Alone Across The Arctic

Pam Flowers — Alone Across The Arctic

Thank you. Well, when I was a little girl, we had this radio in our house. This thing was as big as a piece of furniture and I used to sit there on the floor with my ear pressed up against the speaker and I would listen to my favorite radio program. It was about this guy named Sergeant Preston and his dog, King. And they used to have a dog team and they’d go running all over the Arctic righting wrongs. And I used to fantasize about how one day I was going to grow up and I was going to do those very things. But of course, life got in the way a little bit. And believe it or not, 40 years later, there I was standing on the outskirts of Barrow, Alaska, alone with an eight-dog team and we were going to dog sled across Arctic America to the east side of Canada.

Well, I just didn’t get up one day and say, ​“Well, I guess I’m going to dog sled across Arctic America.” [audience laughter] I had actually spent about 10 years in Alaska and I had learned how to dog sled, how to take care of my dogs, and gone on a lot of expeditions to gain experience. So, when we left Barrow, Alaska, on February 14, 1993, I believe that my eight dogs and I were ready to go. Now, the way it works in dog sledding is you have a team of dogs. In this case, I had eight. And you put a harness on them and on the end of the harness there’s a line, and the line goes back to the front of the sled and the musher stands on the back of the sled and you tell those dogs what to do. So, you don’t have any leash or rein. You just use your voice to control the dogs.

Well, of course, it’s kind of tricky to figure out how to make eight dogs do the same thing at the same time. So, you have what’s called a lead dog and that’s the head dog, the number one lead dog. My dog was a dog named Douglas and I called him Dougie dog. [audience chuckle] And Dougie dog was a big old 75-pound flop eared guy and he was just happy, go lucky. He’d do anything I asked him to do. Dougie had a son named Robert. [audience chuckle] And as far as anyone knows, Robert never did a single thing he was told in his entire life. [audience laughter] 

So, why is he in the team? Well, the bitter truth is I didn’t have much in the way of money. I needed eight dogs. I only had eight dogs. So, if you were in my kennel, you were going. [audience laughter] So, I took Robert along and I put him in the back of the team where I thought he couldn’t cause any trouble. And to be fair to Robert, he did work pretty hard. [audience laughter] [giggles] So, off we went on our first day. And our first day was absolutely spectacular. I mean, everything went just the way it was supposed to go. And I’m standing there in camp that first night, and I’m looking around and look at my dogs all snuggled up behind the sleds. My little red and white tent is waiting for me. And I’m looking around and I’m thinking, ​“You know, we’re pretty isolated. There’s nobody else around us for long ways.” But that’s okay, because I’m a person who really loves solitude and isolation.

And anyway, I was so jazzed. I mean, my dream was coming true. Well, I was going to be the first woman to dog sled across the Arctic. No woman had ever done this alone before. And I’d spent a couple of years looking for sponsorship, and no one would help us. No one. So, I borrowed every nickel it took to make this happen. Not too long before we left, I ran into my neighbor, a guy named Dave. I like to call him Neighbor Dave. [audience chuckle] And I told neighbor Dave my woes about money. And neighbor Dave, he’s this big guy. He’s like 6, 4, and 200 pounds. And he looks down at me and he says, ​“Well, what do you expect? You’re 5 feet nothing. What are you, 100 pounds soaking wet? And those eight dogs of yours, they’re nothing but a bunch of clunkers. [audience reaction] Nobody believes in you, and you’re going to fail.” [audience aww] ​“Wow. Thanks, Dave.” [audience laughter]

So, I’m standing there in that camp that first night, and I thought to myself, ​“You cannot listen to people like Dave.” And I thought, ​“These people, they don’t see what I see. They don’t feel what I feel when I’m up here” and I’m looking at the sun and the western sky, and I’m looking at the Arctic Ocean and this giant sheet of ice and all this land frozen, and I think about the power it took to make that happen. My dogs and I have the same stuff in us as what’s in all of that. And when I look at that, I don’t feel small. I don’t feel weak. I feel full of power, like I can do anything. Well, I wasn’t naive enough to think that this was going to be a day at the beach. This was going to be a pretty arduous thing. As it turned out, there were going to be– there were more storms in the Arctic that winter than there had been in recorded history. [audience reaction] So, when a storm is coming, you need to stop before it comes and you set up your camp. And I would put my dog sleds on their sides and then put the dogs behind the sleds out of the wind, set up my tent, and then I’d get in there and snuggle up with a book and read. But it is not a time actually when you can just rest, because I would go out every four hours round the clock and check on my dogs and make sure they had enough food. And if it was so windy I couldn’t stand up, I did that on my hands and knees.

Well, of course, it wasn’t all bad weather. We had just so many spectacular days out there, so beautiful in the Arctic. One day that stands out most in my mind is this one day right before we crossed the Canadian border. And I’m looking off to the south and there are these mountains and it’s just got a little snow on. It looks like Scrimshaw and the Arctic Ocean. And the air was so pure, it had no smell and so quiet. There is no sound. It’s just total peace. We continued along. We’re sledding. We came around to this beautiful big beach and it looked so perfect, looked like a superhighway right in front of us. And I got this idea. I thought, ​“I’m going to take Robert, my dog, Robert, and I’m going to put him up in front beside my number one lead dog, Dougie dog, and I’m going to give Robert a chance to show that he can learn commands.” What could he possibly do wrong? [audience chuckle]

About five minutes later, we came around a corner, and there up in a ravine off to the right, was a mother polar bear and cub. [audience reaction] They’re about a hundred yards away and they’re standing on this beautiful white snow and this perfect blue sky behind them is just like a picture. And I thought, ​“You know, the dogs aren’t even going to see her.” Well, Robert’s a bit of a tourist, [audience laughter] and he just happened to look off to the right and he saw the bears. And so, now he swings to the right and he wants to go and visit the bears. Now, I’m sure that Robert thought those bears were dogs, because dogs really don’t like bears.

And I’m yelling at Dougie, ​“Haw.” And that means go left. ​“Haw, Dougie, haw.” Because I’m trying to get Dougie to take us away from the bears. But now the other six dogs see what Robert is seeing, and they decide they need to go see the bears. So, now the whole team swung hard to the right, and we are rocketing across this frozen beach. I’m standing on the brake as hard as I can, but it’s not working because there’s only about an inch of snow on this beach and there’s nothing for it to bite into. I’m trying to flip the sled over, but I can’t flip it over. We go rocketing across this beach. We get to the bottom of the ravine. Now the ravine is full of hard packed, windblown snow, and the brake bites and we jerk to a halt. But now my lead dogs, Dougie and Robert, are only about 3 feet from this bear, [audience aww] and I’m like, maybe 60 feet, and I’m yelling at Dougie, ​“Haw, haw. Go to the left.” But he doesn’t hear me. It’s just total chaos. I have no control over anything that’s happening. And this bear is standing there looking at us, and she is not happy.

And she looked at my dog Dougie, and she ran towards him in kind of a false charge. She tried to stop before she hit him, but actually the ravine was so slick that she banged right into him and sent him tumbling to the bottom of the ravine, taking the whole team with him. She turned around and hightailed it back to her cub. And when the dogs saw her running away, they tried to chase after her, but they couldn’t quite get to her because, of course, the brake is still in the snow. And now this bear is getting really agitated, and the dogs are lunging and lunging and barking, and she’s getting more and more agitated, and she starts to drool. You would have to be there to see how much drool can come out of an agitated bear’s mouth. [audience laughter] This is like four water faucets going off at one time. And then she starts wagging her head and clawing at the snow.

And then she made this sound. I’d always been told by native people, when a polar bear makes that sound, they’re getting serious, and you better be ready. Amazingly, I just got real calm, and everything around me started happening in slow motion. I reached into my sled bag and I pulled out my shotgun, turned off the safety, and I aimed it at her. And I thought, ​“If she’s going to hurt one of my dogs, I’m going to shoot her.” And then everything stopped. It just got totally silent. No more barking, no more hissing, just silence. And then the bear seemed to see me for the first time. She took one step towards me, and she looked at me with those coal black eyes. My stomach just lurched, and I stepped away from the sled, one step, and I held out my hand and I said, ​“It’s Okay. It’s Okay. We’re going to go now.” And I swear I heard that bear say to me in my mind, ​“I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you to go.” And with that, she just walked to her den opening about 70 feet away and slipped inside. And her little cub is running over there trying to catch up to mama. [audience chuckle] And it got right beside the den opening. Now, it had its first lesson on how to be a big, tough polar bear. [audience chuckle] And it looked over at us and it went, ​“Ha.” [audience laughter] [giggles] And then it jumped inside, and I never saw them again.

So, I ran up, got the lines untangled, and jumped on the sled. And I said, ​“All right, let’s go.” And I wanted as much distance between us and those polar bears as possible. We didn’t stop for three hours, [audience chuckle] and it took me three days to stop shaking. We had many more challenges on this journey, but somehow, we always managed to rescue one another. This journey took 11 months, and then my eight dogs and I went home happy and healthy. I had wanted to prove by doing this journey that my dogs and I were good enough, that we weren’t a bunch of clunkers. And together we did that. But what I gained most was a profound respect for my dogs and for myself. And as for neighbor Dave, [audience chuckle] now who cares what Dave thinks? Thank you.