They flowed over the edge, vanishing, and then the sled tipped after them and fell beneath me. It dropped over something I might call, in other contexts, a cliff: not quite vertical, but you couldn’t walk down it, either. Then we came around a corner, and the trail just disappeared. I had the distinct sense of cranking to the top of a roller coaster’s first drop. The dogs trotted in switchbacks through an airy forest, rising through the foothills of the Alaska Range. I spent my first two days on the trail dreading the Steps and the last miles before them in a state of suppressed panic. If you’d asked me at any point during the winter what scared me most about the Iditarod, I’d have told you the Happy River Steps, a series of three hazardous drops onto the frozen Happy River, which come fairly early in the race. And then it was the next day, the real start of the race, when teams head into the wilderness, and there were miles of crowds and signs and fans with their bonfires, and then the bonfires were farther apart, the stretches between them minutes or hours long, and pretty soon it was just me and the dogs crossing the huge wild state of Alaska. What would happen, I wondered, if we just kept mushing?Īnd so my husband and I left our home in Wisconsin and traveled to Alaska and kept training our dogs and chopped thousands of pounds of meat and and (usually) slept too little and (sometimes) cried too much, and the next thing I knew it was March 2, and I was standing on my sled at the ceremonial start in Anchorage, the dogs leaping to run, with thousands of people cheering. We could eat food and take a nap and put on our booties and leave this parking lot, this school, this bar-wherever the race ended-and go back into the wilderness where we belong. Then I ran a 100-miler, and a 300-miler, and each time at the finish line, I thought: I could keep going. The truth was that I’d run one dogsled race, a 20-miler, and it was too short. I didn’t really know the answer, which made me uncomfortable.

“Why do that when you could be warm and dry and have money?” He had just finished his second Iditarod himself, and he wasn’t quite serious, but he wasn’t joking either. Last spring, in Wasilla, Alaska, I ran into another musher at a burrito shop and mentioned that I planned to sign up for the Iditarod, the thousand-mile dogsled race.

Iditarod dog sled race online articles