Iditarod Quotes

She was beautiful in a way that only wild things can be beautiful.

But the beauty of the woods, the incredible joy of it is too alluring to be ignored, and I could not stand to be away from it--indeed, still can't--and so I ran dogs simply to run dogs; to be in and part of the forest, the woods

You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.

Life’s battles don’t always go to the stronger or faster man. Sooner or later the man who wins is the man who thinks he can. ~Vince Lombardi, American Football Coach

I'm sorry. I was just running them. Running the dogs." I swallowed more soup and looked at the sky. The cold air was so clear the stars seemed to be falling to the ground. Like you could walk right. . . over . . . there and pick them up just lying on the snow. "I couldn't come back.

The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The professional steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself it is the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull in to Nome.

Do you like the race so far?’ I looked at her, trying to find sarcasm, but she was serious; she really wanted to know. And I thought of how to answer her. I had gotten lost, been run over by a moose, watched a dog get killed, seen a man cry, dragged over a third of the teams off on the wrong trail, and been absolutely hammered by beauty while all this was happening. (It was, I would find later, essentially a normal Iditarod day — perhaps a bit calmer than most.) I opened my mouth. ‘I …’ Nothing came. She patted my arm and nodded. ‘I understand. It’s so early in the race. There’ll be more later to talk about …’ And she left me before I could tell her that I thought my whole life had changed, that my basic understanding of values had changed, that I wasn’t sure if I would ever recover, that I had seen god and he was a dog-man and that nothing, ever, would be the same for me again, and it was only the first true checkpoint of the race. I had come just one hundred miles.

I don't think I could love you if your nose fell off because you wouldn't take reasonable care of it.

Each evening the night swallowed the sun and gave the raven the sun's energy. He stored this power in his wings, tinged with the blue of Alaskan skies.

Mostly, it was just me walking them. My own private Iditarod. And it wasn’t a picnic. Just so you know, if you ever see a person walking four dogs, there are two things you can cross off your list of what to exclaim: (1) “Who’s walking who?” and (2) “Looks like you got your hands full.” Both lines are stupid and someone else has already said them. You might consider saying, “Hey, pretty girl!” or “Wow, four dogs sure make you look thin!

When I tried to write novels, sprawled on my bed with a ballpoint pen and spiral notebook, I imagined girls who outsmarted grown-ups and rescued their best friends from kidnappers, girls who raced in the Iditarod and girls who traveled to worlds far beyond our galaxy—girls who were always white. To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white. That there were millions of Asian girls like me out there in the world, starring in their own dramas large and small, had not yet occurred to me, as I had neither lived nor seen it.

The size of the land can be humbling. It puts my human existence into perspective, not in the sense of feeling like a bug on the windshield of life, but more a feeling of belonging to something too big to comprehend. The times when I have a view of the broad vistas sometimes make me feel as big as the land. I love the size of the land, how it rolls on and on, untamed and for the most part untouched.

While genetics play a significant role, so too, does experience, for running (and especially running long distances) has a high metabolic cost. The dogs’ muscles must be strong, but most of all, they must be efficient. The ability to run fast and consistently for long periods of time depends on the body’s ability to provide adequate energy to working muscles and to efficiently remove waste products such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid. In both humans and dogs, only about a quarter of the energy from the breakdown of fats and carbohydrates in food is converted into mechanical energy; the rest is dissipated as heat. The primary focus of training for a race—for both humans and canines—is teaching the body to get better at converting available energy from glucose, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into energy. This can only really be achieved through regular exercise

To me, it’s not that pound dogs don’t have worth, or to be more specific, inherent worth as sled dogs. It’s just that to succeed with them you have to be open to finding their very individualized skill sets, and that’s what we did with all of our rescues. Pong, while she can’t sustain sprint speeds for very long, can break trail at slightly slower speed for hours. Ping’s digestive processes move at a glacial pace, so much so that I think she could put on a few pounds from just a whiff of the food bucked, and this proved valuable when racing in deep-minus temperatures when dogs with higher metabolisms shiver off too much weight. Six, while small, can remember any trail after having only run it once, which I relied on whenever I grew disoriented or got lost from time to time. Rolo developed into an amazing gee-haw leader, turning left or right with precision whenever we gave the commands, which also helped the other dogs in line behind him learn the meaning of these words and the importance of listening to the musher. Ghost excelled at leading of a different sort, running at the front of a team chasing another which is also useful for not burning out gee-haw leaders. Coolwhip’s character trait of perpetually acting over-caffeinated made her invaluable as a cheerleader, where an always barking dog late in a run can, and does spread enthusiasm to the others. And Old Man, well, he was a bit too decrepit to ever contribute much to the team, but he always made me smile when I came out to feed the yard and saw him excitedly carrying around his food bowl, and that was enough for him to earn his keep.

Traveling alone is simpler and faster. Traveling with anybody else makes you morally responsible for them and limits your speed to that of the slowest companion.

and gotten them back on the trail. They would continue to dry out on the run. He had also replaced his heavy insulated mittens. They were a soggy mess, frozen stiff, and would have to

In the struggle to save the lives of Nome's residents, these two dog would fall victim to the deadly weather.

People have asked me about the loneliness out on the race. But the race is when you finally have some social contact after a long winter of training alone on mostly empty trails. On the race you meet people at checkpoints, and you mix it up with other drivers, people from all walks of life who are bound together once a year by their miseries on the Iditarod Trail.

In my headlamp the dogs looked like ghosts, glistening with frost and half obscured in a cloud of their own frozen breaths. The clinking of the hardware on the collars and harnesses made music in the quite of the night.

What are you doing?” he asked. “If it’s anything like what I just came through, it’s impossible.” That set me. “Impossible?” This was the whole point of all the work and energy I’d put into the past five years. Everything aimed toward one thing: Iditarod. I lifted the snow hook. “Okay, gang. Let’s go.

A part of me wanted life to be like this always: just me and my dogs, alone in this vast, silent country, our goals always sure, living out of the sled day after day. This was the most seductive feature of the Iditarod, the reason I would come back time and time again, despite all the suffering that went along with it: the intimacy I had with those fine animals… and with the magnificent land of the Alaska.

I had never thought much about being the first woman to win the race. I thought of myself as just a sled dog racer, not a woman sled dog racer. But there was no denying that if my winning encouraged other women not to underestimate themselves, then I was happy to have helped.

Wanting her physically was easy. It was the emotional part that gave him the shakes. He no longer found comfort in the false intimacy of casual one-night stands. They left him feeling hollow. You could talk yourself into just about anything, but emotionally you were never fooled. Mornings after were haunted by an emotional hangover for which there was no quick hair-of-the-dog chaser.

I told you this is my fifth Iditarod. I don’t think you understand what that means. It means I’ve been breeding dogs, raising them, working with them all these years to prepare for this race. Every race is this race. As soon as | got home from my first race I started putting together the best team I could train. Every year I do that. “I’ve bought dogs, traded them, tried them out, found out what kind of pups turn into good racers, sold and gotten rid of as many as I kept. With a lot of hard work, I’ve built a racing machine. I know which dogs will go in any kind of cold, which run best in the wind, and which can take the weather without dehydrating. We understand each other. Tank knows, almost before I do, what I want and what to do about it. He’s a great leader. And the rest know me, trust me and what I ask them to do. They love it, the running, as much as I| do. I Jove it, Alex, or I wouldn’t do it.

His headlamp shattered as it hit. So did his nose and cheek. A wicked, foot-long limb projected from the side of the trunk. Cold and sharp, it entered his closed right eye and pushed through his brain until it hit the back of his skull. There it stopped. His body hung against the trunk of the spruce until his weight broke the limb and he fell slowly onto the trail.

The snow machine drivers, dressed in layers of outer. wear to repel the worst the Arctic can deliver, may cover the full thousand miles without a good night’s sleep and with few hot meals. A bed becomes something they dreamed of once; a hot shower, only a memory. They develop shoulders the envy of linebackers. But when they try to explain the pale, empty nights on the ice of Norton Sound, or the northern lights so bright they reflect off the snow in the Farewell Burn, wistful looks come over their wind and sunburned faces and they drift into silence or stammering attempts at description. Many come back year after year, addicted to the trail.

I think you better take this,” she said, her eyes wide. “There's been another accident. In Happy Valley.

Murder is what’s going on. I can’t say it plainer. Someone is killing mushers. We don’t know why, or who. But we will. I just don’t want any more of you to die. If we stop the race now, the deaths will probably stop too. You had all better think about that carefully.

turn, it slid solidly into the tree, mashing a stanchion

With one hundred miles left to go in the Klondike 200 I began imagining how amazed people would be at the finished line. Entering the Klondike, my sights had been set on merely finishing.

A thousand miles of space and time spent with one of God’s most marvelous creations, the sled dog. Mile Upon mile days stacked up twenty high. ‘They were always up, positive, uncomplaining, tough, adaptable, and indomitable. Each evolving in my eyes from a dumb draft animal to a valued trail partner, admired in truth, loved beyond words.

Everything unique to the first race was a first. Meaning, for example, a sled dog race—nothing first, nor unique, here—but one of one thousand miles or more, using the same dogs, is decidedly a first and, without question, unique. There are many Iditarod Race traditions, whose origins are traced to the 1973 inaugural event. Easily coming to mind is the first weekend in March start, Anchorage start site (ceremonial, nowadays) trail mail (mine in 1973 was adopted by ITC in 1974), keeping record of the fastest time between Solomon (Port Safety or Safety, nowadays) and Nome, the town siren and police escort at Nome, use of veterinarians during the race, publishing dog deaths, employment of the “Iditarod Air Force,” multiple finisher banquets, red lantern award (adopted from earlier races), and reliance on volunteers.

While dogs were a hole to sink money into, they were also more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There is nothing quite like hooking up a team of dogs who are raring to go. They bark and dance and just can’t wait. When you finally pull the hook and they take off at full speed (probably 25 miles an hour), there is a swish of sled runners and the wind in your face. Perhaps six furry behinds running ahead like a house afire. It is wonderful. You charge out into the boreal forest where there are no human sounds; no roads, no TVs, no nothing but you and your dogs and your wits.

Finally, Wilmarth threw his cards on the table, uttering, “You boys stay ahead of me and I will buy you all the whiskey you can drink when we get to Nome.” As God is my witness, those were his, almost, if not exact words. They had effect. Within fifteen minutes, the sound of the last machine blended into the music of wind playing through the cabin

The offshore north wind built to a gale force. My poor dogs. They would hit a wind-polished spot, loose traction, and literally get rolled into a knot, requiring a frustrating untangling, under something lessthan good picnic conditions. Other times, away would go the sled skidding sideways, with me firmly attached, until it struck an immoveable drift or a crusted snow patch, and over I went, taking the entire team with me, ending, one time, a half block off the trail. Wha, storm. What an experience. Blinding and, at times, breath-sucking Dangerous, scary, but exciting and exhilarating at the same time. One remembrance I have kept—all these years—is thankfulness for the relatively mild temperature at the time. And another is an absolute, set-it-in-concrete admiration for my dogs. In the course of many untangles I rearranged my front end. Genghis, my old faithful, went in front with Kiana. Bandit was placed back in swing. We went. In spite of roll! overs, roll-ups, wraparounds, and tangles, we went. And even when a couple of males—Kuchik and Casper—repeatedly attempted to dive behind snowdrifts, out of the punishing tempest, we went. How gratifying it was to witness my years of training pay off. Uncounted hours: back on Kenai Lake and Resurrection River flats, driving this never-say-die team head-on into fiendish, violent snowstorms.

Sled dogs love new trails. The drive to explore unknown ground, to huge distances with pack mates, is genetic. In the wild, it is necessary for food gathering and survival. All canine senses come into play in this vital game of life. But, by far and away, the most important is the dog's astounding sense of smell, a million or more times that of a human, we are told. A canine’s innate desire to travel, to sniff out new ground, and thig inborn compulsion to run with its kind, provides a key answer to the often-asked question: “What makes Iditarod racing dogs run a hundred or more miles per day?” In truth, nothing or no one really makes them run. They are, in fact, by their very nature, compelled to run. They were born that way. Selective breeding for those wondrous, wild instincts—in the case of the Seavey kennels, some twenty sled dog generations to date—simply brings to the top the very best of what hay been there for centuries unnumbered.

I do not remember much about that final moment before my great adventure, my personal odyssey, began. What I do recall was a feeling of a most calm serenity enveloping me, an at-peace well-being filtering into my very core. All was done. All was right with the world. All was going to be just fine. Come what may during the next one thousand miles, we—my dogs and I—could handle and profit from each and every one of the experiences awaiting us.

We human pioneers of the “great camping trip,” as George Attla would dub it, will remain incorporated, as it were, in the fabric that weaves our history. But what of the four hundred pioneer dogs? Those wonders of God’s creation, who weathered Arctic gales, slept in snowbanks, suffered exhaustion, sore, raw feet, and, to some degree, human ignorance, and neglect. What of them? Leaders Genghis, Kiana, and Sonny. Others, who strained in wheel, team, and swing positions, and at times, in lead as well, were Kuchik, Koyuk, Snippy, Eska, Shiak, Flame, Bandit, Casper, and Crazy. Names listed on a sheet of paper seem such a hollow tribute to twelve of a person’s most loyal, tested friends. And hollow that tribute would be, if all twelve of them were not imprinted indelibly in my heart. Those twelve devoted, steadfast trail companions bestowed upon me the one true adventure of my life. In so doing, they became the pathfinders for all ensuing generations of endurance race dogs. Genghis, Kiana, Sonny, Kuchik, Koyuk, Snippy, Eska, Shiak, Flame, Bandit, Casper, and Crazy—a renewed and heartfelt salute.

However, what an opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. A chance to truly go somewhere consequential, somewhere distant by dog team. What a thrill it would be to soak in the very essence of a trail known only vicariously through book and legend. How overpowering the thought: To ride runners over a pioneer’s boulevard, where august spirits of old-time dog men sit in watch. Here was an occasion where all the noble qualities of a noble animal could be demonstrated to an ever-growing remote and mechanized world. Dare I hope that such an event would excite a renewed interest in the historic trail? That my adopted hometown, indeed all the communities along the way, would begin anew, an appreciative relationship with that heritage treasure? Yes, I just had to do it. There could never be another first Iditarod Race, and for that matter, the first could well be the last.

Though out of character, lofty-minded Tom Johnson, at one of our meetings, posed the question, “How in the world will we ever pull this thing off?” A bunch of ideas and suggestions were offered amid a goodly portion of friendly banter. It was agreed that to sell the race, it would be necessary to get all sorts of people emotionally involved. Get them to volunteer, to buy into the race. Joe, Sr., never one to think small, brought our task down to nutshell simplicity when he stated, “We have to get the whole darn state involved.” This was our message: Look out, Alaska, here we come. We are going to buttonhole you and ask for your help. We believe in our product, now we want you to believe, too. To become involved in our dream. You, the musher, politician, lawyer, army, air force, event organizer, banker, merchant, recreationist, publicist, publisher, miner, villager, pilot, radioman, and a myriad of others, are needed. Together, we can relive our glorious past and provide something positive for Alaska’s future. Without you, all is lost and we are doomed to failure. That was our basic approach in rounding up volunteers for the first race. It was an easy sell.

From the beginning then, our two chief Missions as a committee, were expounded: an event to give purpose for sled dogs and preservation of a trail over which to drive them.

From Files: (Desirable Sled Dog Traits, 1965) I. Above all others, must be genetically forward-oriented. Self-driven, trail aggressive. 2. Medium size, males 50 -75 Ibs; females 50-60 lbs. Good body conformation. Well furred. 3. Good feet. 4, Siberian husky appearance. 5. People-oriented (friendly). 6. Trail endurance, capable of a long day’s work.

The early Iditarod dogs were tough and hearty and so were the people who ran these teams. The first races took many days/weeks. During these early Iditarod runs, there were no headlights, no booties except the rare hand-sewn seal-skin bootie, no reflective trail markers (spruce boughs if anything), no quick-change runners, and no pre-race drop-bags assigned to each checkpoint. The mushers that ran were experts in survivalist arctic living and elite dog-men; many times these individuals were the trail-breakers as Iditarod was a trail and not a highway at that time. I remember air dropping dog food to the mushers at Poorman, they were snowshoeing in front of their teams. Mushers camped ang rested at night. The dogs were more trap-line dogs than anything. Today's Iditarod dogs are trained better and selected for more speed. (From the foreword by Terry O. Adkins)

Take huskies and malamutes, for instance. Both are bred for endurance in cold weather. They’re designed for running and sledding, and they love it. They can’t get enough of it. Do they need to be in the Iditarod? Nope. Do they have to prove anything to anyone? No, they just love what they do and do what they love. End of story.

Germans have a term, Fernweh, that signifies “yearning for a distant place.” Having grown up in small-town Ohio, almost literally in the middle of a cornfield, I’ve always had a particularly strong sense of Fernweh. When I went to college, I took every opportunity to travel, working in Hawaii with dolphins, attending a semester abroad in England, and even backpacking through Greece. There have been countless vacations and trips. The world is a vast and infinitely interesting place, and in truth, I’ve always looked down on people who chose not to wander, not to see and experience different cultures. Maybe there was something deeply ironic in the fact that this chance encounter with an elderly Athabascan woman pushed me to reconsider my stance. She was content, serene. Could I say the same? Not really. She didn’t need to tell stories about wild sled rides to make her friends jealous; she didn’t need to supplement her life with cheap souvenirs from tourist traps. She only needed the now of the weather, the dogs, and the mushers. I wondered if all the adventures in the world could ever bring me such peace.

Run in tow heats over a 25-mile course, the race was officially named the Iditarod Trail Seppala Memorial Race, in hone of mushing legend Leonhard Seppala. Over the years, the Iditarod trail Sled Dog Race’s origins have been closely linked with the “great mercy race” to Nome. Most people believe the Iditarod was established to hone the drivers and dogs who carried the diphtheria serum, a notion the media have perpetuated. In reality, “Seppala was picked to represent all mushers, “ Page stressed. “He died in 1967 and we thought it was appropriate to name the race in his honor. But it could just as easily have been named after Scotty Allan. The race was patterned after the Sweepstakes races, not the serum run.

the Iditarod.

The wail of the savage winds devoured all sounds, including any commands to the front of the team, and the snow – getting deeper and deeper – felt on the verge of swallowing us. Even the dogs had a cupcake-thick icing of white to their fur. I began to feel not just lonely, but very only – the only one brave enough, the only one stupid enough, the only one to be mushing on a mountaintop miles from any humans. Even the ptarmigan I had seen hours before had the sense to stick together.

What I do know for certain is that there are moments in time that resonate, staying with you forever. For me, that infamous training run stands out as one of them. I glimpsed divinity and understood – possibly for the first time at that spiritual depth – the perfection embodied in Cyber and Zoom. I appreciated, truly, the caliber of athletic performance they emanated. I valued the privilidge of not just knowing a once-in-a-mushers-lifetime lead dog, but knowing two of them.

By February 15 we will spread the empty sacks in the driveway in a big circle. In the middle we’ll pile provisions for the trail. I know from experience that the quantity of dog supplies will be shocking: seven hundred pounds of beef, six hundred of kibble, twenty-five hundred booties, to name a few. Everything will be bundled in small usable parcels. There will be 55 one-gallon bags of frozen beef sliced thin like pieces of bread. Thirty-five bags of salmon slices. A hundred and ten quart-sized bags holding five sets of booties in each. My musher supplies will also be plentiful. I’ll have packed thirty gallon-sized bags with my own food, and another thirty with personal items such as glove liners, heat packs, batteries, neck gaiters, and socks.

The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare. Have you heard the legend of Sylvester Stallone staying up three nights straight to churn out the screenplay for Rocky? I don't know, it may even be true. But it's the most pernicious species of myth to set before the awakening writer, because it seduces him into believing he can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence. The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The professional steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself it is the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull in to Nome.

I know you’re just following directions because Marise said I’m supposed to rest for a couple more days, but I’m not planning on joining the Iditarod. I just want to walk around for a few minutes. No big deal.

The birds eyes were half-human. He traced the outline of the carving. Perhaps it bestowed on him some kind of secret ancestral power

Finding the best view of the Absarokas in Wyoming meant riding my quarter horse to the crowned, windy summit of Whiskey Mountain. To climb in