Call of the Wild

arizona's own call of the wild

Romeo's Love Story Starts in a Canine Shelter, But Leads to a Snowy Triumph

First-time dogsled racer Ryan Clark nervously eyed his watch as delicate snowflakes landed on his wool cap, parka and mittens.The 31-year-old high school English teacher's watch read 9 A.M., just a half hour until nearly a dozen mushers, powered by their churning dog teams, would explode at one-minute intervals out of the starting chute at The White Mountain Winter Games, Arizona's version of the Alaskan Iditarod dogsled race.

On this 28-degree January morning at Sunrise Park Resort, a ski facility in eastern Arizona's White Mountains, towering Sunrise and Apache peaks loomed like abominable snowmen in a starkly white landscape. Smack-dab in the middle of a pristine ponderosa pine forest riddled with frozen lakes, boughs drooped with the weight of freshly fallen snow, and the ground glistened like crushed crystals.Clark leaned over and ruffled the thick fur of His lead dog, blue-eyed Romeo, a pure white wolflike Siberian husky with steely muscles and a warm heart. Romeo returned the affection with a wet face lick, as if in gratitude. Just two weeks before, Clark had liberated Romeo from homelessness at the Arizona Humane Society.Clark had been on a last-minute lookout for a lead dog-smart, fast and tough enough to position at the head of his team. In a quirky twist of fate, Clark's friend and fellow musher Ron Miller had dropped by the Humane Society to pick up dog tags and spotted Romeo in a holding pen. Hungry and badly dehydrated, the stately Siberian had been lost and on the run for about a week when the shelter rescued him. More than a foot of gnarled chain still dangled from his neck.

After Miller gave Clark and his wife, Linda, a call, the kindhearted couple went to the shelter to meet Romeo. There was an instant bond: Romeo snuggled next to the couple, licking their hands and faces. "He was such a lover," Clark said later. "He wanted to be as close to us as possible." It only took five minutes of Romeo's charms to win over Linda, who clinched the deal: "Let's sign the adoption papers."

Clearly Romeo was a lover, but Clark had no idea whether he could count on him to lead his team successfully in the White Mountain Winter Games. Until the next day, anyway.

Clark took Romeo along for a test drive at Sunrise Park. He strapped him in with his other dogs-Timber and Ophelia, both malamutes, and Konan, a Siberian husky and malamute mix-to a gangline attached to his wooden sled. To Clark's surprise, Romeo was a natural, even if he didn't know the commands yet. "Hike!"

Gets a dogsled team going, "Gee!" turns them right, "Haw!" left, and "Whoa!" makes them stop. Clark discovered that Romeo could make all the right moves when he was paired next to well-trained Konan, who knew the lingo.

Romeo instinctively knew to veer away from thin patches of snow and displayed pure drive and verve. Best of all, "He was just so fast," Clark said, beaming with parental pride. He trusted Romeo completely. Then, As Clark fretted about the race. fellow members of the Arizona Mountain Mushers readied their dogsled teams. This odd assortment of racers ranges in age from 31 to 69. Some live in Arizona's high-altitude snow country, Flagstaff or Pinetop, while others dwell in desert areas. Mushers make an amusing sight in the desert. They man three-wheeled carts made of 1-inch welded pipe and barrel past rocky cactus-studded terrain in the cool morning and evening hours (except in the hot summer months) to escape the heat. It can be a jarring ride, as Tucson musher Don Uhlir, who's had hip-replacement surgery, can attest. The engineer's solution? Shock absorbers, of course.

Like the famed Olympic Jamaican bobsled team depicted in the comedy hit Cool Runnings, not even a lack of snow can deter the Arizona Mountain Mushers from passionately pursuing their sport. Every year, they gather on the White Mountain Apache Reservation for some fun-loving competition.

Bundled like Alaskan Inuit native people in heavy parkas, wool caps and mittens, nearly a dozen mushers, both men and women, hustled their antsy Siberian and Alaskan huskies and malamutes from their trucks. Excitement hung in the air like the mushers' clouds of breath. As wired as preschoolers at Disneyland, the dogs yipped, yelped, whined and clanked their chains.

Feathery snowflakes dusted the mushers' wool caps as they unloaded lightweight dogsleds made of ash, birch or oak. Just the sight of the sleds heightened the frenzy for the wolflike dogs-thick-shouldered, barrel-chested malamutes; perky-eared, mediumsized Siberians; and their leaner, long-legged and more high-strung counterparts, Alaskan huskies. These churning dynamos were born-and bred-to run. "I know the minute I show my team the harness they'll just go ballistic," said Clark.

For Clark, the games weren't so much a race as an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream. He'd grown up reading Call of the Wild, American novelist Jack London's vivid saga about Buck, a "superdog" shanghaied into servitude in the Yukon during the Alaska Gold Rush. Years later, Gary Paulsen's Winterdance captured Clark's imagination. This man-against-nature adventure vividly portrays the blinding wind, snowstorms, moose attacks, frostbite and sleeplessness the author suffered during the Iditarod, a punishing 1,150mile race through the Alaskan wilderness.

The history of the Iditarod, called the Last Great Race on Earth, features the tale of Balto, a Scandinavian immigrant's dog that gained international renown on the storied "serum race to Nome" in 1925. That winter the snowbound city was struck by a disastrous diphtheria epidemic, and Balto's owner, Leonhard Seppala, was selected to drive south from Nome by sled toward Nulato to obtain a life-saving supply of antitoxin. While Seppala hooked up his best lead dog, Togo, for most of the mission, it was Balto, mushed by Gunnar Kaasen, who braved the final miles through a storm to Nome and became the most celebrated lead dog of all-as a statue in his honor in New York City's Central Park can attest.

Little did Clark know that on this Saturday, January 29, his 31st birthday, he'd become a lead character in another dogsled drama. You could call it "Arizona's White Fang."

Clark faced four more-experienced racers in the three-dog race. His competitors included Frank Engelhardt, a musher with 18 years behind the sled. A Flagstaff resident, Engelhardt and his wife, Cheri, an Arizona Mountain Mushers founder, compete throughout the Southwest. Another competitor, Reignie Farley from Sedona, had nabbed second place a year earlier. Clark also faced Barb Mays, a dedicated musher from Vernon who parents 19 dogs and handcrafted her own sled. His other challenger, Bill Coan, a 69-yearold welding shop owner, jokes he's from "The Dogsled Capital of America." That's Phoenix, by the way. Bundled-up onlookers, holding steaming cups of hot chocolate, waddled about, boots sinking deep in crunchy snow, until they claimed their spots on stadium seating near a red-and-white-striped carnival tent. Under the tent, longtime rodeo announcer Floyd Massey, a White Mountain Apache new to the sport of dogsledding, entertained the gathering crowd. "I work for the BIA. You know what that means, don't you?" he asked. "Bossing Indians Around." At last, it was time for the competitors in the race to hustle their dogs into their harnesses. The yipping, yelping and barking hit a crescendo as the huskies leaped and lunged, almost mad with eagerness. The mushers then lined their teams up in the red starting chute, where the dogs nearly dragged their handlers off their feet. Gut-wrenching anxiety gripped Clark as he looked down at his team and realized this was it. "I was breathing hard, and I kept reassuring Romeo, 'It's okay, Romeo, it's okay.'" It was really only Clark who needed the reassurance. Looking back at Clark with serene sky-blue eyes, Romeo was purely in his element.

At one-minute intervals, the starter yelled "Go!" and each dogsled team barreled out of the starting chute. The starter kept Clark apprised of the time . . . 30 seconds . . . 15 seconds . . . then he started the final countdown.

"Five . . . Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Go!"

With Romeo in the lead followed by Konan and Timber, the dogs lunged, snapped loose from the restraining handlers and launched like rockets. "It was a surge of incredible power," Clark said. "They're so strong and so fast, you just don't want to let go." The dogs blazed across the snow, headed up a steep hill and ran past a towering stand of ponderosa pines and into a wide-open field blanketed with sparkling snow. Here, the competition heated up. The dogs shifted into overdrive when they spotted teams ahead. After more than 3 miles, Clark crossed the finish line in 21.16 minutes, coming in fourth behind Engelhardt, who led the race with a 16.37-minute time, and Farley and Mays. Clark wasn't disappointed with his fourth-place finish. "At that point, I was as high as a kite," he said. "The dogs had done well, and I hadn't totally embarrassed myself." But the race was far from over. The winner would be decided by combined race times on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday, the dogsled teams again shot out of the starting chutes in one-minute intervals: first Engelhardt, then Farley, Mays and Clark. As Clark's team stampeded across the snow, he shouted "Woo-hoo!" in pure delight. The words were magical. "The dogs surged," Clark said. "Suddenly I was running on more ounces of dog power." "Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!" Clark yelled, with the dogs running faster and faster, eventually passing Farley, who was second out of the starting chute. As Romeo, Konan and Timber triumphantly crossed the finish line solidly in second place, they looked like they were grinning-even though they were only panting-as the crowd cheered. Clark's team's remarkable time that day-a full two minutes ahead of the thirdplace finisher-bumped him up to second place with Engelhardt holding on to first. "I'm so proud of you!" Clark told Romeo, who wagged his tail excitedly before planting his heavy paws on Clark's chest and licking his face. Mushers say there's no other man-and-animal relationship in the world more adventuresome, more emotional or perhaps more mystical than that of a racer and his sled dogs. Clark and Romeo would agree. Their bond made a lifelong dream come true and turned a hopeless pup into a champion. Although Lori K. Baker's favorite experience while reporting this story was piloting a dogsled herself. That is, until she yelled "Hike!" The dogs realized she wasn't their owner, stopped dead in their tracks and refused to budge an inch. She lives in Mesa.

Kerrick James of Mesa says he had never seen so much strength and stamina in such small packages as the sled dogs that can pull hundreds of pounds uphill, in biting cold.

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