After a while we arrived at the mouth of the Koyukuk River on our right hand side. The Yukon here becomes really HUGE, scary and for more than 10 miles in a straight line we could see at the end the Koyukuk Mountains where the River bends 90 degrees to the left. Just here, incredible but true, on the right hand bank, in the middle of no where…there is a liquor shop named " Last Chance ".. because it is the last place where you can get alcool on the Yukon since from there on the sale of it it's forbidden by law because of the problems related with intoxication among Indian and Eskimo population ( damned gift of the white man during the gold rush ). But I was very curious and so I asked my leader Megh to stop and wanted to visit personally, even because I wanted to buy some Alaskan Beer for the evening. A nice Indian lady greeted me while her son was shoveling snow from the roof to tell me that they ran out of supplies because of the Snow storm. She gave me anyway some free pizza, smoked salmon and crackers that she had made. I gave her my official post card, hugged her to thank her and…off we went towards Nulato where we arrived at the local High School at 8 pm, after 7 hours of travel, stops included.
VS ARARAD K
