Seventh musher rescued by helicopter
By TIM MOWRY
Staff Writer
A 30-hour ordeal did not end until Tuesday morning for a trio of Yukon Quest 300 mushers who ended up stalled on the 35-mile trail between Angel Creek Lodge and Mile 101 due to heavy snow and blizzard-like conditions.
The group included the youngest musher in the field, who was airlifted to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital.
While their troubles were overshadowed farther up the trail by the Monday night rescue of six mushers who were plucked off Eagle Summit by an Alaska Air National Guard helicopter, they too suffered a long, cold, miserable night that could have turned out much worse than it did but for the efforts of volunteers who broke trail on snowmachine from Angel Creek Lodge.
Alyssa Quaile, a 17-year-old Fairbanks musher, was medivaced off the top of Boulder Creek Summit on Tuesday morning by the 68th Medical Air Ambulance from Fort Wainwright with minor frostbite and a sprained wrist. The only one of seven airlifted mushers actually flown back to Fairbanks from the trail, she was treated and released from Fairbanks Memorial Hospital Tuesday afternoon.
Qauile spent more than 30 hours on top of the summit, at well over 3,000 feet elevation, unable to get her dogs to move forward after they stalled in the white cauldron that enveloped the three mushers as they began the climb into the Rosebud Summit area.
After injuring her back on the climb up Boulder Creek Summit, one of the steepest climbs on the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race trail, Two Rivers musher Tammi Rego could no longer push her sled up the hill to help her dogs over the final hump.
Without her help, the dogs couldn’t budge the sled. She was stuck in one of the worst possible places in the world to hunker down, but she didn’t have a choice.
“I couldn’t push anymore,” said Rego. “The dogs kept trying but they couldn’t move the sled. It was too steep.”
So the 31-year-old musher, one of 14 competitors in the Quest 300, which follows behind the 1,000-mile Quest, did the only thing she could do. She pitched camp on an exposed face near the top of the hill.
“That’s one of those things you know you shouldn’t do … get stuck on an exposed face like that,” she said. “But there was nothing I could do.”
Rego and Ester musher Chester Witczak made their way back to Angel Creek Lodge early Tuesday after snowmachiners from Angel Creek came to their rescue and broke trail through 18 inches of fresh snow to reach them.
It wasn’t a pleasant situation for anyone involved, said Rego, the only one of the three mushers who could be reached for comment.
“It was rough,” she said by phone from her Two Rivers home.
When she left Angel Creek at about 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Rego knew there was a storm blowing in. Officials had warned both she and Quaile, who left a short time before Rego, that the weather was changing.
“I figured there was enough time to get up and over (Rosebud),” said Rego.
But the 20-mile trail leading to the base of the mountain was horrific, she said.
Patches of sloping ice and overflow dotted much of the trail. Mushers repeatedly slid down patches of ice and slammed into trees at the bottom, soaking themselves and their sleds in the process.
“I can’t say how many sections of overflow there were,” said Rego, who broke a stanchion on her sled at one point and then jerry-rigged it together. “My wheel dogs went under (water) one time.”
It started snowing when she began climbing up Boulder Creek Summit but the wind wasn’t blowing bad yet, Rego said. Near the top of the hill, Rego said she felt a “pop” in her back that rendered her helpless. After unsuccessfully trying to get her dogs to move forward, Rego made the decision to camp at around 6 p.m.
“I got in my sleeping bag and put handwarmers everywhere and basically hunkered down,” she said. “Luckily it wasn’t cold. If it had been 40 below I wouldn’t have made it.”
It was about midnight when Witczak came up on her and asked what she was doing camped where she was.
“I told him I couldn’t move,” she said. “Nobody in their right mind would camp there unless they had to.”
Determined to make it over the summit, Witczak continued on only to be halted by whiteout conditions on the other side, Rego said.
“He got over the summit and started down but couldn’t see anything,” she said, relating what Witczak had told her.
After a short rest in which he sat behind his sled to get out of the wind, Witczak turned his team around. It was about 6 a.m. Monday when he returned and told Rego what had happened. Witczak continued down the hill to get out of the wind but Rego didn’t want to chance it in the dark and waited a couple hours until there was enough light to see.
It took Rego about an hour and a half to plow her way back down the hill through waist-deep snow drifts before she reached the spot where Witczak had camped, she said. They stayed there for about two hours before retreating to the bottom of the hill. They reached the bottom at about 3 p.m. and made camp again.
Both she and Witczak were having trouble getting their dogs to go, Rego said. Plowing through the heavy snow discouraged the lead dogs, and both mushers had females in their teams that were in heat, causing problems that were fitting for Valentine’s Day.
An Alaska State Trooper helicopter flew over and circled them a short time after they reached the bottom of the hill, Rego said. About two hours later, a trio of snowmachiners—Steve Verbanac, Dennis Alexander and Larry Bradley—showed up after breaking trail from Angel Creek, Rego said.
After getting a fire started, Verbanac, a trapper familiar with the area, continued up the hill to look for Quaile. Though his snowmachine became stuck in deep snow, Verbanac contined on foot and found Quaile on top of the summit with a tangled dog team that showed no interest in moving.
Making sure Quaile was safe, Verbanac then walked three miles back to where Rego, Witczak and the two snowmachiners were camped so he could send someone for help.
It was about 10 p.m. when Rego hooked up her team and followed Bradley on the trail back to Angel Creek. They arrived back at Angel Creek Lodge at 4:25 a.m. on Tuesday. Witczak arrived back at the lodge later in the morning, tired but uninjured.
Troopers received a call from Alexander at around 6 a.m., informing them that Quaile needed to be airlifted off the summit. A MAST unit from Fort Wainwright was dispatched around 11 a.m. to pick her up.
Rego was thankful for the efforts of locals from Angel Creek and Two Rivers who helped search for she and the two other mushers. And throughout the ordeal, Rego couldn’t help but be impressed by her dogs.
“The dogs were awesome,” she said.