My enthusiasm with the Iditarod stems back to a memorable vacation my wife and I had in Alaska eighteen years ago, when we visited several sled dog kennels and actually met Susan Butcher and Jeff King. Coverage of the event was minimal in those days, but today it is possible to follow it almost in real time, thanks to the Internet. The combination of GPS tracking, frequent video interviews, and daily blogs almost makes up for the fact that there is no conventional national media coverage of this fascinating sports spectacle.
The nearly prohibitive favorite for this year’s race was Dallas Seavey, a five time Iditarod champion, hoping that a sixth win this year would make him the all-time leader. Brent Sass, who had already notched three mushing wins this year, also had a lot of supporters, although some detractors were concerned that he had overworked his team with those efforts.
By checkpoint Nikolai (milepost 263) Seavey and Sass had moved to the head of the pack, which initially numbered forty-nine teams. Brent Sass was first into Ophir (352), where he rested four hours, then took off in hot pursuit of Dallas Seavey, who blew right through the checkpoint, stopping only to sign the card there. When Seavey stopped along the trail to rest his team, Sass passed him and established a lead that he never relinquished. Remarkably, this lead was never greater than twenty miles nor less than ten. He went under the Golden Arch finish line in Nome in eight days, fourteen hours, and thirty-eight minutes; one hour and eight minutes, and eleven miles ahead of Seavey.
Thirteen hours later Jessie Holmes pulled in to claim third place, followed by five more teams in the next four hours. All told, thirty-seven of the forty-nine teams that started the race were able to negotiate the 975 miles between Anchorage and Nome, with the final finisher, Apayauq Reitan, arriving four days after Sass.
The characteristics of the Iditarod that differentiate it from other major sporting events are numerous. Let’s begin with the trail itself, 975 miles of wildly different terrain. Up steep hills in the Alaska Range; down steeper ones on the backside; across the wind-blown Burn Area where the trail is frozen dirt and rocks; out onto the ice in the middle of the Yukon River; through magnificent spruce forests on newly packed snow; out onto the frozen Bering Sea and across hummocks of ice; and finally through the wind-tunnel on the coast where fifty mph gusts flip the sleds like toothpicks. Add to this the wild variations of weather – minus thirty degrees to plus thirty overnight; heavy snowfalls that penalize the leaders who must break trail; crystal clear nights with the Aurora Borealis blazing; spectacular sunrises and sunsets; and the fact that, at any given time, it is dramatically different depending on one’s current position.
The Iditarod is easily the best example of a sport in which men and women compete against each other equally. Just ask the best male mushers what they think of Paige Drobny, Michelle Phillips, and Mille Porsild. And where else do you find twenty-two-year-olds (Hanna Lyrek) in direct competition with sexagenarians (Jeff King and Martin Buser)? Or identical twins, married couples, and father-and-son pairs all racing against each other? Perhaps competition is the wrong term to use – Iditarod lore is full of stories of mushers sacrificing their chance to win in order to help another musher in trouble.
We fans are intrigued with tactics and strategy in every sport. In the Iditarod both are equally important and both are implemented in real time at a speed that is easy for us to follow. Dallas Seavey limited his team to short training runs in January and February; Brent Sass’s team ran three highly competitive three hundred mile races (and won all of them)! Aaron Burmeister took his mandatory twenty-four-hour rest stop at McGrath (664 miles from the finish) while Sass and Seavey opted for Cripple (114 miles farther down the trail). Sass and Seavey chose to fight a ground blizzard crossing the Norton Sound while the next seven mushers huddled in a shelter in Shaktoolik.
In the long run, of course, the thing that matters most is the dogs. Fifty years ago a group of Alaskan old-timers, lamenting the imminent demise of sled dogs, invented the Iditarod in the hope that, by celebrating the heritage of these four-legged athletes, their survival would be guaranteed. This hope was indeed realized and today Alaska has several hundred kennels where Alaskan huskies are bred each year. These kennels and the dogs they house have become popular tourist attractions. In 2004 my wife and I visited (four times Champion) Jeff King’s Husky Haven in Denali and (another four-time Champion) Susan Butcher’s kennel on the Tanana River near Fairbanks. One of our favorite photographs of my wife shows her holding a week-old puppy at Husky Haven.
The rapport between the dogs and the mushers is consistently evident. When a team stops for a four-hour break, the musher immediately spreads out straw for beds for the dogs, removes their booties and applies lotion to their paw pads, warms up food for them, and feeds them before even thinking about his/her own needs.
When Dan Kaduce prepared to leave White Mountain in fourth place, sixteen minutes behind Jessie Holmes, he had an important decision to make. If he jettisoned four of his slower dogs, he believed he could beat Holmes to Nome for an impressive third place finish. At that point Kaduce still had all fourteen of the dogs that started the race with him; Holmes was down to his nine fastest dogs. Kaduce made the decision to accept a fourth-place finish because he wanted all fourteen members of his canine team to experience completing a 975 mile race.
Three days after the leaders had reached Nome, Mother Nature played a trump card that nearly was tragic for seven teams resting in White Mountain. Despite warnings of abnormally high winds in the leg between there and Elim, they set out in a staggered sequence so they each would arrive in Nome, seventy-seven miles and ten hours away, a few minutes apart. About fourteen miles into the run they each realized that the wind was reaching once-in-a-lifetime magnitude. The first four teams managed to reach a cabin where they could find shelter.
Gerhardt Thiart, and Bridget Watkins were not as fortunate. As Gerhardt’s team crossed a frozen stream, they were blown sixty feet sideways. Bridget, close behind, stopped her team, and helped Gerhardt bring his team back to the trail. They dug a snow cave to provide shelter for the dogs and huddled there, hoping the storm would slacken. Eventually they realized they and their dogs were in a life-threatening situation and requested help. First to arrive was a local resident named Ed Stang, on a snow-machine.
With great effort he shuttled the two mushers and their nineteen dogs to a spot three miles away that was somewhat sheltered from the wind. During these shuttles there were numerous occasions when the wind flipped the sleds over; Gerhardt suffered a broken ankle; Bridget, a fractured collar bone. At this point Bridget, who is a nurse, realized that Gerhardt was going into shock from hypothermia. She stayed behind with the dogs while Stang transported Gerhardt to White Mountain and a waiting helicopter. She and the dogs were then rescued by her husband and his cousin who had set out from Nome as soon as they realized she was in danger.
The rescue teams also found Sean Williams and his team, hunkered down and nearly frozen, and transported them to White Mountain. This is not the first time that high winds and ground blizzards have threatened mushers on this stretch of the trail. The duration and magnitude of the storm and the number of teams affected was unprecedented however.
So much drama and excitement crowded into such a short time! I really can’t imagine any other sports event that can begin to compare with the Iditarod.