The long way home

It's been way too long and, well, too nice out, so here's something interesting anyway.

There's a story floating around today about a dog that escaped an Iditarod musher about 300 miles into the race and eventually made it most of that distance almost to home.  An old friend who used to live in Nome posted it on facebook and I took advantage to point out this was not the first time an escaped dog had made the journey back home.  As a matter of fact the leader of the first team to win the Iditarod, way back in 1973, escaped almost immediately after crossing the finish line.

There is one error in the news story in the clipping. It is a lot farther than 107 miles from Nome to Red Devil. Here is what I wrote from this and other sources:

"(Dick)Wilmarth’s lead dog, Hotfoot, didn’t hear all the speeches and hoopla at the finish. Somehow in the milieu of the arrival and being unhitched from the sled and team, the dog took off that same day. A frantic search of Nome failed to locate him and his owner eventually had to go home without his most famous dog. Thirty-one days later, Hotfoot trotted into Red Devil, lean and hungry but other than that, in fairly good shape. It’s 344 air miles from Nome to Red Devil and that probably only begins to measure the circuitous route a dog might take. In the process, he had to cross the Yukon and the Kuskokwim rivers, though most likely both were still frozen in April. None of the accounts mention whether he still wore that collar of bells when he reached Red Devil." -- From the upcoming book tentatively entitled Iditarod -- The First 10 Years.

The collar of bells refers to something that happened in Nome.  A law dating back to gold rush days requires mushers driving dog teams in town to hang a bell on their lead dogs to warn people they are approaching.  When Dick Wilmarth pulled up onto Front Street to win the first Iditarod, a woman walked out, blocked his way, and put a collar of bells on his lead dog.  Welcome to NomeAlaska.  (That's not a typo.  People there say "NomeAlaska" as if it were all one word.