NOME — After several 1,000-mile races, Dan Kaduce wasn’t a rookie heading into his first Iditarod, regardless of what the official scoresheet might say.
The 40-year-old Kaduce, who has competed in five Yukon Quests and numerous other races but never before an Iditarod in his 15 years of mushing, said as much on Thursday, the day after his 21st-place finish in the 2010 Iditarod.
That mark was good enough to secure him the coveted Rookie of the Year honor, which will be presented to him at the Iditarod Banquet here in Nome on Sunday.
“It was pretty much another race, just different. I didn’t have any kind of rookie jitters like I did for my first couple Quests. Being our seventh 1,000-mile race, I certainly had some advantages that other rookies didn’t,” Kaduce said after speaking with his wife, Jodi Bailey, and mushers Hugh Neff and Dallas Seavey in the Nome Convention Center.
Though he had the experience of the Quest to go on, he said he didn’t feel qualified to give too much advice to his fellow rookies. “Since I still was a rookie to this race, and I’m not a cocky rookie, I wasn’t giving any advice to anybody, especially if I didn’t know what was going on.”
Kaduce finished with 11 dogs from his 16-dog starting team, but he praised one in particular that he had to leave behind. “I’ve got a little female named Guppy, she can’t be but 40 pounds, and she’s never made a race team for me before because I’m always afraid to bring her on the Quest. She’s kind of little and furless and not long-legged. My big tall male leaders were a little sore coming into the race and she led for over 600 miles until, on the way to Elim, she stepped in a crack in the ice and went head over heels and came up three-legged. I had to carry her in and drop her. She was our speed for the whole middle of the race. We loaded her into the sled and she was squealing and barking at them, like she was saying, ‘I didn’t run all this way for nothing.’”
The other four dog drops weren’t from serious problems, Kaduce said. “Hers was the only real injury. The rest of them were digestion problems that resulted in weight loss that I wasn’t willing to let them continue. Once you’re showing ribs in my team, you’re done.”
The digestion problems Kaduce mentioned came from thawed food, a problem that afflicted almost every musher in the race to varied degrees. Even champion Lance Mackey wasn’t immune; his dogs had to run on kibble alone for a portion of the race, limiting their top speed.
Kaduce was able to sidestep the problems somewhat by using some of the food reserved from mushers who had scratched. “All of my drop bags — every one of them until the last two checkpoints — were spoiled. I was feeding them my food in the beginning of the race and was having some digestion problems because of it, and then a race official told me to start using food that people had either left behind or dropped mushers weren’t going to need. I started doing that to search for meat that wasn’t spoiled, and boy, instantly digestion improved on the dogs and things went better.”
Despite those problems, Kaduce mostly stuck to his schedule. “My plan all along was to outrest everbody in my area and keep as much trail speed as possible and not worry so much about my position. Just learn about checkpoints and the trail and how the layout of the land works for this race.”
Learning about the trail was an interesting experience, Kaduce mentioned. He praised the way the trail was marked, saying, “We pretty much had a magic carpet ride the whole way. The trails were incredibly well-marked. You’d have to be asleep to lose the trail, and being as we rested so much, there was never a problem with that. ... The Quest seems a little longer, but the terrain is more the same. This here, you see everything from deep snow to no snow to glare ice to hills to gravel, sea ice — way more varied terrain.”
The well-marked trail is intended to help mushers proceed through winter blizzards that frequently pop up along the Bering Sea coast, but Kaduce didn’t encounter much hostile weather other than low temperatures along the Yukon River. “Going through what they call the “blowhole” between White Mountain and Nome, I wasn’t sure if I was in the area or not, because when I would stop in the area, you could light a candle and hold it in the air, it was so darn still. It was baseball cap and sunglasses area for my part of the run, even though it was one of the areas I was potentially dreading the most.”
Even in the Alaska Range, when a blizzard covered a trail that had been mostly barren of snow, Kaduce didn’t struggle. He credited that success to training in the hills near Chatanika. “We had an incredibly stiff headwind and heavy snow going over the Rainy Pass, but those are our kind of conditions. We live in the hills and my dogs understand that all you need to do is crest that hill and the wind is going to change as soon as you get over the other side. That’s the run where I picked up the track for the first time and really let them go, and that’s where you saw speeds on that run that the race has never seen before.”
That speed, recorded by Iditarod officials as more than 16 mph between Rainy Pass and Rohn, is about 5 mph faster than champion Lance Mackey recorded over the same distance.
His finish time of 10 days, 50 minutes would have been good enough for second place last year, when racers were delayed by a Bering Sea storm.
As to whether he’ll run the Iditarod again, Kaduce was noncommittal. Next up for him is “a summer of work.” For his dogs, there’s a little more racing left. “Our dogs will be in a couple different races with Jodi and another friend of ours.”
If he goes down the Iditarod trail next year, it’ll be with a bit more experience and without that rookie tag next to his name on the scoresheet.
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