Leonhard Seppala love

Leonhard Seppala

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  • "Mark Summers had a plan, an express delivery. The entire route could be covered by two fast dogsled teams, one starting from the railhead at Nenana heading west, the other from Nome heading east. They would meet halfway on the trail at Nulato. Summers knew the one man who could do the western portion of the run, from Nome to Nulato and then back again: a scrappy Norwegian outdoorsman named Leonhard Seppala. Seppala was the gold company's main dog driver. He supervised the company's 110 miles of ditches that supplied water to the gold fields, and he freighted supplies and passengers out to the company's mining camps and ferried officials on business trips to other towns in Alaska. Tireless and disciplined in his work, he was undoubtedly the fastest musher in Alaska."

    --Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against an Epidemic (NY and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 56

    January 24, 2017

  • "In the vast silence, Seppala could hear the patter of the dogs' feet on the crusted snow and their steady pant as they pulled ahead in the cold. There was something soothing about the sound of the sled in motion: the creak of the wood like the rigging of a schooner under full sail, the rub of the rawhide lashings, the swish of the runners on the snow. This was a broad terrain, an empty ocean, and when the weather behaved, the sled would glide easily over the trail's swells. The only marks left behind were two parallel lines in the snow and the clouds of the dogs' exhalations, which lingered over the trail for a moment."

    "'The birchwood runners of my sled make tracks so deep in my memory I can see them to this day,' Seppala once said of his first dog team. 'All (the dogs) asked at the end of a grueling day was to be fed.'

    "The first rule of survival was to hang on to the team, because without the dogs you were dead."

    --Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against an Epidemic (NY and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 63

    January 24, 2017