Mooi artikel over Sam in "The Anchorage paper"

Dit artikel bereikt ons via Eric die het kreeg van Carol.

The Anchorage paper posted a great story about Sam...he is making a great name for himself!

At back of the Iditarod pack, problems abound
By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com
(03/11/10 21:27:34)

TAKOTNA -- Sam Deltour, a 25-year-old medical student from Belgium, ran a charmed race during his rookie Iditarod run in 2008. No big crashes. No dropped dogs.

"I had all the luck in the world," he said.

This year? Not so easy.

Deltour started the race down a dog when one of his favorites wouldn't pull. Other dogs favored sore wrists or shoulders, and Deltour busted the brake on his sled on an infamous stump between Finger Lake and Rainy Pass.

But mostly in the 2010 Iditarod, he keeps coming across other people's problems.

It started about 50 miles into the race, when Deltour rushed to tie off a dog team that charged off while another musher, who was still packing, was sent tumbling upside-down on her sled. He helped patch another musher's sled at 20 to 30 below. He found a rookie knocked bloody and unconscious.

"I scraped him off the trail, basically," Deltour said Thursday, ice on his cheeks and beard, after feeding his team a dessert of frozen turkey skin. "That was really scary."

At 49th place among the 64 mushers still on the Iditarod Trail on Thursday night, Deltour was among a handful of middle- and back-of-the-packers taking their mandatory 24-hour rests in this old mining town along the Takotna River.

Iditarod leaders had come and gone from the halfway point of Cripple, 84 miles up the trail, while stragglers were resting 18 miles away in McGrath. By this point in the race, the Iditarod can become frantic among front-runners and pragmatic for mushers farther back who are just looking for a healthy finish.

Those in Takotna on Thursday were mostly in the latter category. During the Iditarod the town transforms into a sled-dog truck stop where coffee brews around the clock, and Deltour doused a stack of pancakes in syrup as he returned to the story of how he got here:

After a few initial hiccups, the troubles grew serious after Deltour passed a couple of dog teams going over Rainy Pass and began heading downhill.

Suddenly, he saw 33-year-old Pat Moon -- a Chicagoan making his first try at the Iditarod -- in the trail calling for help. Moon's sled had fallen in a creek three or four feet off the trail, Deltour said.

"We fixed it together and I told him, 'Keep mushing buddy. Just hang on ... It's only going to get crazier from here,' " he said.

Deltour was right.

Two or three miles later, Deltour spotted Moon again, this time lying on his back. Moon's face was bloody and -- a nightmare for a musher -- his dog team was gone.

"He probably got thrown off of his sled to the side, and I think he smacked into a tree -- busted his head real bad and he just was passed out when I found him," Deltour said.

He called Moon's name. No response.

Deltour finished 11th in the Yukon Quest earlier this year and is doing the Iditarod partly to inject himself with an overdose of dog mushing before he spends the next few years in medical internships.

When he saw Moon motionless on the snow, his mind flashed to basic CPR training. "How does that work again? Two inhales and 15 compressions," he thought.

But by the time Deltour had tied off his dogs, Moon was on his feet. He didn't remember anything.

"You know you're running the Iditarod right?" Deltour asked.

"'Yeah, yeah I remember that."

"OK, that's good. You know who I am?"

Moon remembered him. He seemed to be doing all right. "I think it was only a small contusion or something," Deltour said.

"We got to go find your dogs," he recalled telling Moon.

The pair continued along Dalzell Gorge, searching for the lost dog team with Moon riding in the seat of Deltour's sled.

Luckily, a pilot who had landed in the area for pictures had corralled the team, Deltour said. A substitute musher was flown from the nearby Rohn checkpoint, and Moon was flown to safety, he said.

"I was really worried for his dogs. When the dogs are gone, they're all on their own," Deltour said. "It's one of the worst things that can happen to a musher. We're so in touch with these guys -- and they're our everything right now."

It doesn't hurt to have a good sled either. And Soldotna musher Jane Faulkner's ride was in "horrible" shape when she arrived at Bison Camp, an unofficial checkpoint about 40 miles south of Nikolai, Deltour said.

Deltour had helped repair the sled in Rohn, but now it was in worse shape than ever, he said, with broken stanchions and damaged runners.

"We found a piece of runner plastic left behind from somebody and found a piece of wood and just started goat-roping the thing together," Deltour said. All the while, the race clock was ticking. NASCAR drivers might not help each other change tires at pit stops and jockeys don't replace competitors' horseshoes at the Kentucky Derby, but here near the back of the pack in a sled dog race, the goal is finishing rather than winning.

Besides, Deltour said, next time he might be the one who needs help.