Ashton, Idaho American Dog Derby

It's an event that screams for nicknames. Lydia “Whistlin' Lyd” Hutchinson you'll meet in a moment. Right now, let's talk about Tud. “Tud” is the nickname. “Tud” Kent. He regularly ran the mail from Ashton, Idaho, to the Railroad Ranch in Island Park, Idaho, a journey of about thirty miles.

In 1917, he and four others founded the American Dog Derby. He won the first race that year, a 55-mile slog through deep snow and a raging blizzard from Ashton to West Yellowstone, Montana. In the subsequent ten years, he won five more times, each time in a blizzard. They had better blizzards back then.

This year, those who participate in the 100-mile race will do so in Tud's honor – the race now bears his name. But there's room for the new at the American Dog Derby, too. The 60-mile race, for instance, is named this year for Ray Gordon, of Rock Springs, Wyo. Since 1995, he's won five races at the American Dog Derby, a record no modern racer has bested. He also boasts of running the Iditarod. Twice. Best I've done is hook our wiener dog up to the kids' sled for a race down our suburban street.

So go to Ashton this year to see the real thing. Races this year kick off Feb. 18 at about 7:30 am (I'm fudging a bit on the time here, get there early to get a good view and so you don't miss the race). Races go on through Saturday the 20th, with plenty of events in town to keep you entertained. For more information on this year's events, go to www.americandogderby.org.

Now, on with the story . . . The sun is up, but only just. Even the stubbiest buildings cast long shadows across the snow turning it dark blue, a stark contrast to the brilliant white where sun and snow meet. Grain elevators stand as a rampart of worn wood and cold grey steel along the half-buried railroad tracks. Icicles on eaves catch the sun and shine like jewels. The worn brick buildings of Ashton, Idaho, lie somnolent in the deep snow on a cold February morning.

Sound has odd qualities on cold, bright, crisp mornings like this. Without the rumble of traffic, scarce enough on this city’s streets, and without the whip of wind, common enough here if the leaning trees tell the truth, the sound in Ashton’s air this morning reaches the ears, descends the spine, sets nerves alight.

But no barks, no growls. Instead, a cacophony of yelps and wails and whines from throats and bellies. Many dogs. Their cries build a dome of sound over the intersection of Main and Fifth streets. Underneath lie strings of vehicles and trailers, the odd snowmobile, and clusters of men, serious men, clad in warm hats and light brown Carhartt snowsuits, the de facto uniform of the day.

Next to – and sometimes crouched under – the vehicles lie the dogs. Not big dogs. Not carbon copied pet-store dogs, though some are black as carbon, others mottled white with brown and grey; a few whiter than the snow they lie on. But all are lithe. Alert. And, like performers in a cold green room liberally spotted with pee, they are anxious. Anxious to be underway.

One yelps, the others join in. Cues for their performance lie all around: rope lines and harnesses, humans clad for the warm, sleds with numbered flags tied to them. And the sun is climbing higher. It’s time to go.

“This is a lifestyle thing,” says Bino Fowler, strapping orange canvas booties to his dogs’ feet with strips of Velcro. “It’s not something you get into for a year. The dogs are yours 365 days a year. You don’t put them in a shed like you can a snow machine. When we go on vacation, the dogs come with us. When we go to the coast [in the summer] we run them on the dunes. I don’t need snow to run them.”

But there’s snow today. And the lifestyle thing – the sleds, the dogs, the cold weather, the competition, the freedom – is sled dog racing. Sled dog racing has been part of Ashton’s history nearly since there was an Ashton to have history. The city was founded, in part, in 1906 by the Union Pacific Railroad when residents of the nearby village of Marysville decided against having the iron beasts rumble through town on the way to Yellowstone National Park.

Two stories vie for first place in the American Dog Derby’s origins. The more folklorical story, according to Neal Wickham, a local historian, is that a popular Ashton barber named Jay Ball brought sled dog racing to Ashton after reading about the All-Alaska Sweepstakes in Nome and the Hudson Bay Dog Derby in Le Pas, Manitoba, Canada.

Wickham and David Crowder, another area historian, agree it’s more likely that the Union Pacific Railroad played the largest role in starting the derby as a way to promote travel on their newly-constructed rail line from Ashton to Yellowstone National Park. The railroad advertised the event heavily and even brought in special trains of spectators. Early races saw as many as 10,000 people pour into this town of little more than a thousand to watch the races. The races remained popular in Ashton, to varying degrees, through the 1950s, finally petering out in the early '60s. The races were revived in 1993, however, and have grown steadily since.

The 2009 races attracted 25 teams from throughout the United States and Canada. As for the derby's beginnings, it’s clear the first race, held in 1917, was a success. The event attracted 16 teams, all of them local. Many local teams were competitors who ferried mail, freight, and people to and from the high country in Fremont and Teton counties, so it was natural for them to compete in a race in the hopes of winning more clients.

The first race, on the unplowed railroad bed from West Yellowstone, Montana, to Ashton, Idaho, proved grueling, according to Wickham. Heavy snow prevented all but four of the 16 registered teams from starting the race, and continued snow and wind along the 55-mile route forced the remaining four teams to hole up in a fish hatchery overnight, 15 miles from the finish line.

Spectators in Ashton waited, meanwhile, for the mushers to arrive. When the teams finally raced into town the following morning, there were no crowds to welcome them. Tud Kent, a Union Pacific employee, won the first race, and would go on to win five more, fighting through a blizzard each time to win. He became known as a “blizzarder,” bragging that wind and snow couldn’t stop him.

The derby, over the years, has introduced other colorful characters as well. In 1922, the railroad made a celebrity of Lydia “Whistlin’ Lyd” Hutchinson, an Ashton native and participant in the derby that year. “Distinctive in her parka and velvet pants,” according to historian Crowder, Whistlin’ Lyd (who got her nickname because of her then-unladylike habit of whistling popular tunes) participated in several derbies and appeared in advertisements, newsreels, and newspaper articles throughout the United States and Europe. Hutchinson died in 1930 of pneumonia, and the 1931 derby was run in her honor.

Today’s mushers are happy to carry on with the derby’s traditions. “It’s hard to pass up the history here,” says Fowler. “It’s foolish not to participate. You get to meet Iditarod runners here. It’s fun to see how your dogs measure up to theirs.” The dogs, oblivious to history, nevertheless sense the excitement. Once hitched to the sled and brought to the starting line, Fowler’s dogs erupt into even louder yelps and whines as they strain at the brakes – some mushers even tie their sleds to their vehicles to keep the dogs from taking off prematurely. Two of Fowler’s dogs take turns leaping over each others’ backs in anticipation of the race.

Fowler, an electrician living in Sunriver, Oregon, grew up in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona – as far away as one can get from snow and cold. He spent a summer in Alaska as a teenager and, he says jokingly, “I met the wrong people.” He’s been fascinated with dogs and sled dog racing since. “What got me into this sport, and what keeps me in this sport, is that sense of adventure. That taste of the trail. It’s different every day.”

Adventure on the trail is rarely that of the “Call of the Wild” variety: untamed river, untamed wildlife, untamed lust for gold. In Ashton, by contrast, Fowler says the biggest challenge is the potato fields. “When you’re out on those rolling hills” east of town, he says, “there’s no cover.”

The dogs perform at their peak in cool weather, but with the sun shining on even a cold day – below freezing but above zero – the dogs overheat. The solution is counterintuitive: “For the dark-haired dogs, I put on white coats,” Fowler says. The coats reflect the sun’s rays rather than absorb them, keeping them cooler.

Challenges at other sled dog races are sometimes just as unconventional. A few years ago, a lone bull on the course of the Attaboy 300 (a race in central Oregon) kept several dog teams at bay. “That bull wasn’t happy at all seeing what he thought were 20 packs of wolves coming into his territory,” Fowler said. “We had a bunch of mushers ready to make hamburger” until one team broke from the pack and shot across the bulls’ field, shooing it to greener pastures.

An encounter with what Fowler thought at first was a downed single-engine airplane also left an impression while participating in Ashton’s race a few years ago. “It was the most bizarre thing I ever saw,” he says. He thought he might have stumbled upon an old wreck until he saw the contraption moving, with an enormous prop spinning at the back of the wingless fuselage. It turned out to be a snowplane – a three-seater enclosed snowmobile powered by a World War II-surplus airplane engine. As it passed his team by – at a safe distance – Fowler recalls having only one thought on his mind: “If I ever get tired of sled dogs, I’m getting one of those.”

That brings us to Clark Lenz, Ashton area resident and snowplane enthusiast. He brings one or two snowplanes to dog derby events every year, showing off the rare machines to others who get gleams in their eye similar to Fowler’s.

This year, he parked his snowplane at the point on the trail where the 20-mile racers turn around. Tinkering with and driving the machines involves “a lot of brute force and ignorance,” Lenz says, laughing.

Maintaining the machines is difficult, as spare parts for the machines – particularly their engines – are scarce. “Do you know how hard it is to find a really true, straight piece of wood in this country these days?” he asks, tapping the snowplane’s 12-foot-long wooden lead ski. And replacements for the engines’ magnetos are even harder to find, he adds.

Though the machines are favorites of area ice fishermen for getting to and from their favorite fishing spots, Lenz says they’re also used for bucketing across snowy fields. “You sit in there listening to all the thumps, clanks, and bangs and you think, ‘God, now what’” has broken, he says. “But you always fix what you can and go out again.” He has his snowplane skipping along at 70 miles per hour, but adds “that’s too damn fast. Thirty is a lot more realistic.”

A Clinton-era ban on snowplanes – due to their loud engines – has chased snowplane enthusiasts from Jackson Lake, a long-time favorite snowplane haunt in Grand Teton National Park, but snowplane users have found other places to run their machines. “And on private property,” Lenz says, the Feds “can’t tell us a thing. They can go to hell.”

As Lenz talks, a dog sled team races by. In contrast to the dogs’ yelping enthusiasm in town, the dogs – all the dogs – are quiet, tongues wagging, eyes agleam, running silently as wolves. “They love their work,” Fowler says before the race. All the yelping and leaping about shows their excitement, he adds. “But on the trail, they get down to business.”

Preparing the trails for the race is fairly simple, according to Frank Scafe, a track setter for this year’s event. “When the time gets close, they just stop plowing the middle part of the road,” he says, laughing. “We hope for a little snow after that.” To make up for gaps in snowfall, the city also plows mountains of snow into a vacant lot on Main Street.

Just before race day, volunteer crews with trucks and shovels scoop up the stored snow and spread it out where necessary. Some snow is compacted by volunteers in boots, while the rest – including the trail through town and potato fields to the east – are groomed by the Fremont County Parks and Recreation Department.

Once into the Targhee National Forest about ten miles west of town, mushers on the 100-mile race follow groomed snowmobile trails to Cave Falls in Yellowstone National Park’s southwest corner. While the racers are gone for the day, the trails in Ashton don’t sit idle. To keep folks in town long enough to see the racers return – usually about two or three hours after they leave – derby organizers hold other events as well.

Most popular are the mutt races, in which area children bring their own dogs for solo races down a 200-yard course. The event always begins, at least in the past few years, with the appearance of Klondike Barbie, pulled on a miniature sled by a Chihuahua. What the rough-and-tumble organizers of the first race in 1917 would think of that is anyone’s guess, but that their race has been revived would undoubtedly please them.