Musher shaken in snowmachine vs. dogsled collision

BIG LAKE — Being hit by a snowmachine isn’t the way any musher wants to scratch from a race, but it could have been worse.

At about 1 p.m. Sunday, Meredith Mapes was mushing her team along the Iditarod Trail as part of the Aurora Dog Mushers Club’s 50-50 race.

About a mile and a half east of the Little Susitna crossing a snowmachine came out of nowhere and hit her team. The machine was riding a trail that goes from Point MacKenzie up to Big Lake, crossing along the way the Iditarod trail.

“There was no way of stopping. Neither one of them could stop,” race organizer Larisa Myers said.

Myers described the tangle as a freak accident — neither Mapes nor the snowmachine driver saw each other until it was much too late.

Efforts to contact Mapes failed as of press time.

Myers said Mapes was unhurt and neither, apparently, was the snowmachine driver. But his machine was wrecked, one dog suffered a broken leg and another is still missing.

“It hit so hard that it ripped the harnesses off the dog,” Myers said. The missing dog, a brown fellow with a white face that goes by the name of Logo, just took off.

“It was so spooked that it left the scene,” Myers said.

The dog, she said, should be wearing black booties with yellow Velcro, a black harness and a collar.

Mapes wasn’t the only musher to scratch from the race. Erin Redington, who stopped to help Mapes after the crash, added Mapes’ bruised and bewildered dogs to her own team to bring them home.

“She just gave up her whole race,” Myers said.

Another Redington, Ray Redington, stopped to pick up the wounded dog and brought the animal to race’s end in the basket of his sled.

“It’s great how people just jump in and help,” Myers said.

Cim Smyth, the eventual winner of the race, tried to help Mapes but couldn’t get his dogs stopped. He donated half his purse to Erin Redington for her efforts.

The 50-50 race is an annual event for the club, it runs from Big Lake to the Nome sign on the Iditarod Trail and back. The two-day race goes 50 miles each day.

Myers said Mapes was the only junior musher on the trail that day, but she’s a very accomplished athlete, having already run the Junior Yukon Quest and Junior Iditarod. She’s training to run the Junior Iditarod again this year.

It’s very uncommon for a sled dog team to be hit by a snowmachine. Myers said in her years running the Aurora Dog Mushers it hadn’t happened prior to Sunday.

“We’re going to probably see more and more of it now that we’re getting more people out here,” she said. “I really hope not. But it’s always the fear of the mushers.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.