Before retiring, a final run for Alfalfa musher

Published 10:48 pm Monday, February 13, 2017

Jerry Scdoris drives a team of sled dogs through trails near Mt. Bachelor ski area's Sunrise Lodge on Friday. Scdoris recently competed in the Pedigree Stage Stop in Wyoming, which he says will be his last big race.(Joe Kline/Bulletin photo)

MOUNT BACHELOR — It was on the first day of the seven-leg Pedigree Stage Stop Race in Wyoming that Jerry Scdoris realized he was likely competing in his final big-time sled dog race.

Scdoris, the 69-year-old founder of Oregon Trail of Dreams sled dog rides, said he had intended to continue racing for at least another year, until he was 70, but the first stage out of Driggs, Idaho, on Jan. 28 gave him plenty of reasons to move up that retirement date. The 300-mile race includes more than 20,000 feet of climbing through the Rocky Mountains, and while mushers typically get off the sled and run alongside their teams during uphill stretches, that kind of athletic effort was no longer possible for Scdoris, a former long-distance runner who had already scheduled two knee-replacement surgeries.

“Every time you go slow enough to run, you get off and run, and the rest of the time you stand on one runner and pump, like a scooter,” Scdoris explained last week during an interview at Mt. Bachelor ski area, where his daughter Rachael Scdoris and her husband now run the sled dog tour company. “I pumped as much as I could, and I got off a couple times and ran. And even though I’m in reasonable shape, I’m also 240 pounds, as opposed to 140, which is the equivalent of carrying two 50-pound dogs in the sled, up the mountain. That’s a bad strategy.”

But if the uphills were painful for Scdoris and the 12 dogs on his team, the downhills could be downright dangerous. During the first stage, a 31.5-mile out-and-back trail full of hairpin turns and treacherous switchbacks, Scdoris saw some of the best sled dog teams in the world crash while rounding corners he managed to navigate.

“We went by this cliff on the left, and my dogs were right on the edge,” Scdoris recounted. “I’d run (that trail) the two previous years, but there was a berm. This year there was no berm. And I went, I’m not having fun. I do not want to get injured.”

But as the days wore on, Scdoris said, he and his team felt better and better. While many of the 14 teams had only eight or 10 healthy dogs running by the end of the race on Feb. 4 (teams are allowed to start with a pool of 16 dogs, and up to 12 are allowed to pull the sled at a time), Scdoris still had a full team of 12 Alaskan huskies in shape to race.

“I had 12 crazy dogs, and I said I’m going for it,” he said. “I definitely felt it the first day, and then each day (after that) I felt was a blessing, and each day I let my dogs go a little more. The last run, the last day of the race, was maybe my best sled run ever, so it’s a good time to really step aside.”

After flying downhill at about 17 mph for the final 3 miles of the race, Scdoris finished in ninth place with a time of 27 hours, 13 minutes, 44 seconds, a little more than four hours behind the winner, British Columbia’s Lina Streeper.

Scdoris said it was a gratifying conclusion for a career that began 40 years ago when he was a young teacher living in Gold Beach on the southern Oregon coast. He spotted an Iditarod racer named Jim Tofflemire as his dogs pulled a cart up and down the beach, and Scdoris said he knew on the spot that he wanted to do the same thing. His first team included Jenny, an Alaskan husky he found outside a Eugene supermarket while he was a student at the University of Oregon, along with a Siberian husky given to him by Tofflemire and a bunch of pound puppies. Jenny was a natural, Scdoris recalled, but the rest were, well, sweet dogs, if not world-class athletes.

He and the dogs trained for two years or so, and during a frigid night in 1979 at a sled dog race staged in Sisters, Scdoris looked up at the crystal-clear night sky and, in what he describes now as his “awakening as an adult,” decided that as soon as the school year ended he was moving to Central Oregon and focusing on sled dog racing.

Scdoris quickly found work as a teacher and counselor at J Bar J Boys Ranch in Bend, and though he intended to travel to races during the weekends, he was soon getting phone calls from recreation directors at resorts around Central Oregon who had dozens of visitors who wanted to go on a ride in a dog sled.

“And he said, they’ll pay you real money — how much are you going to make at the race?” Scdoris said of one conversation with a recreation director at what is now Seventh Mountain Resort. “And there was no money at the race. So I took these 14 people, and they paid me, I want to say, $40 or $50 a head. I was never a math teacher, but I did some basic math and realized that made a lot more sense that weekend than going to a race.”

Scdoris, who eventually moved to a 40-acre ranch in Alfalfa, where there was ample room for dozens of dogs, still traveled to high-profile races in the East and Midwest — and was surprised at the level of competition he found there — but the second income from tours became even more important when Rachael was born in 1985.

It took only a few years until Scdoris realized Rachael’s attraction to sled dog racing rivaled his own — indeed, by the time she was a toddler he found it so difficult to keep her away from the dogs he decided he would use only dogs that were gentle enough to be trusted around children.

While in second grade, Rachael, who was born with a vision disorder called achromatopsia, insisted on camping outdoors on the porch every night as preparation for the Iditarod, expecting she would one day sleep in a sled during the Alaskan winter nights.

She proved to be right: In 2005, she became the first legally blind musher to compete in the Iditarod, and the following year she became the first legally blind competitor to finish the 1,100-mile race. She also competed in 2008, pulling out 941 miles in, and finished 45th in 2009.

Jerry Scdoris did not race much while Rachael was taking on more and more challenging races as a teenager and young adult, but he said the decision to step aside during those years was easier than stepping aside this time. When asked about his favorite memories from his racing career, he immediately replied with highlights from Rachael’s career: the starting line of the Iditarod in 2005, and her finish in 2006.

“I always say she could have an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale with the amount of money we’ve spent on those Iditarods, but it was worth it,” Scdoris said. “She’s got a Ph.D. in woodsmanship — woodswomanship — and no one can ever take her Iditarod finishes away.”

Scdoris returned to serious racing about three years ago, as Rachael and her husband, Nick Salerno, took over most of the business operations for the touring company. Scdoris said he will still compete in local races, such as the Bachelor Butte Dog Derby at Wanoga Sno-park next month. He is also helping Rachael train the team for the Yellowknife Dog Derby, a three-day race around the Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territory. The race, which Rachael ran for the first time last winter, is held entirely within a well-groomed track with high berms of snow on each side, meaning Rachael can compete without a guide on a snowmobile or directions from a competitor running ahead of her.

And though there will not be such races ahead for Jerry Scdoris, he said the final few miles of the Pedigree Stage Stop were about as good as any sled dog racer could ask for.

“I’ve got to admit those final 3 miles in Wyoming were really wonderful,” Scdoris said. “I mean they were just gratifying, to see my dogs run themselves out.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0305, vjacobsen@bendbulletin.com

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