Jet and her brother Ozzy have run side-by-side in lead over thousands of miles in Wade Marrs’s team, but this year is likely be their last Iditarod. At 9 years old, they’re slowing down a little, but it’s hard for Marrs to imagine where he’d be without them — literally.
He recalled a few years earlier approaching Nome during the Iditarod in the Topkok Blowhole, a notoriously windy area where visibility is often reduced to next to nothing.
“I thought for sure we had to go left and I kept yelling ‘haw,’ and I even stopped the team and I went back and turned Jet to the left, and she kept going right,” said Marrs.
Eventually Marrs gave up trying to fight his leaders.
“I was kinda tired and frustrated with the whole thing and I was like, ‘You just go wherever you want,’ and then boom! There’s trail markers,” he said.
Marrs isn’t sure where he would have ended up that year, but he’s just glad he trusted Jet to find the way.
“She’s one of those dogs that knows where she is all the time and knows where she’s going,” he said.
Sven and Ghost are part of our “Dog of the Day” series. Each day during the Iditarod, we feature a new dog making the 1,000-mile dash to Nome. Earlier, we met Dusty, Moose, Boomer, JoAnna, Mach 10, Senior, Covid, Blunt, Elway, Viper, Sven and Ghost.
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Lex Treinen is covering the state Legislature for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at ltreinen@gmail.com.
