FORT KENT, Maine — For 25 years, teams of mushers and their dogs have been traveling to northern Maine to take part in what some fondly refer to as “The Iditarod of the East”: the Can-Am Crown International Sled Dog Races.
Over the years, scores of mushers and hundreds of dogs supported by an army of volunteers have logged thousands of miles through the north Maine woods, cementing the area’s reputation as a mushing mecca.
The event marks its 25th anniversary with the running of the 60-, 100- and 250-mile races beginning Saturday, March 4.
A quarter-century of racing has produced a lot of stories, tall tales and memories. As the Can-Am prepares to enter its next 25 years, I’d like to offer my own Can-Am Crown top 25 memories — in no particular order:
1. That first year: 1993. Standing on a snowbank at Fort Kent Community High School watching my fellow University of Maine at Fort Kent class of 1985 alum John Kaleta join eight other teams as part of this wild idea to host sled dog racing in Fort Kent. It took John a few attempts, but in 2003 he finished the grueling 250-mile race. I could not have been more proud of my friend.
2. Andre Nadeau. For four years the Quebec musher and his team of solid Quebec Siberians was the only winner the race knew. Nadeau trained and lived full time with those dogs and it showed, as did his mastery of race strategy that from 1993 to 1997 outpaced his competitors. I’ll never forget watching Andre at the end of one race unhook his entire team and each dog trotted over to his truck and, unaided, jumped into its respective dog box.
3. In 1997, a musher named Don Hibbs of Millinocket took command of the trails becoming not only the first racer to knock Andre Nadeau out of first place but the first Mainer to win the race.
4. Even among the hardcore mushers there are those who stand out. In 1995, my friend Barry Dana decided to forgo the traditional dog sled and instead skijor — basically skiing while being pulled by dogs — his way around the course with a team of six dogs. Seeing him cross the finish line 250 miles later, grinning from ear to ear, is one of my fondest Can-Am memories.
5. Then there was Ontario musher Al Moorcroft, who arguably had one of the best lead dogs in Can-Am history. After 200 miles on the trail in the late 1990s, Moorcroft was understandably a little tired when he left Allagash for the final run to the finish in Fort Kent — so tired, in fact, that he fell asleep on the runners. When he woke up, he discovered his dogs had taken him off the trail into the town of St. Francis and stopped near what was the only public pay phone for miles around. With no dime to place a call and no idea where he was, Moorcroft called the operator who managed to connect him to Can-Am central headquarters in Fort Kent, where a volunteer was able to provide directions and get him back on the trail.
6. Sleep deprivation is a constant among distance mushers. Just ask my friend John Kaleta. The year he finished the 250-mile race, he commented on hallucinating about “all the guys in suits on the trail between Allagash and Fort Kent.”
7. In 1994, musher Robert Hoyte — aka “The Mushing Mailman of Ithaca, New York” — entered the race and proudly showed off his trail food to the media. For weeks, his wife had carefully saved and frozen in baggies all the leftovers from the family’s dinners. Once out on the race course, all Hoyte had to do was drop a baggie of frozen food into water he was boiling for his dogs and voila, a home-cooked meal. Once that story hit his hometown paper, his mother reportedly was quoted as saying, “My son is out in the Maine woods surviving on leftovers.”
8. In a shout-out to girl power, it took eight years, but in 2001 the Can-Am saw the first woman cross the finish line when Minnesota musher Rita Lensing came in at 7th, despite battling back pain so severe she was taken from the finish line by ambulance directly to the hospital.
9. Rico Portalatin is a popular musher familiar on the New England race circuit in 60- and 30-mile events. He’s won his fair share. But in Fort Kent the former gymnast is known more for his post-race tradition of completing a standing backflip at the podium during the awards banquet.
10. Minnesota musher Ward Wallin is hard to miss at the start line. Every year he’s raced the CAC-250 he’s been decked out in some sort of brightly colored and whimsically patterned fleece ensemble. One year I asked him why on earth he was wearing a yellow fleece jacket with matching pants with dancing kittens and puppies all over it. “Every year my wife makes my outfit,” he told me. “And every year I let my daughter pick out the material. She’s 6.”
11. Weather. Conditions have always been the “third musher” in every Can-Am Crown. While conditions are never perfect, there have been those years when Mother Nature smiled upon the race with the snowpack and temperatures combining to create outstanding trail conditions. But then there was 1994 when the temperature shot up to 60-degrees and the race was canceled halfway in. The previous year a blizzard and temperatures well below zero hit the competition. Over the years mushers have contended with new snow, soft snow, hard packed snow and blowing snow, not to mention those temperature extremes.
12. Mother Nature may be unpredictable, but the Can-Am volunteers are anything but. Every year it takes hundreds of them to pull off this race from organizing the Main Street start to coordinating logistics to months of pre-race trail setting and grooming. Ask any musher who comes every year and they’ll likely tell you it’s the volunteers that bring them back.
13. The weather did play a major role in one of the most dramatic and controversial finishes the Can-Am has seen. In 2011, mushers and their teams were hit with a cold rain that began Saturday afternoon and lasted well into the night. As the rain transitioned into a wet, heavy snow, sled dog teams began dropping out. Of the 22 that began the race, nine made it to the finish line. Along the way the four top teams — including a Yukon Quest finisher — were forced to camp out along the trail less than 10 miles from Fort Kent when the dogs could no longer break through the deep, heavy and wet snow. In a “gentleman’s” agreement among the four Quebec mushers, they decided to leave in the order in which they had stopped along the trail, after a fifth musher came across them and declined to wait with them.
14. There have been countless other examples of sportsmanship among mushers in the Can-Am. Among them, mushers stopping to help competitors untangle dogs, capture loose teams or render other aid — often risking their own finishing times. Mushers might be among the most competitive people I know, but at the same time they are the first to step out of race mode when someone needs help.
15. I’m not sure where I was or what I was doing the first time I realized how easily people romanticized mushing. Sure, there are those Jack London moments of dogs and musher facing the elements, the bond that exists between the two- and four-legged team members. And it’s pretty easy to wax poetic about it all when you’ve never spent a night in the freezing cold nursing a sick dog or heading out to feed a team when you, yourself, are sick as the proverbial dog. Or the fun and romance of scooping what comes out of the other end of the dog after it’s been fed. The reality of mushing is that it’s a lot of hard work 365 days of the year — and those of us who do it would not have it any other way.
16. Where there are crowds, there are politicians. Every year thousands of fans line Main Street in Fort Kent, which has been closed off to cars and packed with snow, for the start of the race. And every year the flatbed trailer that serves as the VIP viewing stand is packed with local, state and national politicians from both parties. In the early years of the race, these folks would ride down Main Street in a dog sled with a CAC-250 musher. It is probably purely coincidental that the last year I can remember any politician making that mile-long ride was the year then Gov. John Baldacci completed his own version of the Rico Portalatin backflip when exiting the moving sled at the end of Main Street.
17. Speaking of the VIP stand, for every race but one, former Fort Kent Town Manager Alain Ouellette has served as the event’s official announcer. For a number of years he was joined by former UMFK professor Chuck Closser. The duo bantered like John Madden and Howard Cosell one minute and Abbott and Costello the next.
18. Sadly, not every memory is a happy one. On two occasions, tragedy struck the Can-Am. In 1997, a lead dog named Izzy was killed when the team was hit by a snowmobiler. Last year, Maine musher Jeff McRobbie was seriously injured when a minor operating a snowmobile crashed into him head-on.
19. When it comes to putting on the Can-Am, northern Maine has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, an abundance of lodging is not among them. So, early on, the event’s board of directors organized a network of local host families to house mushers and dogs. Over the years, those host families and mushers have formed lifelong friendships with the hosts becoming quite territorial over “their” mushers.
20. At some point over the 25 years, the unique lingo used by mushers became part of our collective jargon in Fort Kent. We learned our “gee” from our “haw,” the different parts of the dogsled and what they did and — perhaps most importantly — that real mushers never say “mush.”
21. We also learned that not every sled dog looks like the Hollywood version of Balto. Mushers arrive with teams of the striking purebred Siberian huskies, the svelte husky-German shorthair pointer crosses and the Alaskan huskies — those dogs that can look like anything from Arctic wolf to a dog pound reject. The one common denominator? The love of running.
22. Once the teams leave the first checkpoint in Portage, they head into the North Maine Woods. The next two checkpoints are off limits to spectators and handlers. When my husband Patrick was alive, we were able to gain access to those remote areas, thanks to my covering the race for various media outlets. Driving down those woods roads not only afforded us some amazing views of the teams, but it also sparked memories for Patrick, who’d spent much of his childhood on those same roads with his father who delivered groceries to the lumber camps. I treasure each and every one of those miles we drove together.
23. The sound of heavy, winter boots on the Lonesome Pines Ski Lodge floor. For as long as I live, the noise that makes will be associated with the pre-dawn finish of the CAC-250.
24. Who will ever forget 2015, when a pregnant sled dog brought to Fort Kent by CAC-250 musher Becki Tucker and left in the care of her handler decided to surprise everyone and give birth a bit earlier than expected to a healthy litter of seven puppies at Lonesome Pine Ski Lodge?
25. In 2010, everything I had learned about mushing, the Can-Am and the people who put it on came together when I and the Rusty Metal Sled Dog Team entered and finished the 30-mile race. I will never, ever forget — after years of watching other teams speed down Main Street and then cross the finish line to the spectators’ cheers — experiencing that for myself. Seeing firsthand the trails, the volunteers and camaraderie among the racers leaves me with very little doubt that we are in store for another 25 years of memories to be made.
