Pete Kaiser of Bethel swept the Kuskokwim mid-distance races this season.
He won the 2022 Bogus Creek 150 Sled Dog Race early Sunday. The championship follows his sixth Kuskokwim 300 title just a few weeks prior, but he’s not done chasing gold this season.
The Bethel musher will compete for his second Iditarod victory in just two weeks.
On Sunday at 5:12 a.m., Kaiser and his 10-dog team raced across the Bogus Creek finish line in Bethel. Under freezing rain and dark skies, a couple dozen supporters — including his family, friends, race officials and fans — greeted the champion, clapping and cheering as he arrived home.
After crossing the finish on the Kuskokwim River ice, he pulled a bag from his sled, labeled “Fish,” and gave each dog two frozen slabs of meat.
Despite outpacing the competition, Kaiser said that “it felt like a slow-motion race.”
Heavy snow in the days leading up to the Bogus Creek 150 created a soft, punchy course. A fierce headwind forced many mushers to crouch on their sleds as they raced upriver.
More snow fell as the top racers reached the turnaround checkpoint. And freezing rain began falling minutes before Kaiser arrived at the finish.
Kaiser hadn’t planned to run the Bogus this year. He added his name to the roster a couple days before the start on Saturday, after days of heavy snow.
Kaiser was among a dozen teams who competed in the race, which was re-routed to a roughly 122-mile trail this year to avoid overflow on the Tuluksak River.
“It’s good training to see different conditions than what we’re used to all the time out here, especially going into Iditarod, to see a little bit of deeper snow,” Kaiser said at the finish line.
Kaiser said the Bogus race served as a final long training run before the Iditarod.
For most of the winter, the lower Kuskokwim area has provided a hard, icy trail. Kaiser said that he wouldn’t have entered the Bogus if conditions hadn’t softened.
“Hard, icy, fast trails are maybe more likely to injure a dog, and with Iditarod being so close, there’s not a lot of recovery time,” he said. “This slower trail is like something you might see on Iditarod.”
The top finishers took slightly more time racing upriver than coming back.
Kaiser reached the halfway point in 7 hours and 42 minutes. After a mandatory four-hour layover, he reduced that time on the way back to 7 hours and 27 minutes. He attributed the extra speed to “fresh dogs” coming out of the checkpoint and “a firmer trail after all the teams had gone over it.” Also, what had been a headwind going out was a tailwind coming back.
For his Bogus Creek 150 win, Kaiser received a trophy made by artist Kelly Lincoln of Bethel. She wove the beach grass plate using blue seal gut designs and dyed grass picked in Bethel.
Herman Phillip of Kwethluk placed second in the Bogus, arriving in Bethel at 5:27 a.m. Sunday, 15 minutes after Kaiser.
Phillip won the Bogus back in 2011, and hadn’t planned to enter this year either. He stepped in the day before the race to fill in for his friend, Lewis Pavila, after Pavila became ill. Phillip had not trained with Pavila’s team beforehand.
“I just hop on and go,” he said, laughing at the finish. “Lewis’s dogs are good. They did good for me.”
Phillip was in the lead most of the race, arriving at the halfway checkpoint one minute before Kaiser, but Kaiser passed him near Akiachak on the way back to Bethel.
“Pete is too fast for me. I’m happy for him, he did a good job,” Phillip said, smiling behind his glasses.
At the halfway checkpoint, Phillip had told KYUK that his goal was to have fun. At the finish line, he said he’d done that “both ways, up and down.”
The Bogus Creek gave all 14 of the dogs Kaiser plans to use in the Iditarod a chance to run. He ran part of the Iditarod team, and his friend, Matt Scott of Bethel, ran the rest.
“That was just a real pleasure, something I’ll have with me forever,” Scott said after placing third in the 2022 Bogus Creek, arriving in Bethel at 5:40 a.m. “To be able to run a dog team of this caliber is just something truly special.”
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Anna Rose MacArthur is a reporter at KYUK in Bethel.
