Veteran musher Gabe Dunham ditched her gloves in downtown Anchorage Saturday morning to pet one of her sled dogs.
“This is UNK,” Dunham said as dogs barked all around her in 30-degree temperatures, readying for the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
City officials had to scrape together snow from neighborhood cul-de-sacs to make this year’s significantly shorter, 1.5-mile ceremonial start happen. Dunham’s dogs haven’t seen a lot of snow this year at their home in Willow. They’ve had to travel north to train.
“One of the trips, I went up to Denali, they hadn’t seen soft fluffy snow for quite awhile,” Dunham said. “They all spread out and they were loping through the deep snow. It had snowed like 8 inches. Like little puppies, just like, ‘Woo! This is so amazing!”
Scarce snow and unseasonably warm temperatures in Southcentral have turned this year’s Iditarod upside down. Not only was Saturday’s ceremonial start a fraction of its normal length, but the 33 mushers will now load up their sled dogs and head to Fairbanks for the official race start Monday, instead of starting out of Willow. It’ll be the fourth time in the Iditarod’s history that teams will leave from Fairbanks.
It’ll take Dunham and her 16 dogs about five hours to drive to the Interior city. She said she’ll hit the road early Sunday morning.
“It'll be a nice, kind of easy morning. Scrambling to put everything in the trailer and make sure I got all the last details. And then another early morning,” Dunham said.
Anna Berington, who calls Knik home, said she’s treating the 350-mile trek like a regular road trip. The team has gotten good at traveling this winter in search of snow.
“It's just another road trip, a little longer than the other ones we've been doing this year. But the dogs have been good at traveling, and we've been traveling so much,” Berington said. “A lot of stuff is packed and ready to go, and we've been keeping a good schedule and getting everything ready, so we should have a good departure.”
The conditions on the trail are much better than those in Anchorage. Last week, Iditarod’s race director said trail conditions were snowy.
Rookie Emily Ford is racing to be the second Black woman in history to finish the Iditarod, and said her dogs are eager to run in those snowy conditions.
“I think they're gonna be so stoked and be like – finally,” Ford said. “I think we're gonna fly like, I'm gonna be hard on the break for a long time once the sun goes down, because they're gonna cool off and their paws are gonna feel good, and their wrists are gonna feel good. We're just gonna cruise. It's gonna be awesome.”
Some mushers view the start change as an advantage.
Seven-time Iditarod finisher Jessie Holmes lives in Brushkana, about 30 miles from Cantwell. He said the route change gives Interior mushers the upper-hand.
“I always feel like us Interior mushers that come down to race against these Willow guys are at a disadvantage because their dogs are all at their houses,” he said. “Our dogs are on our trucks. So now that it's a Fairbanks start, I get this extra day and I get to go home.”
His dogs will get to sleep at home Saturday before driving to Fairbanks Sunday.
Holmes was a big fan of Saturday’s somewhat-warm weather. He said the temperature, around 30 degrees, is similar to what his team, and other mushers, might experience on the trail.
“Conditioning yourself for the heat the week before the race is kind of a critical thing,” he said.
But not everyone was excited about Saturday’s weather. Tara Stevens, a longtime Iditarod fan, was dressed in fur at the end of this year’s ceremonial route.
“No snow, shortened race,” Stevens said. “Warm, which is nice, but it's kind of a bummer that there's not enough snow. We're Alaskans so, you know, any weather, we'll come out and support the teams.”
Despite the temperatures, the panting dogs raced the trail as residents lined city streets cheering, high-fiving mushers and yelling for dog booties. The event was shorter this year not only because of the shorter route, but also because of the number of teams: the field of mushers is tied for the smallest in history, with 17 veterans and 16 rookies.
The Iditarod will officially start Monday, March 3, at 11 a.m. at Pike’s Waterfront Lodge in Fairbanks. From there, teams have about 1,128 miles to the finish line in Nome. This year’s trail is the longest Iditarod trail yet.
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