NOME -- Rachael Scdoris and her Iditarod sled dog team were navigating a treacherous cliff, crisscrossed with switchbacks, when her sled slammed into a thick spruce tree.
"It was the worst run I've ever done," said the legally blind musher, who finished the 1,100-mile race early Saturday in Nome.
Scdoris managed to recover from the fiasco in the Alaska Range and crossed the Iditarod finish line in the post-midnight chill of the old Gold Rush town, becoming the first legally blind musher to bring a sled dog team more than 1,100 miles from Anchorage to Nome.
Scdoris' uncorrectable visual impairment limits her to seeing blurry shapes of objects more than a few feet away and makes her acutely sensitive to bright lights. She is color blind and has 20-200 vision.
The 21-year-old from Bend, Ore., scratched last year in her first Iditarod attempt when her dogs caught a diarrhea-causing virus.
"Everything this year was just better," said Scdoris amid a gathering of family and friends in the finish chute under Nome's burled spruce arch. "I learned a lot last year. I was more organized and more confident going into this year. I knew I could do it."
Nome's main street was largely quiet as Scdoris and trail guide Tim Osmar, of Ninilchik, arrived almost side-by-side at 1:42 a.m. Curious spectators left the saloons for a few minutes to watch and cheer as Scdoris and Osmar arrived, before the cold drove them back inside.
Osmar arrived 56th and Scdoris was 57th in a field of 72 teams, not counting 11 who scratched from the race. They completed the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 12 days, 11 hours and 42 minutes. Leading teams this year finished in nine to 10 days.
The most harrowing segment of the Iditarod, both agreed, occurred in the first quarter of the race, where dog teams plunge blindly over the lip of a canyon onto a cliff called the Happy River Steps.
As the two navigated the trail at night with only their headlamps to guide them, Scdoris rammed into a thick spruce tree, snapping the line connecting her sled to her 16 dogs.
"When I heard her screaming I was real happy because I knew she was alive," said Osmar, a consistent top-20 musher who finished 19th last year.
The bushy-bearded Iditarod veteran caught Scdoris' dogs as they took off down the trail and miraculously guided them and his own team to the bottom of the steps, a steep slope with sudden switchbacks where many mushers wipe out each year en route to the Rainy Pass checkpoint in the Alaska Range. There are 24 checkpoints along the trail.
Scdoris said she grabbed her sled and walked with it to the bottom of the steps, where Osmar and another musher, Jim Warren, had managed to halt the two teams.
"I figured if anybody could catch my dogs, it would be (Osmar)," Scdoris said.
Later in the race, Osmar thought he lost Scdoris one night on the sea ice along the Bering Sea coast on the way to the village checkpoint of Koyuk.
After waiting almost an hour, Osmar decided to complete the remaining two miles to Koyuk, borrow a snowmobile and go out and find her.
"I pictured snowmachines, helicopters the National Guard and whatever," Osmar said. "But when I got there, she was already there with straw laid down for the dogs."
Scdoris said she had fallen asleep on the sled, as many mushers do, and veered off the trail.
"It was so flat and so early in the morning, it was hard not to doze," Scdoris said. "I woke up in jumbled ice and no other dog tracks."
As it turned out, Scdoris was close enough to Koyuk to make out the lights of the village and guide her dog team there.
Osmar said he wanted to help Scdoris because he admired her grit in attempting the race last year. He also wasn't planning on being very competitive this year because he was running a young, inexperienced dog team.
"I was in the position to help her, so I did," he said.
The Iditarod Trail Committee until 2004 had been reluctant to allow Scdoris to race. Several mushers had been worried for her safety and said she wouldn't be able to carry out the demanding and time-consuming dog care required along the trail.
"She did a heck of a great job with the dog care," said Osmar, 39, who has run the Iditarod 21 times.
Despite her accomplishment, Scdoris said she wasn't yet ready to commit to another Iditarod.
"We made it," Scdoris said. "I'm just looking forward to sleeping and taking a shower."
TOO SLOW
BEN VALKS, a rookie musher in the Iditarod, was kicked out of the race Saturday by officials because his pace was not fast enough to keep up with the other back-of-the-pack mushers.
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