Mushers question response
EAGLE—Race Marshal Mike McCowan said Wednesday he will defer answering questions about the response to mushers in distress on the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race trail until he is able to meet with his full crew of judges.
McCowan said Wednesday that he intends to gather together the group when the race takes its traditional 36-hour break sometime this weekend in Dawson City, Yukon.
Some of the seven 1,000-mile Quest and Quest 300 racers rescued by helicopter from two White Mountains summits Monday and Tuesday have been critical of the response by race officials. And one participant who was not rescued claimed officials left three trailing teams that had not reached the 101 Mile Steese Highway dog drop by Monday to fend for themselves.
Communication on the Quest is spotty and judges, who serve as referrees and facilitators, are often spread over hundreds of miles of trail. The stay in Dawson City will be the first time everyone has been together since the race start last Saturday.
“At that time, I will meet with all of the judges,” McCowan said. “We will talk about what actually happened at 101 concerning getting the folks off of Eagle Summit.”
About 15 dog teams were out in a storm and overdue early Monday when officials decided to launch a ground search. But the storm’s intensity forced searchers to return to 101.
Officials then called in authorities, who looked for teams using airplanes and a helicopter.
Fears that mushers could be hurt or lost mounted throughout the day. In addition, Quest 300 musher Randy Chappel lost his team during the descent from the top of the 3,685-foot summit.
By evening, six dog mushers and seven dog teams were plucked off the summit and returned to 101. Officials also reported that three teams still on Rosebud Summit had also been found and were headed back to the first checkpoint at Angel Creek. McCowan withdrew all of the racers under guidelines provided in the Quest’s rules.
But while officials celebrated the news in Central that all were safe, Quest 300 racer Tammi Rego said things were getting worse on Rosebud Summit. She had been forced to camp by a back injury. And fellow racers Chester Witczak of Ester and Alyssa Qualie were also struggling.
The 17-year-old Qualie, the youngest participant in either race, was found Tuesday morning after 30 hours on Rosebud and flown to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where she was treated for frostbite and released. Rego and Witczak were led out by a group of local snowmachiners.
“(Quest officials) weren’t even going to look for us,” Rego said in a Tuesday interview with the News-Miner. “When it took me over 18 hours and I hadn’t got into Mile 101 and I hadn’t returned to Angel Creek, my husband knew something was wrong. That was the only way they got things going.”
At least three of the six mushers rescued Monday from Eagle Summit were also critical of either race rules or decisions made about their status on the trail. The complaints of each differ slightly.
Saul Turner, for instance, believes he should have been allowed to continue down the 35-mile trail to Central, but wasn’t given a choice.
Jennifer Cochran, however, said the rescue was the right thing to do. But she believed Quest officials helped put her in the dangerous situation with a flawed weather report when she asked for the forecast.
“They said 30 to 40 mph winds,” she said. “I check this stuff. Thirty or 40 mph winds you can travel through. In 100 mph winds, you can’t move.
“I specifically checked on all that stuff to make sure it was OK.”
Cochran said Army National Guard rescuers during the search clocked winds at 80 knots or 92 mph. National Weather Service equipment on the summit recorded gusts up to 37 mph during the time mushers were lost with average winds of 24 mph.
Senior forecaster Tim Shy said wind speeds, particularly near mountain tops, can be locally much gustier than speeds measured by an isolated piece of equipment. The principles of fluid dynamics tell him it was possible the mushers experienced gusts higher than 37 mph because of their particularly exposed location. But he also noted that it is difficult to measure wind speed without equipment.
While McCowan was unwilling to talk about the rescue Wednesday, a Healy musher who helped coordinate the search told a radio station that miscommunication may have led to the decision to fly out teams.
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault or anything like that, but I think there may have been a misunderstanding of what was being asked. Just locate them and tell us that they’re OK,” Todd Capistrant said in a KUAC broadcast Wednesday. “If we knew they were OK and under way, we wouldn’t have wanted them to be evacuated.”
Not all the mushers withdrawn from the race were critical of officials. Jodi Rozmyn, a Quest 300 musher whose rescue Monday from Eagle Summit was apparently not reported to organizers, said she was the first person into the helicopter when it arrived. The Two Rivers musher was glad for the help.
“I think we actually could’ve waited it out and found the trail,” Rozmyn said. “But once they’ve got the Army out, they’re not going to leave us out there. What if we got in trouble again? I think they made the right decision.”
Chris Talbott and Tim Mowry contributed to this report.