Knowing he has a long evening of mushing dogs ahead of him, Frank tries to catch a catnap in the cab of his pickup parked on frozen Willow Lake.
Glad to be getting his booties for the big race, Slick thanks Jeff, Frank's trainer. Slick was a late addition to the team.
Frank and Jeff confer about the dogs before they're hooked up to the sled.
Claudia bends in to kiss Frank before his trip of 10 or more days to Nome.
Trigger shows what the well-dressed husky wears to defeat the biting winds of the Susitna River valley. Frank says his dogs like warmer rather than colder weather.
The line of handlers stretches out 45 feet from the sled.
The dogs make their first move as a team, curling around to the starting chute.
Green Pea, left, and Clarence know they're going to run very fast and very soon.
The team shreds the soft snow after Frank gets permission to leave the gate.
Frank rides the runners of his sled as his dogs burst down the first hundred yards. On this side of the sled, near the rear support, is his required ax. A knife hangs from the other side of the sled.
As the last team prepares to enter the chute, handlers drive the other mushers' trucks off the lake. They'll return to their kennels for 10 to 14 days, then drive to the Anchorage airport to pick up the returning mushers and dog teams.
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Willow: The race begins
WILLOW -- One by one, Frank's volunteer dog handlers grabbed his hand and wished him a safe trip. He thanked each of them, especially the folks who assumed he was nervous about the 1,100 miles between the starting line and Nome.
Behind his balaclava, his eyes sparkled. Frank Sihler was ready to run.
Willow Lake al fresco
Sunday was the restart of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a true start after the parade on Saturday through Anchorage. The restart was held again at Willow because of poor snow conditions west of Wasilla, the race's headquarters town.
The whole event -- mushers' trucks, thousands of fans and twelve hundred dogs -- was held on the thick ice of Willow Lake behind the community center at Mile 69 of the Parks Highway. Snowmachiners showed off as they chain-sawed across the lake, and a snowcat rolled sedately back and forth. As race time neared, helicopters joined a circus of small planes in the windy sky. Denali, faded by distance, rose to the north.
Hours before the start, fans began to line the fences along the race route. The mushers would head southwest across the lake and downstream on the nearby Susitna River to the Yentna River, where they would turn northwest toward Nome.
A day on ice
Frank and Claudia Sihler and their handler, Jeff Deeter, had arrived early with the dogs and claimed their parking slot a few dozen yards from the starting chute. The teams made a flattened semicircle, with the low bib numbers directly across from Frank's team and the middle numbers a quarter-mile down the ice.
The race began at 2 p.m., with mushers leaving every two minutes. Wearing bib 73, Frank wasn't to leave until 4:22.
Frank tried to take a hour's nap but couldn't sleep. He tried again later, too, curled up on the front seat of his Ford F-250.
He walked to the community center for lunch. He packed and repacked his sled bag, custom-made by Laurie Calandri. He demonstrated the built-in seat he had installed. He posed for photos. He walked around the truck and around the sled, pulling up his sleeve again and again to check his watch.
Clarence and Green Pea
Hours before the race, Frank narrowed his trailerful of dogs down to 16.
Behind opening-day leaders Clarence and Green Pea, the dogs were Nigel, Tears, Slick, Cannon, Mugsy, Eddie, Gunner, Chinook, Blaze, Braveheart, Trigger, Bilko, Charlie and Dipper.
A couple of dogs were taken home from Willow. One of them was going into heat. Frank left her in the truck because, he said, he wanted the boy dogs to pay attention to their running.
The gangline is laid out in front of the sled. It is 23 paces long. Add the sled, and there is more than 50 feet of dogs and equipment that Frank will be driving through the forest, gorges and tundra.
Dog talk
Around 3 p.m., Frank and Jeff took the dogs from their boxes and hitched them to small chains on the trailer's skirt. In the next hour, the frisky dogs were cuddled and petted, then booted, harnessed and dressed in insulated jackets with their names embroidered into the fabric.
The afternoon wind picked up, snapping the flags atop the starting gate to attention. It'll be worse on the rivers, and that's why the dogs were being dressed up.
Crouching beside the trailer with the dogs, Jeff was asked a silly question: Do the dogs talk about the race once they get back home? Well, Jeff answered, the dogs know they did something pretty big and you can see it in their attitude. They can tell they made the musher happy by finishing, and they love the excitement of the finish line. "So maybe they do," he said with a smile.
Ready, set, go
With a half-hour to go, the dogs were led out to the gangline and hooked up: a short lead from the collar to the gangline and a longer line from the rear of the harness to the gangline. Neighboring teams were going through the same process.
Frank's pair of leaders and their handler, Larry Stremikis, were an island of calm amid a storm of howling and yapping.
Each pair of dogs has a handler to keep them orderly as the team moves from the staging area to the chute. For 10 or 15 minutes, the handlers not only pet the dogs and talk to them but also hold them in place. Finally, when the woman in charge of staging-area traffic signals Frank, he cuts the line tying the sled to the trailer and the line of dogs springs forward in a large curve to the left that ends neatly in the chute behind Matt Hayashida, bib 72.
A chute boss tells Larry that there's a big rut in the soft snow under the sign where other teams have dug out, so Larry guides the leaders to the right side of the chute and walks them past the starting line until the brush bar of the sled is at the line.
Race officials quickly check Frank's bag for the essentials: ax, cooking gear, promotional material, food and so forth.
The announcer recites the Frank Sihler spiel -- he created a dog mushing school in Europe, he moved to Alaska because it wasn't crowded, his wife Claudia is an Iditarod veterinarian -- and starts the countdown. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Go!" the announcer says. "Ladies and gentlemen, Frank Sihler of Wasilla."
And by then, Frank's team is digging deep in the snow, lengthening themselves with the joy of all-out running. Frank high-fives a handler on his way out, waves to the crowd ("Good luck, Frank!" someone shouts) and within 30 seconds has gone around the bend in the trail.
Into the rhythm
Frank and his 16 huskies passed through Yentna before 8 p.m. and pulled into Skwentna for a meat-and-kibbles supper at 11:38 p.m. It's a 24-hour-a-day event now, a week and a half of a man and his dogs doing nothing but what they love.
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