Stranded for Summer : Taking a Dog Team Through the Northwest Passage, Pam Flowers Stopped When Trail Turned to Water and She Will Complete Journey in Fall

Her heroes are explorers, her horizon the northern lights, which is how Pam Flowers came to be marooned on an island in Canada’s Northwest Territories for the summer.

“I always listened to ‘Sgt. Preston of the Yukon,’ ” she said. “I always wanted to go to Alaska and have a dog team.”

Preston had one wonder dog, King. Flowers has eight, and they took her 2,000 miles eastward from Barrow, Alaska, through the historic Northwest Passage before the trail turned to water.

“I had read a lot about (Norwegian polar explorer) Roald Amundsen,” Flowers said. “He actually sailed through the Northwest Passage. He motivated me to do it, but I wanted to do it with dogs.”

Flowers is in the village of Gjoa Haven on King William Island, home to about 800 Inuit Indians who ride ATVs in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter, and hunt and fish for their food. There is no local economy, but there is a telephone, which keeps Flowers in touch with the outside world.

“It’s kind of a nice place for me because this is where Amundsen got trapped,” she said. “It was the opposite for him. The ice didn’t go away, so he couldn’t leave. He was here 23 months. I’ve been fishing for my dogs in the harbor right where his ship was stuck . . . probably walked over the same area where he walked.”

Next November, when the sea freezes again, she plans to complete the last 500 miles of her trek to Repulse Bay, where the Northwest Passage begins. The significance of her adventure is lost on the Inuits.

“They know what I’m doing, but they don’t care. When they ask why I’m doing it I just tell them I wanted to go on a long trip by myself. They understand that.”

*

Flowers’ trip was born in her restless soul 46 years ago in Sault Ste. Marie in northern Michigan. First she tried the life of a respiratory therapist and lived in Houston for 11 years, but it didn’t work.

“I went through one of those phases we all go through where we say, ‘This is my big dream and, doggone it, my life’s going by and I’m not doing it.’ So I sold everything I owned and moved to Alaska, got some dogs and lived for a whole year on a dog farm where they do racing. I learned the basics there.”

To train for distance sledding, she ran the Iditarod in 1983.

“I was number 51 out of 54, (but) I finished. It was great. I had no illusions about finishing in the money.”

Over time, the lore of the Northwest Passage grew on her.

“I also read about the guy whose route I’m retracing: Knute Rasmussen. He was a Greenlander (who) came to the Arctic in the early 1920s with the Fifth Thule Expedition. Their objective was to document the way of life of the native people before it was radically changed by influence from the white culture.

“He did that in the company of two Greenland natives. One was a man named Miteq and a woman who was Miteq’s cousin named Anarulunguak. Those three went across the entire Northwest Passage. Anarulunguak kind of faded into history and got forgotten, so I decided to do this trip in commemoration of her.”

Flowers, traveling over the frozen Victoria Strait 100 miles from King William Island, had been on the trail about 100 days when she found herself flirting with catastrophe.

“It was like a heat wave came through,” she said. “(The temperature) actually went to 70 degrees. It would cool off at night to about 34 degrees, so it would kind of firm up a little bit. We started traveling at night and sleeping in the day. When we were 50 miles out, it got real bad. The snow kept melting and then it turned to water. We were traveling over the sea ice in about a foot of standing water.

“There are all kinds of seals around here. They come up through little holes they make in the ice and keep open all winter. You can see those holes most of the time, but when everything is covered with water you can’t. The two lead dogs fell into a hole. The only thing you can do is wade up there and fish ‘em out. It’s pretty hard to get them out, (and) it’s scary because you don’t know if you’re standing on a thin shell or solid ice.

“That, I thought, was more than I wanted to deal with, and we would have crossed a strait that was notorious for breaking up, so it was foolish to go on.”

Then there were the storms.

“It was kind of a record year for storms,” she said. “When we got to Paulutuk, which is a little village along the way, the principal of the school told me they normally close only a couple of days a year for bad weather, but this year they had closed 18 days.

“It wasn’t terribly cold. It never got worse than 45 below, and most of the time it was 25 or 30 below. But the wind is what made it so bad.”

And the polar bears.

“I was sledding along and came around a little corner,” she said. “There was a polar bear standing there nursing her single cub, about 100 feet away. She was above eye level, so I was really hoping my dogs wouldn’t see her. She was just looking at us. They don’t want anything to do with you. They want you to leave them alone. Polar bears are the least aggressive of all the bears.

“We were almost past her when one dog saw her and started pulling real hard to get over to her, because dogs like to chase bears. So, of course, the other dogs looked and they all saw her. My main leader, Douglas, was trying to pull us back. I was commanding him to go to the left to stay away from her. ‘Haw! . . . Haw!’ But he couldn’t overcome the power of the other seven dogs, and I couldn’t slow us down because we were on this beach and the brake wasn’t working.”

Flowers’ brake is a three-pronged iron claw attached to the sled by a rope.

“When we got to deep snow I could stop the dogs, but by then they were very close to her . . . a couple of feet.”

The bear was trying to retreat into its den, but her cub stood transfixed by the dogs. The bear made several false charges to keep the dogs at bay, then finally went into the den, leaving her cub hissing at Flowers and the dogs.

“It looked pretty cute,” she said.

*

Despite the isolation of the trail, Flowers seldom felt lonely.

“A lot of time is spent paying attention to where you are, and you have to pay a lot of attention to the dogs to be sure you rest them whenever they need it,” she said. “I sing a lot in my mind. I don’t ever sing out loud. I think about different things that have happened, what I’d like to write in my journal . . . how to phrase things.

“A lot of time is involved in taking care of the dogs. I have to make about eight gallons of water a day, and that’s a lot of snow to melt. I sleep nine hours, travel nine or 10 hours a day. The rest of the time is in camp, and almost all of that is doing stuff for the dogs.

“My lead dog is Douglas. He’s named after an Antarctic explorer from Australia named Douglas Mawson. I call him Dougie, or Dougie Dog. He’s 10 years old and black with white markings. He’s a real hard worker, but has an overgrown puppy personality.”

The dogs are Alaskan huskies. At 75 pounds, Douglas is the largest, and all are larger than average Iditarod dogs, which are recruited for speed. Flowers’ dogs must pull a sled that with her and supplies weighs more than 500 pounds.

“Speed doesn’t matter,” she said. “I need dogs that prefer to go slow.”

For entertainment, there is aurora borealis-- the northern lights.

“They’re a very subdued light, very soft and very silvery,” she said. “It’s kind of like somebody has a giant piece of silk up there waving in the breeze and somebody is playing a light on it, and it shimmers, right across the sky, floating, never ending, constantly rearranging itself. It tends to be silver, but I have seen them green and in shades of violet.”

Flowers is writing a book. She’ll make the point that her dogs enjoyed the adventure as much as she did, hoping to stifle the kind of criticism the Iditarod has received, especially this year when six dogs died during the race.

“Dog mushing right now is kind of taking it on the chin,” Flowers said. “We started with eight dogs. We’ve come 2,000 miles through some pretty tough conditions and the dogs are still there.

“I’ve shown that it is possible to travel long distances in the Arctic and come out with dogs that are happy and healthy. They didn’t want to stop. They wanted just to keep on going. They weren’t afraid of the water. I’ve never lost a dog on one of these trips. It shows that if you know what you’re doing and you take care of them, they don’t have to die.”

She has no doubts that she will finish.

“You just keep going,” she said.