Four barking dogs pulled musher Ryan Redington on a four-wheeler across a frozen lake in Knik, about an hour north of Anchorage. Normally, he said, he’d be training on a sled, but it’s been months since a big snowfall.
“When we get on a sled it’s a lot more fun,” he said last Friday. “They’re a fun group. On a sled it’s really something.”
Redington and his team were just two weeks away from competing in the thousand-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Redington won the race in 2023, it’s a competition his grandfather founded a half-century ago.
For the third time in a decade, the teams are leaving out of Fairbanks because of bare trail on part of the route out of Willow, not far from Redington’s home. Mushers in Southcentral Alaska, like Redington, have been battling the low snow conditions for months, and they say it has impacted where and how they’re preparing for the race.
Redington said he has never seen his local trails this bad.
“It's trails that I grew up mushing on, but [it’s] shocking to see it like this,” he said. “The last year it was like this I think was 2003 and in 2001. Hoping for snow as always, but it never comes.”
The area saw several feet of snow last year, but right now, there’s only about an inch on the ground. Redington described training conditions as tough, bumpy and icy — forcing him and his dogs to spend more time training about three hours north, on Lake Louise.
“I think we broke about nine different sleds this year, and it was difficult to put the miles on,” he said. “We've had to travel north, and it makes it more expensive, but we gotta do what we have to do to get miles and prepare the dogs.”
Down on the Kenai Peninsula, three-time Iditarod champion Mitch Seavey said recent high temperatures and rain created icy conditions that were tough to train on at times, even on ATV’s.
“The low snow isn't too bad, because we do train on side-by-sides and four-wheelers too. But occasionally we get rain and ice, and then it's slippery and not very good for even [four]-wheeler training,” Seavey said.
Seavey travels with his team every year, and has since his first Iditarod in 1982. He said it’s standard for mushers to travel and train, not just in low snow years.
Back in Knik, 12-time Iditarod finisher Anna Berington also said her team always travels. But, she said, never as much as this year. They’ve gone to Eureka, Cantwell and Petersville. She said her dogs “light up” when they’re loading up for a road trip because they know they’re headed somewhere with better snow conditions.
“The song, Johnny Cash, ‘I've Been Everywhere,’ pops into my head,” she said. “It’s good for them to run on different things, and they're not always running on the same trails. It challenges their bodies and minds in different ways to run different places.”
Berington was training on her sled in November, the earliest she ever has. Now, she said, those once-snowy trails are icy, bare and brown.
Training in minimal snow wears down sleds quickly, so, like Redington, she swaps her sled for a four-wheeler when on her icy home trails. It’s not ideal, she said.
“There's a lot of ice, very low snow cover, and it's not it's not good for long runs,” she said. “And yes, we do encounter conditions like this in races, but it's not something you want to train on every single day for long miles or many hours.”
