Sled Dog Central is pleased to have received the following content from Rod Perry. Thank you for sharing your memories of the early years of the Yukon Quest.
After several months of planning around Fairbanks, we felt it was high time to get the Whitehorse end apprised of the idea. (Kinda like Joe Redington and his cofounders Huyck and Johnson being so up to their ears in Iditarod readying in the fall of 1972 they had no time to clue Nome in until Joe’s historic letter to Howard Farley telling him in December Nome was going to have a race headed their way.) This trip of introduction comprised the first contact the Canadians had with solid news about what we were planning, although they had heard faint, fragmentary rumors. Ralph Seekins, auto dealer and later Quest musher and State Senator, loaned us a Suburban for the drive. Leroy and I had been working 16-7 and Roger 8-7 on the race and asked Bud, an enthusiast, though not core worker, to accompany us because of his Iditarod background and ability to talk.
Some in Whitehorse were initially not all that enthused. Maybe I was being overly sensitive, but it seemed to me at the time there might have been an element there that was perhaps a little miffed because it was the Alaskans’ idea, not theirs. Also, it probably grated on some—rightfully—that we were so presumptive/assumptive as to think we could proceed that deep into the planning before bothering to even contact them, as if they were hardly needed. If that slight negativity was actually there—and again I might have been reading too much in—they had every right to such feelings, although the real reasons on the Alaska side were we just had so much to do we hardly had time to eat or sleep and taking most of a week off for a Whitehorse run was barely thinkable.
It was immediately evident to those in Whitehorse that the Quest would upstage—and trample all over because of dates—their treasured Percy DeWolf Race, commemorating the beloved old mail runner who for 40 years held the Whitehorse to Eagle contract. His memory was so dear to the hearts of the Canadians that it took us four days to win them totally over. We met with the mushers, the media, the business community, and government officials. It was during those meetings that many-time Quest runner and eventual champion Frank Turner and I bonded. He very generously stated in a letter to me last year that in his opinion, without me there would have been no Quest.
One other obstacle we ran into to a degree in Whitehorse, but to a huge extent in Fairbanks where there was an established Iditarod office, was our new race was looked upon as a destructive, eroding competitor with the Iditarod. I wish I had made a photocopy of the letter I ghost wrote to Joe Sr. and had the President of the Quest Board sign. Joe later told me it was that letter filled with sound reasonings that turned him around to at first grudgingly, then later enthusiastically accept the upstart other thousand miler.
Of course during the months of planning, and on the way driving to Whitehorse, there had been some basic race concept/rules discussion. But none of the Fairbanks Board and core planners, and zero on the Whitehorse end, had the Iditarod founding and racing involvement background of Bud and me. The story of how I got Leroy excited about driving dogs on his trapline is told in my book TRAILBREAKERS Founding Alaska’s Iditarod in the About the Author section. So everyone respected our input. On the return run to Alaska, flushed with success of our PR venture to Whitehorse, we came up with most of the basic rules that defined, and continue to this day to define what Leroy would later that winter name, The Yukon Quest.
Leroy’s base ideas were two: First, create a race that was simple and less expensive to stage, administer, and compete in than the Iditarod had become. Second, put the camping/winter trailsmanship skills back in long-distance sled dog racing like it was on the first couple of Iditarods. By the early 80s the Iditarod had already become a checkpoint to checkpoint race. It was evident to us that the Quest route was custom made for Leroy’s firmly demanded parameters. Most of the original Quest checkpoints would be farther apart than Kaltag to Unalakleet, Iditarod’s longest. Also, although long wilderness stretches separated them, there was highway access to all Quest points, plus regularly-scheduled air service in and out of most.
Years into the Quest, when organizers began to install halfway checkpoints, I was incensed, wishing Leroy had established some carved-in-stone covenants protecting his founding concepts by keeping those distances clean. However, three years or so back, at a mushers symposium in Willow, I sat on a Quest panel. Before the audience I voiced my displeasure. Jeff King plumbed me up, bringing me up to date on today’s realities. In essence he said, “Rod, face it. There aren’t many left of the tough ilk like you who used to be moth-to-a-flame attracted to the very toughness of long distance racing. The Quest field has been diminishing, in part because of the grueling nature. What would you rather see, keeping the old rules and losing the race, or adapting to keep attracting a field?” I had to agree with the prevalent thinking.
During that drive, the Suburban pulsated with ideas. Leroy’s basic concepts led me to argue for a twelve dog team limit and three dog drop limit. That would make for more careful choosing of animals for team makeup, a gearing down to team pacing to accommodate the capabilities of the least talented dogs, and a vast lessening of dropped dogs, helping make the race cheaper to administer and run. I argued and harangued the others for this rule until Leroy threw up his hands and exclaimed something like, “OK, Ok, Perry, OK, twelve and three it will be.” Ron Aldrich would later write me his account of the first running—another letter I wish I had kept—enthusiastically admonishing, “Don’t change one (darned) thing!” The first running totaled just 27 dropped dogs, as opposed to hundreds for the Iditarod. Early Quests were run entirely successfully under that 12-3 limit.
Something that was important to me, close as I was to so many early Iditaroders, was that something was needed to refire the imagination of mushers who were burning out on the Iditarod. The early days lacked big sponsors. Long Distance (LD) racing was still a hobby, years before there grew any semblance of financial feasibility of being a profession. It was such a drain, drivers quitting the LD game were a plague. New interest kindled by variation itself (one of the arguments in my ghost-written letter to Joe Sr.) would keep more mushers in the game. So we four agreed we needed to install some differences for difference sake alone.
The differences we would create on that trip indeed had their effect of juicing up the LD world. However, they had another profound effect. After a few years, the Iditarod powers that be and the Quest powers that be kept looking at each other, each attracted to what they saw. As well, as more and more mushers began competing in both, they wanted more commonality to make their training and racing strategies more closely jive. So the Iditarod began becoming more like the Quest, and the Quest more like the Iditarod. That, of course, cut into the variation and eroded some basic Quest founding concepts.
Some of the bigger Iditarod kennels were running teams of twenty or more. After more than four decades of selective breeding today’s dog quality has become wonderfully even, top to bottom, on individual teams. Back then there was a significant drop-off from a musher’s best down to his least performer. That was so even within the best teams. Iditarod drivers could include lots of “filler”—dogs that would “help you over the Range” then be sent home. Those made up vast numbers. Mushers could pace to the fastest dogs, with little consequence to performance of leaving behind dogs that began to show they were no longer contributing. Of course, that made flying hundreds of dropouts out of remote checkpoints and keeping all of those hordes held and organized a monumental, expensive task. So the Iditarod, looking at the success over on the Quest side, installed a top team limit of eighteen dogs, later to become the sixteen of today. The Quest, looking over at the more relaxed nature of team makeup and race pacing of the Iditarod, upped their limits to fourteen and four. Any experienced driver can vouchsafe the difference was not so much going from twelve to fourteen as it was the giant change from three to four. I was not happy with that change either because it so dramatically diminished such a vital element of founding philosophy.
On that road trip home, the idea of reversing direction year by year was conceived. Being a hopeless Old North romantic and visualizing the fan/tourist appeal, I suggested having a set layover in Dawson. Bud asserted that it should be thirty-six hours instead of Iditarod’s twenty-four, claiming it took that long to “rid the dog’s muscles of lactic acid.” To keep the race inexpensive and put old-time skills in the game, a single sled limit was concocted—bust your sled and you had to fix it along the way. Again, these were cool ideas additionally serving as variations for variations sake. I remember Roger promoting a “Nobility Award.” Great idea, but I don’t know where it went. I came up with the idea of a Race Annual that would differ from Iditarod’s. The Iditarod’s came out prior to the current race, but was all about last year’s event, very interesting, but old news. The Quest’s, also coming out just before race time, would be heavy into the upcoming race. I would go on to draft my old friend Dan Wetzell to edit it, and I would help with the initial issue.
Returning to Fairbanks, Leroy and I would hit every chance we could to speak before the Chamber of Commerce and service clubs, and promote media interviews. I recall hitting an evening buffet meeting of the Two Rivers Lions, and there kindling the interest of Congressional Medal of Honor winner Drew Dix, who would go on in future years to become the Quest’s top executive. More and more people began to be attracted until a downtown Fairbanks office was founded and some fairly high-flying personalities became actively involved in promotion/administration.
And where did Rod Perry go? Today, not one in ten thousand Quest followers have an inkling such a person had a thing to do with core Quest creation. Determined to found a home, family, and commercial fishing business, I left just prior to the first Quest to take a lucrative job I would stay with for several winters, pipelining on the North Slope during early Quest runnings. By the end of those winters, living in Chugiak with my wife Karen, I was heavy into raising and homeschooling our eventual family of five and working our Bristol Bay drift gillnet business. I have yet never attended a Quest start or finish. With such a vaporized Quest presence, it is no wonder memory of my founding efforts is only held by a few who go all the way back to the Quest’s very origins.
