Local dogsledder Rick Hillman hopes to run the Iditarod

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.

—Jack London, The Call of the Wild

Suddenly, he was plummeting through the frigid wind at 100 miles an hour, thousands of feet above the rugged Alaskan interior near Fairbanks. His eyes traced the serpentine Chena River, taking in the cold, November landscape spreading out to the horizon beneath him. When his white silk chute opened, he was floating, along with 900 other members of the 82nd Airborne Division who had flown over 12 hours straight from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 4,000 miles away. It was 1976, and the 19-year-old paratrooper from Niagara County landed on the slick, snowy ground at Eielson Air Force Base with a thud. His feet went out from under him, and he was sitting on top of the world.

It was his first experience with Alaska, the state still known as “The Last Frontier.” For the next three and a half months, Rick Hillman and his fellow airmen would live in the frozen wilderness, in tents, building fires and learning how to capture huge snowshoe rabbits in snares as part of survival training for the US Army. We were still in the midst of the Cold War, and from Alaska, the USSR was only 55 miles away across the Bering Strait. The adventure marked him for life. “It hit me one morning,” he explains, “that’s where I was supposed to be.”

The young soldier returned to Fort Bragg, met and married “a beautiful Southern doll,” and raised a family. Decades passed, and occasionally Hillman would return to Alaska—sometimes driving his blue pickup through subzero temperatures from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, up the rugged ALCAN Highway past Whitehorse, Yukon, passing moose and grizzlies at the roadside, and rolling under bald eagles as he traveled into the wild of our 49th state.

Along the way, he developed another obsession. Sled dogs.

Way up north

Dog mushing has been an emblem of Alaska since the days of the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, when people from all walks of life began trickling, then flooding, north from across Canada and what was then the lower 45 states. In many parts of Alaska, the dogsled was the primary form of transportation, borrowed from the Native American tribes of the region that had domesticated the animals for that purpose at some distant point in the past.

Teams of dogs pulled sleds loaded with prospectors and supplies over great distances to rocky creeks where the hopeful had staked their claims. For the vast majority, dreams of a golden fortune simply didn’t pan out. Some proud Alaskans will tell you that those who remained were of the very toughest, most adventurous stock—qualities still highly prized in the rugged state.

If you had to single out the greatest of the many heroic dog-sledding stories, you would have to go back to 1925. In the dead of winter, the port of Nome is frozen. That December, there were roughly 1,500 people in the city that sits just below the Arctic Circle, with another 9,000 in the surrounding area. The one doctor and four nurses there were suddenly besieged by a number of Alaska native children with diphtheria—which, untreated, was usually fatal, especially among the Native Americans who’d never been exposed to the bacteria until the arrival of white men.

It was too late in the season to send the diphtheria antitoxin via boat or plane, so a group of 20 mushers and about 150 dogs engaged in a relay to transport a 20-pound package of serum from Nenana to Nome, a distance of 675 miles, through blizzard conditions and temperatures of 50 below zero. It was called the “Great Race of Mercy,” and the lead dog for the final leg of the run was named Balto. The media made him a national hero, and there is a statue of him in New York’s Central Park.

However, serious mushers today tell the legend of a 12-year-old Siberian husky named Togo, who not only led the pack on what was by far the longest and most dangerous leg of the famous relay, but also performed an act of heroism that would make Lassie blush.

The team and sled were trapped on drift ice in Norton Sound. Togo jumped a five-foot gap over the freezing water, attempting to pull the entire floe to shore. The harness broke, but Togo leapt into the water, took the severed traces in his teeth and pawed his way onto land. Then he pulled the huge sheet of ice toward him until it was safe for the rest of the team to make the jump. He didn’t get a statue in Central Park, but he and his musher Leonhard Seppala gained a measure of fame when they were subsequently featured in a Lucky Strike cigarette campaign. Seppala and Togo are revered today in the world of dog-sledding.

The last great race on Earth

The path these mushers traveled is now a section of the annual 1,161-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Billed as the last great race on Earth, it has become an international symbol of stamina.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal rights organizations consistently proclaim it to be an exercise in animal cruelty—but mushers face stiff penalties including disqualification and banishment if they are found guilty of ill-treatment of their dogs. Few such punishments have been handed down, but still on an average year a handful of dogs die during the race. It’s a startling figure that fires ongoing controversy.

On the other hand, according to a recent New York Times article, Iditarod sled dogs are being studied for their extreme resistance to fatigue. It appears the dogs have a “magical” ability to burn calories at a high level for long periods of time without tapping fat and glycogen reserves. It is hoped that the key to this ability can be discovered and applied to soldiers and others whose susceptibility to fatigue puts them at greater risk for illness and injury. The research may prove useful to human athletes as well.

Man’s best friends

Rick Hillman has always loved dogs, ever since he was a little kid. Today, he is a small bear of a man with a quick smile, and you can see him light up when he shows off his dogs, sleds, woodcarvings, and gold nuggets to youngsters. He’s helped raise over a hundred sled dogs—most of them like the Alaskan huskies he had on display recently at the Town of Cambria’s Bicentennial Celebration.

“It’s all about the dogs and the kids. I’d rather be around them than most people,” he says.

For over 15 years he’s been introducing kids to the sport by letting them interact with his huskies, who are all remarkably well trained. Sometimes, little ones will climb right on top of the resting animals, and the dogs never protest. He’s brought his enthusiasm into classrooms, where kids learn all about the bond that develops between musher and dog.

One elementary school developed an ongoing lesson plan where kids got to do all kinds of activities, from making the special booties that the dogs wear in harsh weather to mixing up the ingredients that go into the high-energy treats they eat. The students got interested in the Iditarod, and when the race got underway in March they would trace each team’s progress via a Web site, using their math skills to determine who was in the lead, and by how many hours, or days, in some cases.

Winners of the Iditarod annually spend more money on their dogs and equipment than the first-place prize money offsets. The real payout to the victor is in subsequent endorsement deals, books, appearances, and so on. Elite mushers do quite well running kennels and selling merchandise over their Web sites. For the majority of racers, it is a colossal labor of love. A challenge that, like Mount Everest, has to be met simply because it’s there.

Some kids would ask Hillman if he’d ever run in the great Alaskan race. “No,” he’d say, although he had participated in regional events. Tiny races by comparison, with comparatively little public following. Two years ago, he was the main promoter of a proposed race on Grand Island, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Despite a postponement, the snow never came and the dogs never ran. Even though it would have been great local publicity for a sport that seems natural to our winter climate, it wasn’t meant to be.

It was a big disappointment for a guy who’s really gotten into the sport. He lists some of the people he’s worked with in Alaska—raising and training their dogs, using their private trails, transporting their dogs. And while the names don’t ring a bell to those who don’t follow the sport, a few minutes on Google shows they are all serious mushers and Iditarod competitors. Several have won the race, and some have done it several times. Martin Buser, Linwood Fiedler, Jeff King, Lance Mackey, Bill Kornmuler, and the father-son team of Buddy and Terry Streeper. Why couldn’t a name like Rick Hillman mingle with theirs, as an Iditarod competitor? He’d helped train their dogs, after all.

North to Alaska

Hillman again returned to the kids, and told them stories about Alaska. He let them explore the sled, and let them play with the traces. He described how everyone should see the Alaska Highway in both the hot summer and howling winter, when it’s 40 below. The kids and the parents ate it up.

Witnessing their enthusiasm, a small voice began whispering in Hillman’s ear—or perhaps it came echoing down from the snowy peaks and frozen lakes of his memory. It has grown louder and more persistent in recent months. That’s why he’s heading back up to Alaska in a couple of weeks to begin training for the 2009 Iditarod. If he makes it through a grueling qualification process, he’ll be one of the few non-Alaskans to participate, and one of the only ones ever from Western New York, a place known globally for snow. To do so, he needs to be in Alaska to start late summer training in preparation for the 300-mile qualifier races he needs to complete in order to gain the opportunity to compete in the Iditarod next March.

Hillman, in his early 50s, acknowledges he’s not in the best shape of his life. “But that’ll all get going again, once I’m up there, and start training with all those guys,” he says. It’s interesting to note that while working on this story, I’d call Hillman on his cell phone, which requires an Alaska area code, even though he was at the time just 20 miles away from Buffalo.

He knows he’s less than a year, but still a continent away, from his goal. In Hillman’s case, his next step will be packing up and pressing down on the accelerator of the same blue pickup he’s driven to Alaska twice. “The whole thing’s been rebuilt, front to back,” he says with pride.

When he got out of the service all those years ago, he was built, he recalls, “like Rambo.” The experience of Alaska was fresh in his blood, and he cut down over a hundred pine trees and built a log cabin by himself out in the woods of North Carolina. It was back when he and his wife were first together.

He still talks like a soldier, peppering many of his responses with an earnest “Yes, sir,” for emphasis. Remembering those days, however, he switches quickly into a sweet impression of his wife’s drawl: “Hiya, Ree-uk. That’s how she used to say it, with her Southern accent…” His voice trails off into the distance, and he seems for a moment like a man lost in the wilderness, searching for that familiar trail that could lead him home.

Then he seems quickly pulled back by a force as heavy as fate, as strong as the gravity he felt when he stepped out of that plane 30 years ago, high above Fairbanks, falling into Alaska.

“If I could just make it,” he says, doing a take on another Sylvester Stallone character, “I’d feel like Rocky. If I could just cross that line…that line in Nome…I’d know I wasn’t just another bum from the neighborhood.”