Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Eight years have passed since Aliy Zirkle earned a measure of fame by becoming the first woman to win the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

And though she hasn’t entered the event since, in no way has she forgotten about it. The local mushing community also hasn’t stopped pestering Zirkle to jump back in the fray.

“The Quest always has a special place in my heart,” Zirkle said Tuesday night by telephone from her Two Rivers home.

While her focus in recent years has been the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, Zirkle felt the inescapable pull of the Quest this year.

So she compromised, and signed up for the Quest 300 for the first time. Husband Allen Moore and Texas-based friend Randy Chappel are also running teams from SP Kennel.

“Every single dog in our yard that has been trained up for this season will be on the Quest trail,” Zirkle said.

And while the teams will likely be balanced (”I don’t think we will have one top team”), Zirkle’s competitive drive will be engaged on a trail that passes within a virtual stone’s throw of her house.

“You can’t enter a race without racing,” Zirkle said. “We certainly would like to go for a win.”

Zirkle, 39, who concedes she’s “maybe getting wimpier,” is unsure about running the full 1,000-mile Yukon Quest in the future. But she is sure that doing both the frigid Quest and the Iditarod back-to-back is not a viable option.

“I do not have a goal to run both of them in the same season. I just don’t,” she said.

Chappel, meanwhile, has a definite goal for the race, which starts the night of Feb. 9.

That is “to finish and avoid blizzards. And to keep my dogs out of helicopters,” Chappel wrote on the Quest 300 Web site.

In 2006, Chappel lost his sled and dog team after plummeting down an icy rock face while descending Eagle Summit during the infamous storm that put about a dozen mushers in great peril. With his dogs vanished along with his survival gear, Chappel made a tough, but sensible, decision. He hitched a ride out of the maelstrom with fellow mushers Brent Sass and Regina Wykoff.

Chappel’s dog team was later found in good shape and airlifted off the mountain by the National Guard.

“We have quite a few of those dogs here,” Zirkle said. “Our helicopter dogs, we call them.”

Chappel, a 40-year-old investment manager in the Dallas area, is not the only Quest 300 musher this year looking to overcome a harrowing experience.

Alyssa Quaile, a 20-year-old Fairbanks student, was stranded on Rosebud Summit for about 30 hours in that same 2006 storm. She was rescued by helicopter and flown to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where she was treated for frostbite and released.

Largely because of the storm, only six of 14 mushers who started the Quest 300 in 2006, the last time it traveled from Fairbanks to Circle, completed the race.

Comprising the rest of this year’s 15-musher field are Devan Currier, 48, of Two Rivers; Blake Matray, 41, of Two Rivers; Dale Curry, 45, of Fairbanks; Rocky Demers, 30, of Healy; Josh Cadzow, 21, of Fort Yukon; Eric Rogers, 50, of Healy; Jason Reppert, 27, of Denali Park; Jocelyne LeBlanc, 33, of Whitehorse, Yukon; Simi Morrison, 36, of Marsh Lake, Yukon; Rudy Niggemeier, 51, of Salzkotten, Germany; and Fabrizio Lovati of Aosta Valley, Italy.

The shorter Quest event started as a 250-mile race in 2000 and doubles as a qualifier for the 1,000-mile race.

Another unique aspect this year is a research study investigating gastric ulcers led by Dr. Mike Davis from Oklahoma State University. The SP Kennel dogs will be given antacid medication and get scoped before and after the race. The purpose is to pinpoint the right distribution of medication, with the goal of preventing dog deaths and other problems due to gastric ulcers, Zirkle said.

Contact staff writer Matias Saari at 459-7591.