Iditarod Musher Cindy Gallea

The early morning scene at Cindy Gallea’s home, in the rolling woods outside Seeley Lake, Montana, is dominated by dogs—a leaping, yelping milieu of black, white, brown, gold, and silver, often two-toned, but always wire-thin and all barking. Fifty-plus Alaskan Huskies in all shapes, from tall and leggy with broad skulls, to small and pointy-nosed—some fluffy, some smooth. Unlike most breeds, their standard is not appearance but will to run.

Upon my arrival, Cindy flings the door open. My first impression is her vitality—petite but powerful. Second, her huge smile. “I overslept,” she exclaims. Inside, a Bowflex and Nordic track frame her living room. Iditarod numbers drape her stairwell. Over granola she tells of evacuating 120 dogs for a summer forest fire. 

Soon, dressed in wind pants, jacket, and short rubber boots, she steps into the brisk morning and a wall of barking. Willow, Cindy’s retired lead dog, holds a central place of honor, a touchstone to caress in passing. Calm but alert, her manner more fox- than dog-like, Willow’s presence is so keen and intelligent it borders on witchy. But friendly.

From tip-toe Cindy checks the thermometer nailed to a tree. She won’t hitch the arctic-bred dogs if it is over 60 degrees, but trains around the edges of the days and weeks, around her full-time Nurse Practitioner job—including 120 mile overnight runs between work shifts. She backs her ATV against a pine tree and anchors it there, stretches the 100-foot centerline draped with blue and green tug- and neck-lines to a firmly rooted post.  The harnesses themselves are soft and stretchy, faded red, and slip over the dogs’ heads and front legs like a muscle shirt. 

But it’s not that simple. Pound for pound these dogs are the most powerful draft animals on earth, and they want to go. Over hundreds of generations, their psyche has formed around running with a sled. It is as much instinct as their will to survive. Cindy has watched wheel dogs (closest to the sled) “save my butt,” muscling her around obstacles she didn’t see.  

She attempts to hold squirming, wrestling lunging, licking Huskies between her legs and get them into harnesses and over to hooks fore and aft. It is a workout in itself. All around her is bedlam, total barking bedlam. And it isn’t as though she has some form of control over it, but more that she wades through it, a point of focused perseverance—wrestling dogs, hauling dogs, sweet-talking and disciplining. Checking her list for which pairs of 18 animals to choose, she laughs that during the whole Iditarod, from Anchorage to Nome, you only have to hitch once.

As the last bright-eyed Huskies are hooked up, the frantic clamor peaks. They know. They are already pulling. Cindy stands astride the ATV. With a flick of a knot all is silent and she is flying—with no reins, no means of control except her voice. “Gee” for right, “Haw” for left, and 18 dogs straining forward. They pull the heavy ATV in neutral, and she brakes on downhills to keep lines taught. Because the dogs throw themselves against their tugs, slack is unbalancing, causing missteps and injuries. It is easy to imagine the line of Huskies dashing through a frosty landscape of nose-biting chill. “They love it when we get snow,” she says.

Cindy first began dog sledding in her early 40s, developing important sled-handling skills and upper-body strength, and eventually moving to Montana with her musher family for close proximity to good trails. She finished her first Iditarod at age 47, one of two Montana women, though Ennis native Jessie Royer ultimately moved to Alaska to become a full-time musher.

Called “The Last Great Race on Earth,” Iditarod is an 1,150-mile dogsled race over terrain equally stunning in icy roughness and immense beauty. From jagged mountains to desolate tundra to windswept coastline, competitors brave eight to 20-plus days of sub-zero temperatures, gale force wind-chill, whiteout blizzards, and sometimes runner-shredding bare ground and fatigue-induced hallucinations. Held in early March since 1973, it epitomizes the history and spirit of Alaska, while drawing mushers, volunteers, and news crews from around the world. 

When Cindy was first thinking about attempting one, she asked Iditarod veterans “How do you know when you are ready?” They answered simply, “You know,” or “You never are.” 2008 will be her eighth one. 

Cindy stops the dogs on a long uphill. They stand, hunched and panting hard, faces and chests flecked with foam, while she untangles lines, coddles, roughs, whispers—touches base with each dog.

In her first Iditarod, Cindy felt totally overwhelmed at the start. Once the race began, she learned to take the 26 checkpoints one at a time. Just like life. By the end she was hooked. Shorter races completely lost their appeal. She thrived on the treacherous winter route, on the camaraderie of Iditarod mushers, and particularly enjoyed contacts in small villages along the way. For her winning is secondary to this experience, and every race is different. Different weather, different dogs, different challenges.

She climbs back into the ATV and the dogs get feisty, but still attentive. It is a loose agreement that Cindy is boss, her commands more like quiet conversation. “Line out,” she says, and they pull the snaky centerline tight.  “Are you ready?” They yelp and leap and are off. 

Early fall begins the dog-training season, when Cindy shifts from her own aerobic workouts, to running two teams of dogs every day she can. She works 10 or more hours at a time at the Seeley-Swan Medical Center to earn dog sledding days—a full-time job to support a full-time hobby. She is serious when she says the race itself is actually simpler because she can focus on just one thing.

At first the one-hour runs equal hookup time, but by December she is running four hours in the dark to simulate race conditions, plus hookup and general dog care, all times two. As training peaks, two teams narrow to one and each dog will run 120 to 150 miles in a weekend, and Cindy does nothing but work and train. Her sled handles are custom-made to counter overuse wrist injuries and blistered thumbs. 

“The Iditarod is long and challenging, and it never gets easier,” she says.  In fact parts of the trail only get scarier, because you know what you’re in for. “You are very isolated,” she continues. “You and the dogs are alone far away from people. You have lots of time to reflect. And all your biggest weaknesses are in your face.” 

As Cindy talks, the hilly terrain and dog-musher jargon roll together—checkpoints, go-to and dropped dogs, Knik, Shageluk, Unalakalkeet—names, places, legends. Through ice, snow, and darkness a dog-sled relay brings diphtheria serum to cut-off Nome in 1925. An eight-year-old boy watches his father win the Iditarod by a nose after 14 grueling days on the trail. Later he beats cancer and the field himself. A Native musher runs on pure spirit and grit to model life without alcohol for Native youth. Alone in a white expanse a woman attacks a crazed moose with an axe to defend her dogs. 

At the halfway point Cindy stops again. She passes out lightweight metal bowls and hauls her blue five-gallon jug up the line. The dogs gulp the water down. Lead dogs Sugar and Hammer wait, keeping the long centerline extended. “Lead dogs are chosen because they can’t wait to see what is around the next corner”, she says, “They don’t mind dashing into the unknown.” 

Generally a 16-dog Iditarod team will include up to eight lead dogs, to be rotated for rest or dropped at checkpoints. One musher carried an old dog in his sled, only running him occasionally the last half, when the going got tough. He was a “go-to leader,” like Willow. These are special dogs not only able to find the trail in a whiteout but to remember it from previous years, dogs with smarts and confidence and a certain unspeakable knowing. She believes there was a point in evolution where dogs became intuitive with humans. Developed over training and honed during the challenge of the race itself, the connection between mushers and lead dogs goes beyond words. Some call it magic. In the 2000 Iditarod Cindy had to scratch after 400 miles because she had dropped both main lead dogs for health reasons, and her remaining team couldn’t focus.

As Cindy collects water bowls and straps the jug down, one dog in the panting line-up begins to yip and dance in her traces. “Cheerleader,” Cindy quips as the others follow suit. She explains that there are other, looser, perhaps goofier roles. The comedian. The cheerleader. At low points, and for no apparent reason, the spirit or humor of these dogs can re-ignite a worn-thin, bedraggled team. 

“Are you ready?” She doesn’t need to ask. 

In the beginning of an Iditarod you never know just how the team, or the individuals, will gel. In 2007 Sugar and Hammer were only three years old, young dogs who stepped into a strong lead position. But Hammer was a seriously shy dog. In training he was a tremendous leader, but Cindy was uncertain about the race situation—crowds at checkpoints and unfamiliar people leading them through. At first when they neared civilization, Hammer tried to turn around, to lead the team back into the wilderness. 

But Cindy decided to respect his need for space. She told volunteers to lead “the white dog” and unhook brown Hammer to follow free. His response still makes her eyes well up. Over the duration of the race the blossoming, the maturity that emerged was like watching a backwards child step up and claim himself. For Cindy it was another life-lesson—the power of acceptance of people and dogs or even herself, for who they are, without expectations or demands. You can go deep with these lessons on the trail.

While sledding six hours on and six hours off, and caring for dogs during the off-time, sleep deprivation weighs large. With three hours sleep for every 24-hour period of physical work and bone-chilling cold, Cindy actually falls into one-minute naps while sledding. She says her waking and sleeping states become so close that she dreams right away. Mushers agree that it takes a minimum of two months to recover.

“But although the Iditarod is mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting, it is exhilarating too,” she says. An emotional roller coaster in primitive Arctic conditions, “it builds toughness and resiliency, and [tears well again] a strong understanding of what really matters in life.”

Back home Cindy praises and hugs the satisfied dogs, setting them loose to play in her yard. When I ask what it takes to be an Iditarod musher, she replies, “You have to be willing to put yourself through it.” There are substantial training, time, and money commitments, constant daily dog and equipment care, the logistical pre-race nightmare of travel with animals and gear and 1600 pounds of food-drops, and finally the extremes of the race itself. “Of course by the end you’re exhausted, ready to sleep and to eat.” But after a rest Cindy always feels displaced. Normal is to hit the trail behind her dogs.

Sipping a Diet Coke, she dreams of having more time to train. What if she and her dogs had 3,000 miles under them at the start? She would like to be more competitive, to prove she is more capable than her current finishes show. To fully use all her skill and all her dogs’ talent, that would be winning. But Cindy has other dreams too. She loves speaking about her experiences at schools, and is enthusiastic about getting a doctorate in mind-body medicine. “But,” she says, gesturing with both hands. “I’m not done with the dogs.” 

She ruffles Willow, pulls a garbage bag off her Comedian, and checks the thermometer. She can run another team before lunch. 

~ Joanne Wilke lives and writes in Bozeman, Montana. Her first book, Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West was recently released by University of Nebraska Press. Her dog, Ricky, prefers chasing bunnies.