Even a tiny dog walking by barked to tell his parents to take a photo of him with the sled dogs above at the start of the Iditarod Trail in Seward Alaska. The trail celebrates the broader history of travel in Alaska by dogsled, but today the Iditarod is famous for just one race. The Iditarod race starts north of Anchorage on the first weekend in March, and the dogs are the real star athletes of the race, of course, running in teams of a dozen or more over 1000 miles for a week or two to the Burled Arch on Front Street in Nome, near the Bering Strait.
During the various Alaskan gold rushes at the turn of the previous century, the winter dogsled trails connected ports like Seward with mining towns like Iditarod, now a remote ghost town (on the southern race route in odd years). Seward is an ice free deep water port, and in winter months mail, supplies and trade goods moved inland and back by dog sled. In 1925 a dog sled relay team delivered life-saving diphtheria serum from near Fairbanks to Nome running along the Yukon River in the middle and making the finishing lead dog Balto famous. The longest dogsled run was from Seward to Nome, which laid the historic path for mining communities, railroads, roadhouses and highways. Some of these remote communities are still roadless, going straight from dog sleds to bush planes after the gold rushes slowed in the 1920s.
The trail is the only winter trail in the national historic trail system, and it’s managed by the Bureau of Land Management. My great, great uncle Norman Vaughan started competing in the Iditarod at age 70 and ran it 13 times. He also organized a commemorative event for the 1925 serum run, ran dog sleds in the 1932 Olympics, and helped Admiral Byrd on his first Antarctica expedition, later returning to climb Mount Vaughan at 89. The Iditarod has a special place in the hearts of explorers.
