SIDE SALAD - Everything crunchy is good.

GO DOG, GO

Unlike past years, I'm not blogging the Iditarod [Link] this time around.
Most times I wind up just linking to stories on the Anchorage Daily News Web site [No Link] and that only drives traffic to them. Even 13 years after they bought my paper out of business, I have a hard time begrudging them even the smallest indulgence.
It's not that they do crap journalism. They write fine stories, when they bother to cover the local area. They've had some compelling stuff about blind Iditarod musher Rachel Scdoris, [No Link] for example. Nice reads abound there.
Still, there are some funny little asides to note.
Like the story of the injured dog who was flown home to Anchorage from the trail, only to get loose on the runway of an international airport: [No Link]

Melanie Gould's dog Olive may have been dropped from the Iditarod, but there's no question the husky can still run.

Airport and Iditarod officials spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon and evening chasing the sled dog around the windswept, snow-covered grounds of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport after she bolted off an incoming PenAir flight around 2:15 p.m.

Gould, who is competing in her fifth Iditarod this year, dropped Olive in Rohn, about 270 miles into the 1,100-mile race across Alaska, but officials would not say why the dog was cut from the team and flown to Anchorage. Olive was en route to her home in Talkeetna, about a three-hour drive from Anchorage, when she escaped.

"She just darted out the minute they opened that cargo bay," said Iditarod spokesman Chas St. George.

See, this cracks me up.

Mainly because I remember covering the race in McGrath, one of the major checkpoints. McGrath was also a hub for transporting food, gear and people, since it has a relatively nice airfield. The Iditarod Air Force, a ragtag collection of volunteers who fly the aforementiond food, gear and people in single-engine aircraft, have the pleasure of transporting sick and wounded dogs as well.

Well, sort of wounded. Mostly, the dogs suffer from a case of the trots and are too weak to run after pooping for a couple hundred miles.

Now, imagine dozens and dozens of dogs sitting on beds of straw, their leashes hooked to the chain-link fence surrounding the tiny airfield in McGrath. They're tired. They miss their dog teams. They're cranky. They've got irritable bowels. And they endure howling snow blasts from the prop wash generated as planes take off behind them.

That probably was the case with Gould's dog. If that pooch was strong enough to take a lap around the airport runway, he probably had enough hassles for one week and decided to am-scray. Good for the dog, I say.

Posted by Jeff at March 11, 2005 08:05 AM