Dick Mackey: Chance Meeting on the Haul Road

Jason and the infamous Dick Mackey!

If you've ever driven the Dalton Highway, you have a pretty good understanding of what the word remote means. It's about as remote as a person can get in a car. There are only a couple small stops north of Coldfoot Camp. There is the turnoff to Wiseman, A port-o-potty near Sukapack, and one at the base of the Chandalar Shelf, and a DOT station near Atigun Pass. That's it. So it's all the more amazing that we ran into one of the most famous mushers in all of Alaska along the way.
Our Arctic Safari Tour left Coldfoot at around 11:00 am, and as we headed up the first few miles Jason (our tour guide, and my little brother) gave us a brief history of Coldfoot. The latest chapter of that story involved the founding of the truck stop back in the 80's by a guy named Dick Mackey. As I understand it he convinced a friend to join him for the summer selling hamburgers and coffee to truckers out of a converted school bus. They set up in Coldfoot, and Mackey spent the next 9 years growing the camp and his business.
We continued on the tour, and after travelling all the way to the edge of the North Slope, we turned around and headed home.
We pulled off at the viewing are for the Chandalar Shelf, and noticed a tent, a dog sled, and pickup truck with dog box that hadn't been there earlier when we were driving up. There were two men standing beside their gear talking. They were both older, with a slightly wrinkled "Alaskan" quality about them. The Alaskan quality I am referring to is the strange way in which residents of the far north tend to look like they are comfortably chatting at a tiki bar in Hawaii when standing on the side of the road in windy -20 degree weather having a conversation. But I digress. Anyway we hopped back on the road, but only got a few feet when one of the men, the one in the circa 1990 teal, purple and pink jacket covered in patches, hailed us down.
Jason recognized him immediately, and quickly informed the rest of us that before our very eyes, was the famous, No!, the infamous, Dick Mackey!
Four hours earlier none of us would have had any idea who Dick Mackey was, but after our history lesson about Coldfoot, and learning that he'd run (and helped found) the Iditerod, we were all appropriately in awe. I mean what are the chances? We were literally out in the middle of nowhere!
We got out and talked with him and his buddy. He was about the friendliest guy you ever met. And despite his being...somewhere around 70 I think, there was a youthfulness about him and the way he talked and gestured that made him seem like a much younger man. He had a great sense of humor, and a smile to match it. His friend had a similar air.
He explained that he was up there with some friends and they were going caribou hunting on the Shelf. He told us a couple stories about being in -85 degree weather, and was a sport about having his photo taken with everyone. He was really a neat guy.
On my way home from Alaska I found a memoir of his in the gift shop at the Fairbanks airport. It was called One Second to Glory. I started reading it in the store. The Mackey legacy in Alaska is an impressive one (he has several sons who are also mushers, and his granddaughter is too), but his origins are humble. Dick went to Alaska a penniless young man with a sense of adventure, and no idea what he was doing. His start in dog-sledding occurred in much the same way. Very much like my brother actually. And his tenure in Coldfoot also began as a wild and crazy idea.
I decided I needed to buy the book, and I read the whole thing on my 3 flights back home. His story is interesting, and funny in parts, but more than that it was inspirational. It's like the theme from the Pixar movie Ratatouille where they say "Anyone can cook.", except the phrase here is "Anybody can mush."