Iditarod 2024: A Sled Dog Named Desire
By Colin A. Warren
Sled Dogs
They’re skinny and don’t look particularly strong at a glance. They’re lithe and wiry. And they all look different; their ears, coat colors, and tails all vary. A lot of them have icy blue eyes. We’re talking about the Alaskan husky. No kennel club recognizes them as an official breed, but this is because they are, at this point in history, essentially a performance mutt with many varieties of dogs mixed in. But their base genetics are ancient and trace back to Alaska thousands of years.
Consider how long humans have been using dogs to pull themselves and their gear and supplies by sled — for at least hundreds of years, maybe longer. The Alaskan husky is the premier version of a sled dog, combining the best elements of Native huskies with that of Siberian huskies, Alaskan malamutes, Chukotka sled dogs, Canadian Eskimo dogs, and Greenland dogs. And more. When European traders and settlers showed up here, they immediately threw some Pointers, Greyhounds, Labs, and Setters into the genetic mix. Today, no dog rivals the Alaskan husky in feats of endurance.
Some people protest the use of dogs to pull sleds. These people usually do not spend time around sled dogs. Anyone that has spent time around them recognizes that there is one thing they want to do — pull, yank, and work their way down the trail. This is the same with a novice sled dog that is merely pulling their owner via skijor down a local trail as it is with a professional team in which the sled dogs are rightfully treated like the world-class athletes they are. How do they show this willingness?
Once they’re harnessed, they get excited. I mean, very fiercely excited. The sled dogs jump, yank, and, most noticeably, yap and howl.
As a poet and journalist, I have spent hours upon hours considering how best to describe the unique wailing from sled dogs in harnesses waiting for their musher to give the command to head down the trail. It’s a wild and atavistic howl, a cruel song, something feral from before animals were tamed. A fiend outside the law. It’s partly reminiscent of the sounds one hears when a pack of wolves are sharing a kill. For the literary-inclined, I’m tempted to mention DFW’s phrase, the howling fantods. But all my descriptive efforts felt bested when I read T.A. Richard’s 1909 book “Through The Yukon and Alaska” in which he wrote: “The noise was something between the sad plaint of friends in hell and the caterwauling of felines on the garden wall. The outcry was especially weird when it became faint, as if in hopeless agony.” Whichever description suits your fancy, the root of it is the same: a sled dog’s uncontrollable desire to hit the trail.
It’s out on the trail where the real magic of the Alaskan husky emerges. Their unique metabolic profile takes over once they start running at a marathon pace. They have what’s characterized as a glucocentric ability — that is, they can extract a more significant percentage of their energy from fat instead of cheap energy like carbohydrates. This, in turn, allows them to sustain long-distance efforts without depleting their glucose reserves too quickly. In biological circles, this is known as anabolic efficiency. And it’s why out on the trail, most of their meals will have heavy fat and protein-rich items like beaver, salmon, bonemeal, chicken, beef, and seal blubber included. When racing, a single sled dog often consumes more than 14,000 calories daily. Mushers breed specifically for the ability of a dog to eat and consume without inhibition, a noble and necessary trait. They are also bred for intelligence and the ability to work as a team. And the little buggers are still undeniably cute.
Our culture parallels the Alaskan husky ethos in that we live in the only state where people don’t shower or change their clothes to excess and where more people talk more about the cost of tires than the price of their TVs. Somehow, almost magically, in an oversold era, we as a state still represent function over fashion.
Out on the North Pole trails with Motley Crew Kennel
Photo by Colin A. Warren
The Last Great Race
In the 1960s, a lifelong musher, Joe Redington, saw the writing on the modern wall. Machines were taking over. Snow machines. Bush planes. Internal combustion unleashed upon millions of square acres. After centuries of sled dogs being used as an essential part of life in the subarctic and arctic worlds, he feared these machines would extinguish a precious and organic existence. He wanted to preserve both the Alaskan husky and the mushing lifestyle. After initially holding a race between Knik and Big Lake for a few years, he dreamed bigger. By far, it was bigger than anyone previously had for any sled race.
A sled dog race over 1,000 miles didn’t exist before the Iditarod. Redington had multiple reasons for choosing Nome as a finish. It was home to the first sled dog kennel in Alaska and the first place to hold a notable sled dog race, The All Alaska Sweepstakes, run from 1908 to 1917. If that doesn’t pull at ye ole nostalgia heartstrings enough, the story of the Serum Run undoubtedly will.
In the darkest months 1925, there was a diphtheria outbreak in Nome. This is a bacterial disease – its scientific name is Corynebacterium diphtheriae – marked by high fever, heart rhythm issues, and breathing difficulties, which can often lead to death. The doctor in Nome sent out telegraphs begging for a serum. Thankfully, they had some at the Alaska Railroad Hospital in Anchorage. At the time, the governor thought air delivery was too risky, so he decided to send it by rail and, then, for the longest stretch, by dog sled. They sent the serum by rail to Nenana, where Wild Bill Shannon loaded the lifesaving goods onto his sled and headed out in -50F temperatures. Several days later, after much frostbite and hardship, with several dog teams relaying the total distance, the serum arrived in Nome behind the lead dog, Balto. They made a Disney film about Balto in 1995, and, oddly enough, yet symbolic of the historical fame of the event, there’s a statue of him in Central Park in NYC. As a coy fan of the Yellow Journalism Era, I enjoy imagining Balto and the Serum Run bolstering the sales of many Hearst publications.
In 1973, after much planning and scheming, Joe Redington announced the running of the first Iditarod. He mortgaged his house, pleaded with banks and local businessmen, and secured a $50,000 purse, an amount thought to have eclipsed the total of all other mushing events combined at the time. Thirty-four mushers started the first Iditarod. Twenty-two finished.
Although there have been years that as many as seventy-eight mushers have entered the race, the entrants this year numbered thirty-eight. Yet since the purse has raised over time, it totals $574,000 this year. But the winner in 2024 received only $55,600 of the total purse. The rest was divvied up amongst the rest of the finishers, with at least a tiny bit – $1049.00, symbolic of the distance between Anchorage and Nome — going to even the last place finisher, too, whom the race deems the Red Lantern winner to celebrate every single musher that completes the journey.
The Trail begins ceremonially in Anchorage, with teams lining up downtown on 4th Street and mushing several miles around town, all just to show in the most significant population hub our state has to offer—the day after the race begins in Willow. From there, the mushers head with their teams up and over the Alaska Range, where they confront precipitous passes and rush down high-walled chutes, trusting their very lives to their dogs' actions. From there, they shoot out onto the Yukon River and travel a few hundred miles on that gargantuan riparian system. As anyone in Alaska knows, it’s on the river where the cold temps sink even lower: 50 below is to be expected. And then, the teams burst onto the last section of the trail of this punishing race: the ocean. Teams cross the last section on sea ice, and the land beside, and it is full of unknown and deadly conditions ranging from overflow to bone-chilling wind blasts. When the Serum Run happened, they reported a -85F windchill temp on the coast. The Iditarod encompasses the spirit of Alaska via trials and tribulations as much as it holds up the multifaceted landscape to its racers like a roadmap to heaven or hell, depending entirely on how the musher’s day is going.
Behind The Dogs
Back in February, when I found out I was covering the Iditarod this year, I wanted to delve into the sport, so I went and visited some friends who work at Rod’s Alaskan Guide Service down in North Pole. Rod met me and explained that they offer all sorts of tours — from snowmachining to hunting and fishing — but that dog sledding was one of his most popular activities. Even though there are twenty-nine cute, red dog houses in the guide service’s front yard, Rod explained that they were just for dogs to rest in during the day. He contracts mushers to bring their dogs each day to work, and the dogs would leave with them at the end of the day. Typically, a musher and their dogs would only work two or three times a week at his place. That way, the dogs and their owners don’t get bored with the same trails over and over.
Rod supports his mushers even further by sponsoring the ones that run the Iditarod – this year, that would include top contender Matt Hall and rookie Lauro Eklund. He also would be renting out some snowmachines to the History TV channel show that Eklund stars on, Mountain Men, so that they could follow him the whole way down the Iditarod Trail.
I went out on the sled with Two Rivers musher Joe Weber that day. Joe is from Wisconsin originally, which, along with Minnesota, is the lower-48 center for dog mushing. His steady, gazing brown eyes seem an extension of the patience required to run a kennel with over twenty dogs. He readily admitted that nowhere is the dog mushing community as strong as it is in Alaska, and he moved here a few years ago to make his kennel dream a reality. He was kind enough to explain the anatomy of a dog team to me, including the parts like the neckline (line between each pair of dogs), the gangline (line running front to back with the whole team), and the names of the different positions for the dogs including leads (pronounced), swing (second pair of dogs behind lead), and the wheel dogs (pair directly in front of the sled - these are essential for navigating tight turns precisely).
As we sledded around Rod’s expansive spruce tree property, he told me that his wife, JoAnna, a pediatric nurse, had finished the Iditarod twice and that she was competing the following week in the Two Rivers 200, a mid-distance race outside Fairbanks, and also that she was currently pregnant. When I asked Joe if she was nervous about the situation, he replied, adorably, that he was the worrier in the family.
She is also one of only a handful of families that grew up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There was a TV show about some of her family, The Last Alaskans. Did everyone here have a TV show? I wondered as I embraced the peacefulness of being propelled through the woods sans motor; the dogs breathed like one giant chugging beast, and the sound of the sled’s plastic runners slicing through the dry snow was almost metallic, like a sharpened knife.
Joe told me that if his daughter was named Alice, he wanted to theme his next litter, a tradition in mushing, after Lewis Carroll’s characters in Through The Looking Glass. Joanna was not hot on that theme, according to Joe. He taught me the dog team commands for right - Gee! and left - Haw!
I would later watch Weber’s wife race to 3rd place while pregnant, running dogs from their Motley Crew Kennel at the Two Rivers 200. Joe later ran their dogs to victory in the Tanana Valley “T-Dog” mid-distance race at the end of March. Seeing them around as much as I did in the mushing world was my first clue to the community's size.
Vet Check At UAF
All dogs competing in the Iditarod must receive an echocardiogram (ECG) to look for heart abnormalities and give a blood sample. I contacted the UAF vet program and was in touch with Maren Johnson. Maren has been a veterinary assistant and a dog handler for the legendary musher Jeff King for five years. She’s often volunteered for the Iditarod Return Dog Program, which tends to treat dogs that drop out of the race. She was recently hired at UAF as their Vet Med Program Coordinator, and she invited me to come by campus a couple of weeks before the start of the Iditarod to watch a dog team receive the requisite medical screening.
When I arrived at the back of the Irving building, a couple of dog sled trailers were in the parking lot. I slid through a propped open door into a large lab with concrete floors, high ceilings, and several vets in scrubs crewing different stations. Josi Thyr, who would go on to win rookie of the year in this year’s race, was there with her There And Back Again Kennel team for monitoring, and she flashed me her tight-lipped smile as I headed for a woman who called out my name upon entry.
I was greeted by Dr. Nina Hansen, DMV, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, and Veterinary Medicine Department Chair. Dr. Hansen is also the Head Vet for the Yukon Quest, the Copper Basin 300, and she has previously volunteered for the Iditarod. Smiling easily like one who enjoys their work, she had one of Josi’s dogs, an eight-year-old named Moon, on a folding table that they used to perform the ECG reading.
Interestingly, Dr. Hansen explained, they used a device called a Dextronix, which was originally developed by the military to monitor helicopter engines. Here in the lab, they applied ultrasound gel with some rubbing alcohol to the dogs’ chests and then used the reader from the Dextronix, which looked like a small drone itself, to observe the animal’s heartbeats. If there were any abnormalities, the results would be passed on to Dr. Peter Constable, a vet cardiologist who has been overseeing the program for decades, for further inspection.
I made my way over to the other station and chatted with some of the other volunteers. Kristine Esposito, DMV, from Southampton, Massachusetts, told me it was her second year volunteering for the Iditarod. She explained that she had to take time off work and buy her own plane ticket up to Alaska, and then the Iditarod took care of her housing and food while she was there. She loved the excitement of tending to such world-class athlete dogs and the camaraderie of the volunteers.
I asked her about PETA’s complaints about the race, and she told me many of their complaints didn’t seem grounded in hard science. Then she explained the other station at which Josi’s dogs were being ushered through in the lab. They were taking two syringes worth of blood samples from each dog in order to run a chemistry panel, which essentially analyzes the dog’s internal organs. Kristine explained that between this and the ECG, there wasn’t much of a chance an unhealthy dog would be on the trail. The blood samples needed to be refrigerated, and Alaska Air donated the freight room to ship the blood from Fairbanks to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, where they run the chemistry panels. The panels then become part of a multi-year study.
I hung out for a while longer and watched mostly calm and kind dogs get shuffled through the screening process. The vets were funny and confided in Josi that they were all rooting for her. A few pooches pissed and knocked over tables. The vets all expressed deep gratitude to UAF for facilitating the screening. They said the lab was much bigger and more comfortable than the spaces they’d used in the past.
PETA
For years, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has rallied against the Iditarod and sled dog mushing in general. They’ve succeeded in getting several large corporate sponsors of the event to stop donating, including Alaska Airlines and Wells Fargo. They usually highlight how many dogs have died in the history of the fifty-plus years of the Iditarod. Many experts question their method of tallying. Yet, even the aforementioned legendary musher and four-time Iditarod winner, Jeff King, has admitted that their protests have raised the standards of the health of the dogs, which is a good thing.
However, PETA seems unquenchable in its thirst for critique. Mr. King went with the CEO of the Iditarod, Rob Urbach, down to their offices in Los Angeles back in 2019, hoping to find some common ground, and he offered to set up an independent panel of veterinarians to judge the sled dogs' welfare. PETA demurred, and the official they met with that day asked if King had kept dogs tethered outside. When he responded yes, some, she said that was all she needed to know.
PETA highlights via national ad campaigns that, for instance, in the 2024 race, “603 dogs started and only 293 were able to finish.” This is misleading language. As vet assistant Maren Johnson explained, this implies that “the 300 or so [dogs] who did not finish are severely injured, sick, or otherwise physically incapable of finishing the race. The reality is the vast majority of dogs who are dropped from the race are for very minor reasons that range from musher strategy [nothing wrong with the dog, they just want fewer dogs at that point in the race], a female in heat [again nothing wrong with dog…] to sore wrist [typically very minor injury].”
She also used statistics to help me understand how few dogs actually die due to race. In the last ten years, only .014% of the dogs that participated in the race died. As many other experts and armchair mushers brought up at this point in the statistical conversation: What percentage of dogs living on couches, overfed and under-exercised, die every day?
PETA protests at the ceremonial start in Anchorage
Photo by Colin A. Warren
Iditarod Has A #MeToo Moment
Alaska, separated physically and, in some ways, psychologically from the rest of the country, is often behind the cultural curve. Sometimes, that separation can be a good thing, and sometimes, as is the case with the #MeToo movement, that is very bad. By many metrics, such as being the place where women are most likely to be killed by their spouse or boyfriend, Alaska leads the country in domestic violence.
#MeToo officially launched its cause back in 2017. I actually traveled from Somerville, MA, where I was living at the time, down to D.C. for the Women’s March on Washington. There were a lot of pink and knitted cat-eared caps. And an intoxicating sense of justice at last. In the weeks and months that followed the March, the movement mostly seemed to strike at Hollywood and the political class. It spread, and in some cases, it was slow. Sports fans have seen justice slowly ripple through several sports, including the World Cup, college football, and the NBA. The NFL was riddled with shame just a couple of years ago until Taylor Swift swung in this year and solved all their PR problems by falling in love with a tight end.
2024 was the year that justice for assault against women arrived at the Iditarod.
In late February, about two weeks before the start of the race, the Iditarod Trail Committee (ITC) announced that it was DQing last year’s Rookie of the Year, Eddie Burke Jr., for violation of Rule 53, which refers to personal conduct. He was facing assault charges for an incident in a hotel room with his then-girlfriend. Though he was never convicted, they supposedly threw phones at each other, and he allegedly choked her. Some protested the decision, saying he shouldn’t be DQd without a conviction. But the Iditarod is a private company, and they can deny entry to whomever they please.
Just after that decision, the ITC DQed a former Iditarod champion and top-contender, Brett Sass, for violating Rule 53. Reportedly, an official from Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Alaska wrote ITC on behalf of women who accused Sass of sexual assault months ago. Anchorage Daily News corroborated some pretty heinous details with two of the accusers. It should also be noted that the Committee was unanimous in its decision to oust Sass. He denied the accusations, telling the press, “This is because they [the accusers] want to ruin my career.” Sass has a massive social media following, perhaps the largest of any top-tier musher, and many of them stand behind him. But the accusers had all told friends or relatives of the assaults when they happened. We, as observers, must remember that victims gain nothing from coming forward and are most often faced with public ridicule.
Yet even supporters of Sass’ ousting wrote editorials in the Anchorage Daily News saying the ITC should have acted earlier in their judgment; they received the accusations last fall, after all. Why did ITC wait until just days before the race to kick him out?
Later in the week, the assault charges against Eddie Burke Jr. were dropped, and the ITC decided to reinstate him into this year’s race. A few days later, Burke made the statement that he would remain withdrawn from the race because he had already leased out his dogs to other mushers in the race and planned to abide by those agreements. His supporters cried poor form at the ITC.
Ceremonial City Start
On Saturday, March 2nd, after hunting for a parking spot in downtown Anchorage for fifteen minutes, I stepped out in front of the Sheraton tower. The time was 9:58 AM. It was two degrees outside, and Anchorageans complained right and left about the low temperatures. For an Interior-based person like myself, I couldn't care less about the just-barely-below-zero windchill and was thrilled about the radiant sunshine. As I shuffled past 5th and Cordova streets, I noticed four Iditarod volunteers with shovels heaping snow back on the bare streets where the cars had pushed it off while two-bellied cops directed heavy traffic. The racers would loop with their teams and a ride-along person for an eleven-mile jaunt through downtown, out onto Chester Creek Trail, and then east to the Campbell airstrip, finishing at BLM offices.
I kept hustling to get to the start as teams were already streaming by. People would later say that crowd turnout was low, which might have been due to the colder weather, but I was thankful for only half-full sidewalks because they were navigable. A couple with matching blue kuspuks trimmed with elegant fur held a dog yanking on a leash, and a volunteer street sweeper said, “You gotta get that thing on a lead,” with a big smile. Television camera teams were set up a bit farther from the start line to get clean shots of the teams as they trotted by, and several StarLink dishes were arranged in the snow beside them. As I got closer to 4th and D streets, where the start line was, I could hear the announcers counting down more mushers’ starts, and the throngs got thicker.
Dallas Seavey, a third-generation Iditarod racer, was giving a speech when I finally got to the line. Flags representing the USA, Alaska, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway whipped above him. Many in the mushing world describe Seavey as a robot. During interviews, he certainly makes a point to discuss his unalloyed focus on the details. But he reminded me of more intense wrestlers I knew in high school than a robot – serious and simple in speech and tiny and muscle-bound in physique. All hard-nosed business. At the start line, he was holding up a sled dog that had been hit by a snow machine on the Denali Highway earlier that winter. While two other of his kennel’s sled dogs died, this one was lucky to have survived. The snowmachine drivers that hit them were intoxicated. Seavey publicly displayed how much he cared about his dogs, and it felt utterly sincere. Yet we all knew he was doing a bit of a PR parade at the same time.
Eight PETA members protested with a couple of stuffed dogs covered in big chains. They handed out glossy handbills that read, “THE IDITAROD: A DEADLY RACE” and beneath, in the fine print, “In 2021, nearly 200 dogs were pulled off the trail because of exhaustion, illness, injury, and other causes, leaving the rest to work even harder. Those who finish the race but are no longer useful to the industry may be killed or just left to starve to death.” At this point, I had met and interviewed and spent significant time with several people who mush dogs for a living, and the care, love, and attention that they gave each of their dogs made it hard to imagine any of them denying their dogs food. I asked one of the protestors if they had any evidence that a musher ever let one of their dogs starve to death. They looked me in the eye, looked away, and asked one of their co-protestors if they wanted to go warm up. Beside them stood Robert Zeigler and his dog Meiko, an Alaskan malamute.
Meiko, the dog, is running as a write-in candidate for mayor of Anchorage. Zeigler was passing out buttons advertising his canine’s candidacy. As the protestors were walking away, I asked them if they thought the job of mayor would be considered abusive towards Meiko. PETA widely publicizes that they do not believe dogs should work, including service dogs.
When I looked up at the start line again, I saw my friend Ron taking a picture of Iditarod rookie Lauro Eklund with his dad, Neil Eklund, a retired Iditarod musher, arm in arm. There are a lot of generational mushers in the sport — Seavey, Reddington, Eklund, and more.
Ron, a musher for the last six years, was a last-minute addition to the Eklund team as a dog handler. But Ron was happy to help out because Lauro is his good friend; also, Ron qualified for the Iditarod last year and has good reason to see the race up close. Lauro is a star on a TV show, and he is also a Filson model. Whereas most mushers are of smaller build – less mass for the dogs to haul – Lauro is broad-chested like a linebacker and must weigh well over 225 lbs. As he took off, the crowd went bonkers.
Lauro didn’t win best dressed that day, though. That award undoubtedly went to Paige Drobny, who came to the ceremonial start with a disco ball helmet on and sparkly capes for all her sled dogs. She’d eventually be the first woman musher to Nome this year and fifth overall.
Dog sled teams usually travel anywhere between six and eleven miles per hour. So, the teams completed the ceremonial course in less than an hour. Afterward, I met Ron and Lauro at 49th State Brewery and found myself at a big table packed full of Fairbanksan mushers. They were taking bets on the winner – Lauro bet on Matt Hall – and gossiping the mush.
Between the two of them, they started discussing hallucinations on the trail. In these longer races, such as the Iditarod, mushers barely sleep for days on end, and it can cause them to see aberrations, especially, they said, when the trail is boring for long stretches. Often, the “trippy” quality of the hallucinations will show itself in the form of their fur ruffs dancing psychedelically– imagined wavy vectors appearing off the pelts around their hoods. The whole city was high on the Iditarod, and the brewery hummed. When we left, hordes descended from our empty seats.
Restart in Willow
After a late night at my office away from home, Chilikoot Charlie’s, I thought I made an early enough start towards Willow, seventy-two miles north of Anchorage. I would’ve been on time but sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for the last fifty-eight minutes, approaching the lake where the true race had begun. After paying $20 for parking, I hustled across the street to the action. Jessie Holmes, an Iditarod veteran and a favorite to win this year, was announced on the speaker as I neared. Holmes also is a TV star on the show Life Below Zero. From there, it was one hundred yards of slick, glassy ice on a five-foot-wide path to get to the start. And there were little hills on the path, too! I looked around to witness humans of all ages gingerly traversing this icy death trap; old men shuffled with their mouths agape, and toddlers sprinted and tumbled, crying. In most places in America, olds and parents would surely be bandying about the impossibility of this path and the lawsuits that would stem from it. Not in Alaska. They all bucked up and made their way with their families, hardly batting an eye at the slippery trouble.
Beside the harrowing path was the lot where the teams lined up before starting. It was easy to spot last year’s champion, Ryan Redington Jr., also the grandson of the “Father of the Iditarod,” because he always wears neon green. Besides him, I had difficulty distinguishing between the racers, all bundled up in mostly white and beige parkas and layers.
As I wound around the crowds, I saw a petite woman in a purple jacket with gorgeous fur trim standing alone. She wore wayfarer-style sunglasses with purple lenses that matched her overcoat. I was taken aback when it dawned on me that this woman was Alaska’s sole congregational representative, Mary Peltola. Her team had an easy-pop tent nearby, and under it stood some aides who were dressed far too urbane to be from Alaska. But Mary stood apart from her own scene, dressed Alaska-hip perfectly – kuspuk, embroidered mittens, easy smile – gently welcoming conversations. I stood for a good twenty minutes, only ten feet away, eavesdropping on the topics her constituents brought up to her; people talked guns, babies, and Willow – the petroleum project, not the town we were standing in.
As I walked farther down the starting chute, which must have been a mile long, I bumped into Ron, who had helped Lauro launch not long before. The racers all started two minutes apart, so it was an endless barrage of action. Another former champion, and last year’s runner-up, Peter Kaiser, had a dog get loose from the gangline in the long starting path lined with fans. The free dog was pleased with all the crowd’s attention, but he hung near his team, and Kaiser reattached him a little ways down. I was thankful for Ron’s help in identifying all the mushers, which he was able to do even with them all bundled up.
Honestly, the restart was over pretty quickly. Ron and some friends were off to find cabin parties nearby for the night, and I left to hustle back to Fairbanks for school the next day, excited to rejoin the race in Nome.
Iditarod 1.0
It may have been the midterms week, but my head was entirely out on the Iditarod Trail. The organization has done a fantastic job at covering and monetizing the race by offering Iditarod Insider. An online subscription that offers live video feeds from checkpoints on the trail, it also features commentary and racer interviews from Greg Heister and Bruce Lee. An Iditarod affiliate since 1992, and a seven-time former Iditarod contender, the two drench the coverage in old-school sports commentary. Insider also gets real-time tracking of all the Trail mushers carrying GPS devices with them. Yet, in true web 1.0 fashion, the trackers often blip or fail.
Their website feels ancient, like Netscape and AOL type ancient. The Insider interface is like websites back then, with all big, clunky boxes made with funky HTML. As someone who still has his AOL account active since he first signed up for it in 1993 as a second grader, I love the old-timey interweb feels. A Live Chat stream would have anywhere from 100 to 1000 people in it at any given time. I checked at 3 AM and 2 PM, AST, and every hour between. There would be people logging in from Germany and then some from Japan. Americans definitely talked the most. People teased and asked questions, but it was also like Internet 1.0 because everyone was nice to each other, or at very least people weren’t bombastic when they disagreed. In the hours that I stared at the chat that week, I never saw an overtly cruel comment.
There were some conspiracies, though. Early on the Trail, the big news was that when Jessie Holmes was in the lead, he fended off an aggressive moose by punching it in the nose. Then, the same moose attacked Dallas Seavey’s team shortly thereafter, and Dallas killed it. According to the rulebook, he was supposed to gut any animal he killed on the Trail. That way, the meat doesn’t go bad, and the ITC actually gets that meat to people in need. Well, Dallas didn’t gut the moose, and the next day, the ITC announced a two-hour penalty. The online crowds were furious. Hyperbolic criticism of the Committee poured forth unverified ideas that certain people were out to get Seavey.
That all changed when Dallas gave an interview at one of the checkpoints. He humbly apologized for not gutting the moose and said he accepted the penalty as fair. Many in the mushing world were shocked by his rare deferential attitude at this moment.
The Insider also offers special deals for classrooms so they can follow along. An old friend who teaches third graders at a private Catholic school in a rough neighborhood in the south side of Chicago told me that he does this with his students and that, generally, it blows their minds to consider frozen wilderness at all, let alone crossing one with a dog team guiding the way.
By the time I was packing my bags for the finish in Nome, the musher that I had bet on to win, Travis Beals, had a commanding lead for a couple of days straight as the teams had crossed the Alaska Range and were barrelling down the Yukon River. I had a gambler’s high, but it wouldn’t last long. Shockingly, several days into the race, there still had been no one that scratched. This was even more impressive because, of the field of thirty-eight mushers this year, sixteen of them were rookies.
No Place Like Nome
Ron and I were on the same flight out to Nome. After twenty years in Alaska, this was my first trip to a town off the road system. I woke just before landing to see the many frozen braids of the Niukluk River weave into the bay. From there, it was easy to see the Iditarod Trail along the coast, where the sea ice was smooth – a bit further out from shore, the sea ice is jumbled and clunky.
In the weeks preceding my trip, I had been told by three separate strangers that the Iditarod finish in Nome was the “Mardi Gras of Alaska.” Having been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, I was skeptical. Yet as I shook the sleep from my eyes, my in-flight neighbor made horn noises with his lips strikingly similar to The Meters. Ron was further up and apparently seated behind the wife of Travis Beals, the musher I bet on to win. She leveraged her marital status with the flight attendant to get free in-flight wifi to watch Insider while on the plane and as soon as we landed, she called Travis on the Trail and spoke to him at a checkpoint. Ron said he sounded anxious. With due right - in recent hours, he had lost his commanding lead and was passed by several mushers in quick succession. In any endurance sport, psychology plays an outsized role with so much time for an athlete to get lost in their own head. To be passed by so many after leading for so long seemed like the sure death at his chance for Iditarod victory.
While there absolutely was an ecstatic feeling of anticipation for all those arriving, there was also an undercurrent of pathos. Two dogs died on the trail that day. It was the first dog death during the race since 2018, and they both happened that morning, only about fifteen minutes apart. The first death happened to Iditarod rookie musher Issac Teaford’s dog, Bog. There was extra media uproar over his dog's death, too, because there was a video of him realizing he had a dog down, and then we see him try, in vain, to resuscitate it. PETA immediately launched a national anti-Iditarod ad campaign featuring Issac. Issac and the other musher who lost a dog, Hunter Keefe, scratched from the race pursuant to the rules stating that a team must scratch unless the dog died to an “unpreventable hazard.” Issac’s mushing mentor, Dallas Seavey, would later assail this rule at his post-race press meeting.
But whether the rule is valid or not didn’t matter to fans on the ground in Nome. We were sad for the dogs, the mushers, and the sport, which would surely feel the brunt of the unfortunate happenings.
Ron and I waited patiently for the last taxi into town. In Nome, there aren’t any yellow cabs or Uber. A taxi service runs big vans all over, and they’re usually ferrying locals around and have a few kids clamoring over the seats. They are presumably the driver’s kids, but who knows? As some other people were dropped off at the recently reopened Nugget Inn — it suffered both ocean flooding and a major fire in recent years — we watched a skid-steer pack snow into a hundred-foot ramp that leveled off at the storied Burled Arch to serve as the finish line. I recalled reading how they just took some powdered, blue Kool-Aid mix the first year of the race and scattered it in a line in the snow to serve as the finish.
After checking into our hotel rooms, we walked down to the main street and out onto the sea ice. It was my first time standing upon a frozen ocean, and the sun was setting. The combination of a clear 180-degree vista over the sea and the slow set of the sun in March made for a wild panoply of pigmentation. It looked like a gigantic color swatch running from plum to strawberry with all the delicious colors in between.
Standing as we were out on the sea ice, directly in front of Front Street, where the race finishes, a sign reads Nome National Forest. There are no trees that naturally grow in Nome. Yet a handful of spruce trees were apparently growing out of the sea ice. It’s a hearty attempt at small-town humor put on by the Nome Chamber of Commerce each year in which they go put people’s old Christmas trees out there. The lark provides a nice little destination for enjoying the frozen expanse of the Bering Sea.
After we had been out there for fifteen minutes, a snowmachine brrrrap brraaap’d on up to us. He asked why we were there, and when we responded because of the Iditarod, he offered us beers. Shortly after, he confided in us that his wife just left him without explanation, and we began to regret accepting his beverages. The sea wind whistled. We were saved by a group of women who had just come out to the National Forest. He saw them and shouted, “You ladies have a tree harvest permit?” and brrrrap’d after them.
Sunset over Nome National Forest on the frozen Bering Sea
Photo by Colin A. Warren
My absolute favorite part of working for a newspaper is the last and simplest job in the business – delivery. There’s something magical about taking thoughts and making them physical. So I was excited to deliver copies of The Sun Star that our newspaper advisor usually mails to the UAF Northwest Campus on Front Street in Nome. Many events are happening all over town during Iditarod week, and many of them take place at the University, so I timed my delivery with a speech by Assistant Professor Jackie Hrabok about “Reindeer In The Circumpolar North.”
Professor Hrabok has a sing-song lilt to her voice that yields attention in the most pleasant way. She’s spent her entire life all over the world studying reindeer management, and, by circumstance, she speaks Finnish, Swedish, and Sami. There have been efforts to create a Nordic-type reindeer management system here for about a hundred years, and it’s never quite taken off. Of course, our government doesn’t support the project the way that the European countries do theirs. This doesn’t dim Professor Hrabok’s enthusiasm for the idea, though, because reindeer meat could provide a lot of local protein in an area that is massively dependent on outside food sources. In addition, their antlers are a renewable resource in many ways, as they’re made of bone.
After her talk, I sauntered down Front Street and observed where famous gunslinger Wyatt Earp once owned a bar. City Hall stands there today. Just in case, we got our subsistence crab harvest permits from Fish and Game. Further down is the Iditarod Hall, where a gang of locals on snowmachines passed around sips of whisky in front of several cops in their patrol vehicles. I headed to the media meeting to get my credentials.
Inside it was pretty easy to pick out the TV personalities compared to the other types of media (see: blonde highlights and too much make-up). They had a table full of Iditarod swag: “Keep Calm, Mush On” stickers, ulus with sled dogs on the handles, kids' shirts in pastel colors, CDs of Hobo Jim singing about dogs, shot glasses, and even branded sled dog booties for $2.50 each.
As soon as it was over, I got word that Issac Teaford was at the bar. I know Issac from his glacier-guiding days in my town, McCarthy. When I saw him at the bar, he looked sad and haggard; his eyes were perpetually watery. His lithe, strong, and tattoo-covered limbs looked abnormally limp. How could he not be broken, I thought? He spent the last five years working with these dogs, often for eight to twelve hours a day, going weeks on end without a day off. They were his brothers and sisters, his inspiration, and the very carriers of his own hopes and dreams. When he plays his trumpet for them, they howl along.
It wasn’t the first dog he’d lost that year, either. When training with his mentor, Dallas Seavey, earlier in the winter, two of Issac's dogs were killed when a snowmachine hit them on the Denali Highway. Issac had brought the ashes of those dogs – Olaf and Oreo – with him during the race. Now we went out back onto the sea ice at sunset to scatter their ashes, home at last, at the end of the Trail.
The group of us tried to bring some levity to Issac. We brought him to the Polar Bar, a seedy spot on Front Street with dim lighting, beat-up red-upholstered booths, and $4 PBRs. David Lynch would definitely shoot a movie there. HBO wouldn’t, though, as we learned this winter when they based the new season of True Detective on a fictional version of Nome that they actually filmed in Iceland.
We told each other stories of devilish parties in Nevada, recalled times of guide service rebellion in McCarthy, and imagined life after death. My best friend, who I moved to Alaska with, died in a gun accident a few years back, and Issac told me he had been playing his music on repeat out on the Trail. That made me cry, the idea that my friend still existed, however fleetingly, out in the wildest valleys of Alaska. Issac kept saying that he was done with dogs.
Later, a guy named Ben, who works for Dallas Seavey’s kennel, came into the bar. Ben is very close to Issac, a father-like figure. He didn’t like that I was taking notes. And he had reason enough to be skeptical: a few years back, someone who worked for their kennel for months turned out to be a PETA spy. The spy didn’t uncover much in the way of hard proof of ill-treatment of dogs or anything, but it still didn’t look or feel so hot to be betrayed like that.
Ben asked me if I promised never to write anything negative about mushing. Immediately, my journalistic ethics kicked in, and, of course, I said no. Ben tore several pages out of my notebook, and I shouted at him. The whole bar stopped and stared at us. I felt the tense molecules in the air begging for a fight as blood rushed to my head. I stood up, told him he was making a mistake, and went out for fresh air.
Good thing I did. Later that night, after our friends brokered a détente between Ben and me, I learned that he was a retired Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. I also learned that he is hired to be the river rafting company manager next to my house in McCarthy, hundreds of miles from Nome, for the coming summer; when someone calls Alaska a small place, they exclusively mean the people-scape.
You better believe I saved those crumpled notebook pages after I pulled them out of the beer glass he had thrown them in.
Time in Nome during Iditarod week feels like being at a music festival. Except it’s all dogs instead of live tunes. It’s a fairly international crowd, with a heavy slant towards the Nordic. Everyone buddies up with a little crew, and you start recognizing people in town and maintaining week-long running conversations. I saw Bruce the announcer at the Quickie Mart, asking about pull tabs. The guy I sat beside on the plane always walked around in a bright red jacket with a full lynx pelt splayed over his neck and back. We killed time sauntering around the craft fair at the church, which had some of the most beautiful fur and beadwork that I’ve ever seen. I would've bought it there if I had $850 to spend on a wolverine hat. Then, we went back to UAF Northwest, where Professor Hrabok hosted a free craft workshop, where we were invited to make jewelry, keychains, or handles out of reindeer antlers.
The fire siren in Nome alarms the public when an Iditarod racer is nearing Front Street for the finish. Even though we all knew what it meant, the sound still set our hair on end. Tuesday afternoon, we heard the siren and were aware that we were about to witness Dallas Seavey make Iditarod history. Everyone I was hanging out with was still a little agog over his latest interview from the Trail, in which Seavey advised, “Win as easily as possible. Find the path to victory with the least resistance.” It was a weighty humblebrag. Only a handful of champions have won the race four times. Only Dallas and Rick Swenson had won it five times. This year, Dallas claimed his sixth victory. And at only thirty-eight years old, he still perhaps has his best mushing years ahead of him.
He was light on his feet with a bruise around his eye as his dogs pulled under the Burled Arch. He was loquacious for barely having slept in nine days, but when asked what he was going to do after the race, he responded, “I hope I don’t have to make any decisions.” He gathered his two honorary dogs, Arrow and Sebastian, on the victor's platform, garlands of yellow roses were put around their necks. Before going to his post-race press talk, Dallas went out of his way to sign some autographs for a small group of kids. When he reached for their notebook, a bunch of empty Capris Suns, which Dallas is infamous for loving, fell out of his parka.
Later that night, Matt Hall and Jessie Holmes finished second and third. The next day, more and more racers crossed the finish line, and they would trickle in for days more, completing what is surely one of the most impressive feats of endurance on earth. The festival feelings grew stronger as we delved deep into strategy and barstool judgments. Jeff Reid, a former Navy Seal and Fairbanks-area local, claimed the Red Lantern award, given to the final musher to finish, when he crossed under the Burled Arch at 2:22 a.m. on March 16th, twelve days, eleven hours, twenty-two minutes and one second after he started.
Capitalism and fame have tainted our view of sports stars, making them seem as if they’re unapproachable, if not otherworldly. Not at the Iditarod. In Nome, after the race, all the mushers are at the bar, in the cafes, and on the streets, just like everyone else, and it’s entirely endearing, especially hearing their first-hand accounts of the Trail. Jessie Holmes wore a silly grin when he recounted how he punched a moose in the nose, and we both grinned at each other when we realized that we had washed dishes together in McCarthy nearly twenty years ago. I chuckled when I saw Jeff King at the Make Your Own Bikini contest at the Arctic Native Brotherhood Club. I cackled when I saw one musher sliding on his knees across the dance floor.
Between the classes and the late-night dancing, I traded my Copper River salmon for some muktuk and king crab. Everyone said hi to everyone else walking down the street, and while I didn’t find the eventful week too much like New Orleans’ Mardis Gras, the kindness of strangers was a distinct similarity. I shed a tear when I saw my UAF classmate, Isabel Rhodes, watch her father, Will, an Iditarod rookie, cross under the Burled Arch and then embrace as a family. They gave their dogs salmon filets at the finish, and a couple of the dogs' first reaction was to roll on the fish as hard as possible.
People without close knowledge of the sport, often those influenced by PETA ads, constantly shout greed on their online posts. I’m pleased to report that the notion of greed in the Alaskan sled dog world couldn’t be further from reality. Alaskan mushers are all part of a big family, and that community is based around a lifestyle. I never once was left with the impression or saw any evidence that any musher was in the sport purely for business. The first-place purse from winning the Iditarod barely covers the expenses of running a kennel for a year. These people live and breathe dog care, exercise, training, and hard work, including literally shoveling shit daily. They’re all hooked on that ghostly song of wailing desire the dogs let out when waiting to pull the sled. And, most importantly — where answering that call brings them.