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Richard Arlin Walker
Special for ICT
The toughest challenger in the 975-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is often not another competitor but the route itself: dry stretches of trail that jostle musher and sled, moose encounters, steep elevation climbs and descents, rugged ridges and twisting runs, whiteout conditions along Norton Sound.
But there are rewards: Yup’ik mushers Pete Kaiser and Mike Williams Jr. told ICT in past interviews about watching the Northern Lights moving in waves across the sky; about the unsurpassed beauty of jagged mountains, rivers, forests and windswept coast; and the personal significance of traveling routes used for centuries by their ancestors.
They and others also talk about the bond between musher and dog and the hospitality of villagers along the trail.
Alaska Sports Hall of Famer Aliy Zirkle competed in 21 Iditarods, finishing second three years in a row. She was also a six-time recipient of the Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award in recognition of her outstanding care for her dog team. She said in 2016: “One of the most important aspects of racing the Iditarod, to me, is the interaction with wonderful Alaskans across our state. I enjoy visiting all the villages along the trail and feel loved and supported during the Iditarod race and beyond.“
The 52nd Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which begins March 3 in Anchorage, will feature 40 teams representing five countries and seven U.S. states. Twenty-three mushers are Iditarod veterans, 16 are rookies. Mushers and their teams of 16 dogs will test their fitness, training and rest-run-pace strategy across Alaska to Nome.
The field includes three champions: Ryan Redington, Inupiat, 2023; Dallas Seavey, 2021, 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2012; and Kaiser, 2019.
The 2022 champion, Brent Sass, was scheduled to compete but was pulled from the race on Feb. 22 by the Iditarod race committee after it was reported in Alaska media that he had been accused by two women of sexual assault. The women provided sworn statements about the alleged assaults to Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Alaska, which forwarded the information to Iditarod race officials. Sass has not been charged with a crime and has denied the allegations to reporters and on social media.
The Iditarod race committee received the information from Planned Parenthood four months ago. “The unanimous vote by the Iditarod Trail Committee Board … came a week after Alaska Public Media, the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica first asked it about sexual assault allegations against Sass,” Alaska Public Media reported .
The field of competitors also includes several past top-10 finishers: Travis Beals, Eddie Burke Jr., Aaron Burmeister, Paige Drobny, Matt Failor, Matt Hall, Jessie Holmes, Nic Petit, Mille Porsild, and Jessie Royer.
Of the field, Burmeister, who finished second in 2021, is the most seasoned; this will be his 22nd Iditarod. Royer, who finished third in 2019 and 2020, is competing in her 21st Iditarod.
Several mushers and teams put their readiness to the test in mid-distance races in January and February. Kaiser won his eighth Kuskokwim 300 on Jan. 28 – he is that race’s winningest musher – and placed a close second in the Bogus Creek 150 on Feb. 11.
And yet, little can fully prepare a musher and dog team for the unknowns of the Iditarod. Jeff King was 22 miles from winning his fifth Iditarod in 2014 when he and his team got caught in a whiteout, strayed off the trail and had to scratch. Nic Petit had been leading for much of the 2019 Iditarod but had to scratch 800 miles into the race because his dogs were spooked by a windswept stretch of icy trail and wouldn’t continue.
Alaska Sports Hall of Fame musher Dee Dee Jonrowe and her dog teams experienced and endured much of what the Iditarod can throw out in weather and trail conditions. Like Petit, Jonrowe scratched in 1999 when her dog team refused to go into a strong headwind on the Yukon River.
Jonrowe completed 32 Iditarods between 1980 and 2018, with 16 top-10 finishes – and twice finished second. Over the course of her Iditarod career, “I’ve had back surgery, frozen my shoulder, broken my hand,” Jonrowe said in the 2004 book “Women Warriors.” “I think I’ve had every single cold-related injury.”
The Iditarod was founded in 1973 by Redington’s grandfather, Joe Redington Sr., to celebrate the heritage of the Alaska sled dog. The sled dog was an important part of Alaska Native life for centuries, and the sled was to Alaska Natives what the canoe was to Native peoples of the Northwest. In addition to pulling sleds to and from villages and fishing and hunting grounds, Alaska sled dogs watched over children and warned of possible dangers. Their endurance was brought to the world’s attention when a relay of sled dog teams transported life-saving serum from Seward to Nome during a diphtheria epidemic in 1925.
By the mid-20th Century, however, the sled dog had been supplanted by the gas-powered snowmobile.
Now, nearly 100 years after the serum run to Nome, sled dogs are calling attention to another threat.
At Ground Zero
The average temperature across Alaska increased by approximately 3°F from 1954 to 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported. “Warming in the winter has increased by an average of 6°F and has led to changes in ecosystems, such as earlier breakup of river ice in the spring,” the EPA reported. “As the climate continues to warm, average annual temperatures in Alaska are projected to increase an additional 2 to 4°F by the middle of this century.”
The EPA and its counterparts in other countries say the average temperature globally began to rise when the Industrial Age began, which increased the amount of carbon dioxide and other emissions released into the environment.
Mushers and sled dogs are witnesses to those changes. In the 2023 race at the 311-mile mark in McGrath, the daytime temperature peaked at 36°F – it’s usually below zero that time of year – turning trails into mush and compelling mushers and dogs to wait for temperatures to cool later in the day.
Several times in the last 10 years, the Iditarod course has been changed because of poor trail conditions caused by lack of snow, and in 2015 snow was imported for the ceremonial start in Anchorage. The Yukon Quest Canada was shortened from 450 to 300 miles this year because of poor trail conditions.
It’s not just Alaska that’s feeling the heat: the 300-mile John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, the premier sled dog race in the Lower 48, was canceled this year because of lack of snow. The Tahquamenon Country Sled Dog Race in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was canceled for the second consecutive year for the same reason.
And it’s getting worse.
Along the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race route, mushers and sled dogs travel along rivers where banks have eroded because the permafrost is melting. They travel through villages where homes are sinking into the tundra. They travel along coastal areas where rising sea levels have eroded uplands, flooded homes and infiltrated wells.
“Right now, there’s only a foot of ice on the Kuskokwim River,” Akiak Native Community Chief Mike Williams Sr., an Iditarod veteran, said on Jan. 8.
By December, ice on the Kuskokwim River is usually thick enough to support truck transport of goods to communities like Akiak and Bethel. “There’s still no ice road,” Williams said on Jan. 8. “The ice is too thin on the river.”
That’s had financial implications for mushers and other rural Alaskans that live away from the state’s road network. Without truck transport on ice roads, goods must be flown in. The resulting costs are triple compared to the cost for the same products in Anchorage, Williams said.
Riverbank erosion deposits silt in salmon spawning habitat, further challenging salmon populations already affected by warming water temperatures and harvesting by commercial fishers from Canada.
“We’re having continuing restrictions in the Kuskokwim River and there’s been no salmon fishing in the Yukon River for the last three years,” said Williams, who is also chairman of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. “Like the Northwest tribes, we’ve been depending on the salmon forever, but we’re seeing salmon on the brink of not returning anymore. It’s happened in the Nome area where they used to see salmon in abundance, but the chinook has really declined there and in Norton Sound.”
Those who follow the Iditarod will likely see those environmental changes as well. The event is covered extensively by Alaska media. And a team of Iditarod commentators interview mushers and report on trail conditions at each checkpoint on Iditarod Insider, a feature of Iditarod.com.
Williams hopes exposure to Alaska’s climate change challenges will spur action to reduce the greenhouse gases that are trapping heat near the Earth’s surface.
“I’ve been telling this story for the last 30-40 years about the impacts that we need to get ready for and the number of changes I’m witnessing and trying to tell Congress to act on cutting down emissions on every front. And still no action,” Williams said.
“We’re at a point where it may be too late, but there’s still possibly a chance to do something to slow down this erosion of our planet. There’s still a small window of opportunity to do something.”
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