13 - Extreme Makeover
The long, strange trip of Yukon Quest musher Michelle Phillips.
Offered a glimpse of my future at the age of 15, I would have believed that I’d someday earn my living as a writer. There’s no story in the contrast—or lack thereof—between the person I am now and the one I imagined I could be. But I’m convinced that a scene in which a teenage Michelle Phillips receives a peak at her destiny is the hook for an entertaining tale about multiple personalities.
As she stares in disbelief, Phillips wonders if she has mistaken a snow globe for the crystal ball. She sees herself grown up and happily at home in the small—no, tiny—community of Tagish, Yukon. She’s surrounded by Alaskan huskies. Not pets, mind you. Sled dogs. Dozens of them. And, for the fifth time, she’s preparing to harness the chosen few and set off on the toughest sled dog race in the world.
Is this the future, she asks herself, or a cruel joke?
As time will tell, it’s no joke. But for Phillips—and those who’ve known her as long as I have—it’s funny all the same.
“I wanted to be a secretary,” admits Phillips, now 40 and quick to laugh at her youthful aspirations. Then, a slight revision. “I actually just wanted to live in a city. I wanted to marry someone very rich and drive a sports car and have nice clothes. I don’t even remember watching a sled dog race.”
Where once she might have been content with the purely cosmetic makeover (”I was pretty obsessed with my looks,” she observes of her high school years in Whitehorse), the veteran Yukon Quest musher has seemingly overhauled her very essence.
“My mom has always said I’m a person of extremes,” she concedes.
Her younger brother and occasional dog handler, Thane, has memories of Phillips that certainly support this characterization. According to him—and many others would agree—the talented figure skater seemed like the last person who’d ever attempt, let alone relish, a grueling 1,000-mile dogsled odyssey through the frozen northern wilderness.
“Outdoorsy and Michelle would never have come together in a sentence—unless you would have said ‘Michelle hates the outdoors,’” he recalls. “I still don’t know how you go from figure skating to dog mushing, but that’s what she did.”
What happened, in fact, is that Phillips met a musher named Ed Hopkins. Apparently, he came from a very different world.
“When he was little, he just wanted to be a dog musher and live out in the bush,” Phillps says about her partner and father of nine-year old son Keegan. “I mean, he used to hook up his dog-a golden retriever-to his wagon.”
Thanks to Hopkins, Phillips became just as passionate about sled dogs, mushing and the rustic lifestyle.
“It was just something I found I really enjoyed and connected with,” she says.
In 2004, Phillips finally entered the Yukon Quest, the annual race between Whitehorse and Fairbanks, Alaska. She placed ninth. Last year, she turned in her best performance to date—fourth—and set her sights even higher for the race in February 2009.
“I have to just focus on believing in myself, and realizing that I can run with the big boys,” she says, referring to a competitive field that includes Lance Mackey, whose four consecutive Yukon Quest victories (plus two Iditarod championships) recently earned him an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
If Phillips’ determination ever translates into victory, perhaps she too could find herself in Conan’s guest chair. In the meantime, brother Thane suggests that her life’s extreme makeover might present an alternate route to the TV talk show circuit.
“This is along the lines of someone who’s overweight losing 250 pounds and going on Oprah,” he jokes. “That kind of stuff.”
From the surprising comfort of a once-unfathomable future, Michelle Phillips weighs this comparison and offers the final verdict.
“I would probably agree.”
First published in the January/February 2009 issue of above&beyond magazine. Photo by Derek Crowe.
