Mike Dillingham - Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers - The Adventures of Balto, Back of the Pack, Honor Bound, Rivers

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 to 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.

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.