Early mushers used a mixture of breeds. Over the centuries, different Native peoples had bred dogs for their particular needs. For instance, the Malemiut Inupiat people of the Seward Peninsula developed a particularly hardy sled dog which today bears their name: the Malamute. The teams on the Iditarod Trail included everything from Native working dogs such as Malamutes and Siberian huskies to various domestic breeds imported from the Lower 48. Some mushers even used wolves—some full-blooded but mostly mixes—although these eventually fell into disfavor as more suitable dogs became available.
By 1900, dog teams were as common in Alaska as cars, ATVs, and snowmachines are today. Almost every winter photograph of early Alaska includes a dog team of some kind. These ranged from small family work teams to massive freight teams used for long-distance movement of supplies, mail, and even passengers. The Iditarod Trail and many other winter trails around Alaska (such as the famous Yukon Mail Trail which ran the length of its namesake river) were built and maintained primarily for the freight and mail mushers, who occupy a special place in Alaska history. They manned Alaska’s winter lifelines in the days before airplanes and modern communications.
Freight drivers would start out from Knik with 20 or more dogs pulling up to three sleds laden with food and gear for the isolated mines and villages as soon as the river crossings were frozen. Traffic was heavy. In November of 1911, for example, 120 teams headed west across the Alaska Range on the Iditarod, and over an average winter many hundreds of teams would travel part or all of the trail.
Each evening the drivers would stop at roadhouses located about a day’s travel apart. Some roadhouses were in villages and towns, but some, such as Mountain Climber Roadhouse, Rohn Roadhouse, and Pioneer Roadhouse, all located on the lonely trail across the forbidding Alaska Range, were isolated way stations not much different from Old West stage stops of half a century before. Mushers could get a meal (two dollars) and a warm bed (two dollars more), along with food for their dogs and a place to wait out the storms which periodically swept the trail.
The elite of the Iditarod, and throughout Alaska, were the mail drivers. With their large, well-trained teams, they operated on rigid schedules in all kinds of weather and were often trailbreakers for other travelers. They limited their loads to 50 pounds per dog and tried to make at least 25 miles per day regardless of conditions. They were accorded great respect and always got the best food and accommodations wherever they stopped.
A trip to Nome could take three weeks or more. Mostly the teams hauled cargo, but passengers were sometimes carried in the long sleds. (Most people who did not plan to winter over probably had taken the last steamboat out in the fall when “termination dust” coated the mountaintops.) Dog teams sometimes hauled out the season’s gold on the return trip to Knik. According to Ron Wendt in Hatcher Pass Gold, 2,600 pounds of gold arrived at Knik on December 10, 1911, hauled by four teams. In December of 1916, no less than 3,400 pounds of the precious metal came out behind 46 dogs.
The Iditarod Trail was used every winter through the World War I era and well into the 1930s, with parts of it being used as late as World War II. By the mid-1930s, Alaska had more than 7,000 miles of maintained winter trails, mainly for dog teams, stretching from the Canadian border to the Bering Sea and from the Gulf of Alaska to the Arctic Ocean. Even as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the autobahns were being built elsewhere in the world, Alaska’s extensive winter trail system was still in daily use.
The inevitable end for the Iditarod and other long-distance winter sled trails in Alaska, though, was the airplane. In the late 1920s and 1930s, air freight became economically feasible with the advent of reliable engines and sturdy, easily maintained airplanes capable of using short bush airstrips and sandbars. At the same time, the gold mining which had provided much of the freight for the dog teams dwindled as strikes played out; Iditarod itself was a ghost town by end of the 1930s.
Even as the freight traffic waned, mail continued to use sled trails. However, the airplane soon began to usurp this hallowed domain of the dog team as well. The first airmail in Alaska was flown from Fairbanks to McGrath in early 1924 by legendary aviator Carl Ben Eielson. The first regular air mail contract was given to Harold Gillam in 1931. By 1938, airplanes had won most of the long-haul mail contracts in the territory.
Once the mail teams vanished, the roadhouses began to disappear and thousands of miles of trails that had so admirably served the territory for half a century were abandoned. Alaska went directly from the steamboat and the dog sled to the airplane, without the road-and railroad-building era which led to the dense road and rail networks of the Lower 48.
But the dog teams had one last taste of glory in early 1925 when a diphtheria outbreak threatened isolated, icebound Nome. The nearest serum was in Anchorage, and the first thought was to fly it to Nome. However, the only pilot in the Territory considered capable of braving the unpredictable weather was Eielson, who was on a trip in the Lower 48 and was not available.
Instead, a Pony Express-type relay of dog teams was quickly organized. The serum was loaded on the newly completed Alaska Railroad and rushed to Nenana, where the first musher took it westward down the frozen Tanana River to the Yukon. Every village along the route offered its best team and driver for its leg to speed the serum toward Nome. The critical leg across the treacherous Norton Sound ice from Shaktoolik to Golovin was taken by Leonhard Seppala, the territory’s premier musher, and his lead dog Togo. Gunnar Kaasen drove the final two legs into Nome behind his leader Balto through a blizzard hurling 80 mile-per-hour winds.
The serum arrived in time to prevent an epidemic and save hundreds of lives. The 20 mushers and their teams had covered almost 700 miles in little more than 127 hours (about six days) in temperatures which rarely rose above 40 below zero and winds which were sometimes strong enough to blow over dogs and sleds. The serum run gained worldwide press coverage and the mushers received special gold medals from Congress. A statue of Balto, Kaasen’s heroic lead dog (who actually belonged to Seppala) was erected a year later in New York’s Central Park, where it still stands.
But the day of the dog team as an integral part of Alaska’s long-range transportation system was almost over. The bush pilots were in the ascendant, learning how to fly the air routes now taken for granted by Alaskan aviators. Within a decade of the serum run, pioneer flyers like Noel Wien, Mudhole Smith, and Bob Reeve had fashioned the foundation of a far-flung network which today serves nearly as many scheduled destinations as all Lower-48 airlines together.
Even after airplanes took over the territory’s long-haul work, one remarkable dog-team trip captured national attention, although it is surprisingly little remembered today. In his book, Northwest Epic, about the building of the Alaska Highway, historian Heath Twichell relates how early proponents of a road link from Alaska to the Lower-48 decided to help a sourdough gold miner named Slim Williams run his dog team down the proposed highway route. Williams left Copper Center in November of 1932 with a team of eight wolf hybrids, intending to mush all the way to the Chicago World’s Fair.
Had his journey been scripted by Hollywood it could not have been more incredible. He nearly drowned in half-frozen rivers and lakes. One of his dogs was killed by wolves in remote northern British Columbia. He was forced to negotiate trackless mountain terrain where no one had ever taken a dog team. He had to put wheels on his sled when he returned to the road system in southern Canada and ran out of snow. And to keep his dogs from overheating he ended up running mostly at night as he crept along the highways of the Great Plains.
Williams gained publicity with every mile and he and his team were treated royally by every town they passed through. By the time he finally mushed his dogs into Chicago in September of 1933 he was a national hero, at a time when the Great Depression was deepening and real heroes were few and far between. After a month and a half in the limelight representing Alaska at the World’s Fair, he drove his team on to Washington, D.C., where he was invited t
o dinner with President and Mrs. Roosevelt.
However, the popularity of Williams and his dogs could not stop the decline of long-distance dog mushing, although dog teams continued to be used for local transportation, mail delivery, and day-to-day work in Native villages and remote areas. Even the little-publicized but vital roles played by mushers and their teams in World War II in Alaska were not enough to arrest the inexorable decline of long-haul dogs.
After the war, short-haul freight and work teams were still common in many areas of Alaska. Even as President Kennedy announced the United States would put a man on the moon, the mail was still being delivered by dog sled in a few isolated parts of the new state. During the 1960s, however, it was not space travel but the advent of the “iron dog” (or snowmachine, as it’s called in Alaska) which resulted in mass abandonment of dog teams and the loss of much mushing lore.
The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race
To help save some of Alaska’s fast-vanishing mushing heritage, Dorothy Page, a planner for the 1967 Alaska Centennial celebration, conceived of the idea of a dog race over the Iditarod Trail, which by then had been disused for many years. Local mushers’ groups, with the leadership of Joe Redington, Sr., and retired Air Force Col. Norman Vaughan, threw themselves into the project. Col. Vaughan was in charge of Admiral Byrd’s dog teams on Byrd’s famous 1928-1930 Antarctic expedition, on which Byrd made the first flight over the South Pole. Vaughan later used dogs for search and rescue work in Alaska and Greenland during World War II.
With much volunteer labor (the start of a fundamental Iditarod tradition) the first part of the trail was cleared and short races over the Susitna Valley portion north of Anchorage were held in 1967 and 1969. Finally in 1973, with the Army helping clear portions of the trail not already in use as winter snowmachine trails, and with the support of the Nome Kennel Club (Alaska’s earliest sled-dog racing association, founded in 1907) the race went all the way to Nome for the first time. The winner, Dick Wilmarth, took almost three weeks to finish; the last musher spent more than a month on the trail.
While the race officially commemorates the 1925 Serum Run to Nome, it is really a reconstruction of the freight route to Nome. The mushers travel from checkpoint to checkpoint much as the freight mushers did 80 years ago, and even carry a packet of mail in honor of the intrepid mail drivers. However, modern mushers like Doug Swingley, Martin Buser, Jeff King, Susan Butcher, and Rick Swenson move at a pace which would have been incomprehensible to their old-time counterparts, making the trip to Nome in under 10 days.
Since 1973, the race has persevered despite financial ups and downs, and is now famous enough to allow the best mushers to receive tens of thousands of dollars a year from corporate sponsors. Dog mushing has recovered to become a north-country mania in winter, and a few people now make comfortable livings from their sled-dog kennels. Dog mushing has even been officially designated as Alaska’s state sport.
Alaska is the world mecca for sled dog racing, which has developed into a popular winter sport in the Lower 48, Canada, Europe, and even Russia. (There are even mushing clubs in Australia and South America.) Mushers from more than a dozen foreign countries have run the Iditarod, and Alaskan mushers routinely travel Outside to races such as the John Beargrease in Minnesota, the Big Sky in Montana, and the UP200 in Michigan. Even the Winter Olympics are considering adding sled dog racing as an event, and several sled dog races were held in Norway in conjunction with the 1994 games.
While the Iditarod has become by far Alaska’s best-known sporting event, there are a dozen other major long-distance races around the state every winter, such as the grueling 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, the Kobuk 440, the Kusko 300, the Klondike 300, and the Copper Basin 300. And, there are many short-distance (or sprint) races run as well, including the prestigious North American in Fairbanks and Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage. In a revival of tradition, entire villages and towns in rural Alaska become swept away in the frenzy of sled dog racing, and sled dogs are once again common in many rural areas where they were eclipsed by “iron dogs” only a few decades ago.
Although the Iditarod’s fame causes many people to think of the Iditarod Trail when they think of traveling to Nome, the trail is actually impassable during spring, summer, and fall. Moreover, its routing is far from a direct course, taking more than 1,150 miles to cover the 600 or so airline miles from Anchorage to Nome, largely thanks to the race committee’s massaging of the race route to pass through a number of towns and villages missed by the original trail. Additionally, the race has adopted a northern route for even-numbered years to include more villages along the Yukon.
Checkpoints for the first half of the current race are Anchorage, Eagle River, Wasilla, Knik, Yentna Station, Skwentna, Finger Lake, Rainy Pass Lodge (Puntilla Lake), Rohn Roadhouse, Nikolai, McGrath, Takotna, and Ophir. In odd-numbered years, the middle part of the race loosely follows the original trail, from Ophir through Iditarod to Shageluk and then Anvik on the Yukon, then up the mighty river to Grayling, Eagle Island, and Kaltag. In even years, the trail swings north from Ophir down the Innoko to Cripple, then northeast to the Yukon at Ruby (heart of another old mining district), and then down the river to Galena, Nulato, and Kaltag.
Shageluk, on the southern route of the Iditarod, is the chief village of the Ingalik people; its name means “place of the dog people.” It is typical of many isolated, mostly Native villages in the Interior of Alaska.
From Kaltag, the home stretch is the same every year: Unalakleet, Shaktoolik, Koyuk, Elim, Golovin, White Mountain, Safety Roadhouse, and Nome. True to their predecessors, the mushers run up Front Street past the still-notorious saloons to the burled arch. Every team’s arrival is heralded by the city’s fire siren and each driver is greeted by a crowd lining the “chute,” no matter the time of day or night, or if he or she is first or fifty-first across the line.
The Drivers and Their Dream Machines
On the first Saturday in March, anywhere from 50 to 80 mushers leave the starting gate on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage. Of these, at least half have no real hope of winning or even seriously competing: their main goal is simply to finish in the best time they can—and in some cases, just to finish. Crossing under the famous burled arch at the finish line in Nome with their dogs is more than victory enough.
Running the Iditarod is a grueling test of dogs and drivers which can last as long as three weeks and can involve head-on encounters with some of the most forbidding weather and terrain on earth. Nevertheless, any musher worth his (or her) salt wants to run the Iditarod some day, just as runners want to do the Boston Marathon, even if there is no chance of winning.
Drivers who run the race cover a wide spectrum. Mushers have included teenagers and octogenarians, well-to-do adventurers and backwoods trappers, executives and laborers, teachers and students, storekeepers and factory owners, lawyers and Maytag repairmen. A few can be considered professional dog mushers who make their livings from their dogs, while most are part-timers who must hold down a “regular” job to keep their teams afloat.
But the most striking feature of the Iditarod is that everyone competes equally: men and women, young and old, amateur and professional—there are no separate men’s or women’s divisions, nor is there a senior class or a special amateur bracket. About 20% of mushers are female, and women have won the race five times (all within the past 12 years). The top 20 finishers in every race routinely include several women. Age is no barrier, either: most Iditarod winners are older than 30 and two mushers have finished the race at 80 or more years of age.
Of course, not everyone completes the trip: on average, one of every five mushers will scratch somewhere along the trail. Not surprisingly, the Iditarod Official Finishers Club is one of the most exclusive in the world, with under 500 members. (More people have climbed Mount Everest than have finished the Iditarod.)
Because of its difficulty, the Iditarod places strict qualifying restrictions on people who would take the long road to Nome. Naturally, a
nyone who has previously finished the race is eligible to sign up. Rookies, however, must finish one or two approved mid-distance races totaling at least 500 miles within the previous two years. (The term “rookie” can be misleading: some so-called rookies have finished or even won major races such as the Yukon Quest; they have little difficulty qualifying for the Iditarod.)
Training for the race usually begins in summer of the preceding year, when dogs are hooked up to all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) for short runs of three miles or so. These four-wheeler runs may lengthen to 10 or 15 miles by the time snow falls in mid-October. Once sleds are hooked up (which pull much more easily than the ATVs), the runs rapidly increase to 30 and 40 miles; some mushers will have their teams routinely making 50-mile runs by Christmas.
The first “mid-distance” races (meaning anything between 200 and 500
miles in length) are in late December and early January. Most Iditarod mushers will try to run their teams in at least a couple of these races for the good training; some better drivers, of course, also have an eye toward prize money. By the time the Iditarod rolls around in March, most of the dogs will have 1,500 miles or even more behind them. Since the training is usually done with smaller teams, mushers themselves may have more than 2,500 miles on the runners.
The basic setup of a dog team is fairly simple. Long-distance racing sleds weigh no more 50 pounds and can be built of traditional materials such as birch or ash, or of modern lightweight plastics and composites. The eight-to nine-foot-long runners are built to accommodate special plastic bottoms which can be slipped off and quickly replaced when they wear out. The musher stands on the rear part of the runners, behind the basket (or body) of the sled.
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 48