/ 2008 Archived Material / A Day in Nokolai

Target Iditarod Teacher on the Trail^™ A Day in Nokolai

by Jane Blaile

This morning I was taken to Nikolai.  I jumped out of the plane, put my gear bag on my back and my computer backpack on my front and trotted into this Athabascan village of 70 people.  My first stop was the Iditarod comms cabin (communications) to check in.  I left my gear bag there and went down to the checkpoint to meet the race judge and to see what the status of mushers was.  The first musher, Kjetil Backen, was on his way.  A local woman was taking guesses on what the minutes of the time for the first musher would be.  Half of the proceeds went to the church here, Russian Orthodox, and the other half went to the winner.

Since I was going to have awhile, I went back up to the school.  By the way, you can see the checkpoint from the classroom window.  I found one of the teachers, introduced myself and sat down for awhile to talk.  Alaska is part of the public library's Big Read program, and I delivered a small box of books to the school which contained the selected title To Kill a Mockingbird.

The elementary students, there are 4, came in the room and we played a few rounds of Old Maid.  Then they needed to get back to their lessons, so I went to the gym to take a picture of the quilt they received.  While I was there, I heard the announcement of the first musher arriving, so I geared up as fast as I could (which I'm not too fast at yet) and started to the checkpoint.  A man on a 4-wheeler stopped and offered me a ride - so I jumped on the back and off we went the short path to the river. 

I stayed down there taking pictures and watching the front runners come in before I went back to the school to work on writing.  And all day that is what I did - went to the river, where the mushers were arriving and leaving and back to the school, where the mushers were in the gym eating, visiting, sleeping. I love this part of being here...sitting around listening to the mushers tell their stories about their runs, their dogs, their plans...

Around dinner time, I went back to the checkpoint and offered my help.  The vets needed help delivering dropped dogs to the line, which was up the road a ways, so I started helping with that. Around 10 o'clock p.m. I decided I needed to try to sleep and maybe write a little.  The teacher had offered me the classroom floor to sleep on and given me a thick mat, so I was very, very comfortable.