iditarodcore

a psa about the most wonderful time of the year

Yesterday was the official start of the 2024 Iditarod– the most slept-on sport in America. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think Balto. It’s a spectator sport, if you have a generous read of the term spectator. I follow it mainly by checking a spreadsheet periodically updated on Iditarod.com that logs the mushers' times in and out of the various checkpoints they dogsled through— a more riveting experience than it may seem. I also pay $40 to get GPS tracking of the teams crossing the state of Alaska and video content from the trail and it's some of the best money I spend all year.

What you need to know about the Iditarod

• It is a 1000 mile dog sled race running between Willow and Nome, Alaska

• The course alternates between two routes. This year is the northern route, with 26 checkpoints along the trail.

• Dog sled teams start with 16 dogs, and must finish with at least five. At each checkpoint dogs can be dropped if they are ill or injured, but most dogs are dropped due to performance and mushing strategy (fewer dogs require hauling less food and supplies for a lighter and faster sled, slower dogs will be dropped to keep speed up). Don’t worry, the dropped dogs are flown back to the start of the race to go back to their kennels.

• Being a musher is more like being a backcountry vet/survivalist than a racecar driver. The dogs are extremely well taken care of and intrinsically motivated to run, so most of the musher’s job is to keep pace so they don’t tire out too quickly. A musher would never push their dog team past their limit— their task is to read their dogs to see what they can handle and need at any given moment.

• The fastest Iditarod time is a little over 8 days, but slower finishers will take 12+ days to finish. The last person across the finish wins the Red Lantern award for perseverance.

• Mushers must take one 24 hour rest and one 8 hour rest at two checkpoints along the course, but they can choose when and where they take them. For all other checkpoints they can rest for as long or as short of a time as they wish. Many blow through in under a minute, and will snack and nap their dogs along the trail. 

• The checkpoints are little more than some loose hay for the dogs to sleep on, and a small hut for mushers to rest in. The mushers spend much of the time during these rests tending to the dogs (feeding them, changing their booties) and barely sleep for the duration of the race. It is also, mind you, approximately ten degrees outside.

• Dogsleds are typically moving at around 9 miles per hour. Mushers will physically tie themselves to their sleds to sleep while the dogs run, and sometimes they fall off and the dogs will keep running without them. In that case they will end up walking for miles and miles until they can meet up with their team at the next checkpoint.

• Conditions on the tundra are brutal and teams are frequently breaking new trail, running through blizzards and crossing over the frozen Bering Sea. Sleds may break a runner on rough terrain– mushers can send one replacement sled ahead to a checkpoint to exchange it.

• Alaskan huskies are much smaller than the huskies we see as pets around town, they are typically about 40 pounds and only come to a little above your knee.

I was latently aware of the Iditarod as a nineties kid growing up in Seattle, but my real introduction to the sport came during a trip to Alaska in 2022. Alaska Airlines had a Buy One Get One Free ticket promo with Starbucks (??) and so Sophie, Jackie and Dan booked a long weekend to Alaska in March. Truly no one is traveling from Los Angeles to Alaska for a four day weekend in the winter but I cannot recommend it enough—there are nonstop flights and we had the time of our lives. The spontaneous BOGO energy of the ticket purchase and off-season prices really set the tone for the trip and we booked a bunch of activity packages— one of which was a dogsled experience.

Someone from the kennel picked us up from a bakery in town and drove us out to the property. The only other guest in the van peppered the driver with questions about the current Iditarod, dropping names of mushers and discussing trail conditions. We all looked at each other like “were we supposed to have done research before showing up to this?” It turns out that this random kennel we had chosen for location and convenience was actually owned by Dallas Seavey, a third generation Iditarod Champion who had won the race five times and was on the trail with the A-Team at that very moment. One of the dogs pulling our sled had actually been on the winning team the previous year— it was like taking a swim lesson from Ryan Lochte.

They had over a hundred huskies at the kennel, each with their own doghouse and strip to run around. Someone asked where the dogs went if they needed to go inside and the musher looked at us blankly and asked “why would they ever need to go inside?”

Cast of Characters

Part of what is so fun about the Iditarod is that it is an extremely small community of people who are mentally unwell enough, and have the resources, to race it each year. A mushing career can last decades, so if you start following the race, you start recognizing the same faces year after year. There are 38 mushers starting the race this year– here are some key figures (as arbitrarily decided by me):

Ryan Redington: Our reigning champ. On his paternal side he is a third generation musher, and his grandfather actually founded the Iditarod in the seventies, but no Redington had ever won before. He is also Inupiat on his maternal side, and the race goes through the village his mother is from. He had never ranked higher than 7th place until last year when he won the whole thing!! A perfect Iditarod story.

Last year was really cool because the top 3 finishers were all indigenous Alaskan. Keep your eye on Peter Kaiser (Yup’ik musher who came in second last year), and Richie Diehl, (Dena’ina Athabaskan musher who got 3rd last year)

Anna Berrington: she and her twin sister train and run together, finishing back to back every year. However it looks like this year Anna and Kristy combined teams and are taking turns competing in different races. Curious to see if they are more competitive time wise with this new strategy

Dallas Seavey: After several years away, he is back. The van driver at his kennel told us he was raised so deep in this world that he was “basically a dog” and watching his Musher bio video I truly felt like I was watching a Disney cartoon husky do the talking head. He shares the record for most Iditarod Championships of all time.

Jessica Klejka: Sophie’s sister went to vet school with her! This is her third race.

Josi Thyr: Another personal connection to Sophie’s sister– she was a client at Sophie’s sister’s vet practice. Apparently being a vet in Northern Idaho makes you weirdly connected to the dogsled universe.

Mille Porslind: A Danish musher who comes from a long lineage of dogsledding. Her great-grandfather founded the first Arctic research station in the world. She moved to Alaska to race dogs with her partner who won the 2018 Iditarod. They have since broken up and I like to think that she is trying to win to spite him. She has extreme witch energy.

Isaac Teaford: He was our tour guide for our dogsled experience, and was telling us that it was his dream to one day get to race Dallas’s B-Team in the Iditarod. Rooting for him for Rookie of the Year!

Personally I’m rooting for Ryan and Mille.

luxurious checkpoint

We are less than 24 hours into the race and it’s anyone’s game still. The drama is absolutely nonstop– I just checked in while editing this newsletter and learned that Dallas Seavey and his team had a run in with a moose on the trail (super dangerous) and Dallas had to shoot the moose to protect his team. The moose is laying across the trail and the other teams are sledding over it “as if it were a snow drift.” The commenters on Iditarod.com have assured viewers that Alaska Fish and Wildlife has been dispatched to salvage the meat, which will be distributed to the local community. Alaska is the craziest place in the world! The Iditarod is the best race in the world! If you aren’t watching, what are you even doing with your time?? 

premium Iditarod content

How to watch:

A great starting point for getting into the race is the 2016 documentary about Lance Mackey called The Great Alone. Unfortunately it seems to only be available with a free trial of the Faith and Family Channel on Amazon Prime/Youtube, but trust that its actually….not religious.

The only way to follow the Iditarod in any real way is via Iditarod.com. You can access the race logs for free, which are updated multiple times an hour with each musher’s most recent checkpoint in and out time, speed and standings. But really I cannot encourage you more to splurge for the GPS coverage of the race. It’s over a full week of riveting entertainment, and they post exclusive video interviews with mushers from the trail. You can also read up on the musher bios on the website.  

I’ve also started buying up vintage Iditarod swag off of eBay– incredibe merch opportunities.

I’m going to post daily summary updates on Substack Notes all week if you want to tune in :) (I’ve never used this function before so we will see how it goes, you can only access it via the Substack app or website.)

Housekeeping:

I started my new job which has been…really crazy! Turning an active construction zone into a fully functional art gallery in under a month is a lot of work, it turns out! The gallery is now open and I’m hoping the dust will start to settle soon. I’ve put paid subscriptions on pause for a while until I get back into a writing routine— I’ll let you know when I turn them back on.

Mush mush!

Nicole