Libby Riddles Quotes

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.

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.