The first ten great races – Iditarod

When I was fresh to Alaska, one of the first events I observed was the 1974 running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the second in what has became an annual festival in the state. All those dogs and their rough-looking Alaska drivers and sleds packed for the long trail and heading out for Nome a thousand miles distant, epitomized everything I had envisioned as a boy playing in the woods and dreaming of a day when I could venture north.  Over the next few years I stayed close to the race, at times envisioning ways I could get free to enter it myself, something that never quite materialized.  The best I could come up with was flying along with it a couple of those first ten races and writing the first book about the race.

Over time my own adventures led me elsewhere, but my interest in the race remained and come March the urge would rise again. I eventually built a cabin in Bush and usually venture there during Iditarod time and follow the race on a local public radio station. I will never forget the first year I did that.  I had made it to the cabin, got inside and started a fire, brought in my supplies and then turned on the radio and began putting things away, straightening up and sweeping the floor, all the little chores you do when you come back to a cabin after a while. I had heard this little radio station had started up during my most recent absence, so I twirled along the dial until I found it. At that moment there was a radio-reader program on, and I pretty much tuned it out as I went about my work.

Once in a while, I would catch a phrase the reader said and it would sound familiar but I never stopped to focus enough to try to figure out what he was reading. That happened several times over the next hour until I sat down for a rest and listened more carefully. That was when it hit me: He was reading MY book, my Iditarod book, during the running of the race.  Wow. There are a lot of joys in writing a book and seeing it published. That one had to be close to the top of the list.

Now, many years later I have been given the opportunity to contribute to a book about the first ten years of the race. which has been running 40 some years now. What we are writing now is almost ancient history.

This new book about the Iditarod has been mentioned in posts over the past couple of years.  Well, it's getting closer. The final edit has been sent to the printers and it's not too long until the book will be available for sale.

More than 100 contributors wrote a variety of articles for it, mushers, pilots, veterinarians, family members. volunteers and even a few sundry writers such as myself. These are complemented by historic photos from the trail and original art works. The end product documents in a very down-home way, the first 10 years of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, called by many who have not sailed single-handed around the world, the last great race on earth.

The Old Iditarod Gang, a collection of people who had something to do with the race during those first years joined together over the last four years gathering materials and preparing the tome for publication. The group has now put up a web page where interested folks can learn a lot about the book and the people who made it, and how you can purchase a copy :) . Look for the link at the end of this posting.

Take a look at some preview pages

There's a link to some preview pages attached to the illustration to the left. Those selections include part of one of my contributions. Flipping through those pages will give a reader an idea of what the more than 400 pages in the entire publication will be like.

There is quite a variety of articles including personal accounts by racers themselves, adventures and profiles told by others, recollections of people and places woven into the very fabric of the trail.

When that first race took off in 1973, many of the folks didn't really know what they were getting into. One musher, Dick Mackey, told of wives and sweethearts in tears kissing their mushers goodbye not knowing for sure if they would ever see them again.

It was a huge logistical undertaking by a whole bunch of people who had never tried anything that huge before. In those first years mushers often found there was no trail, supplies had not reached some checkpoints when they arrived with hungry dogs. And that difficulty seldom brings mention of the frantic volunteers trying desperately to get supplies to those drivers and teams. There are tales of competitors stopping to hunt for food along the trail, of temperatures with wind chills going lower than minus 100. Many looked at it more as a long camping trip than a race. But year after year the support logistics matured and evolved, better equipment also came available, lessons learned in dog care and nutrition all grew to make the race more and more competitive.

And, you will hear survivors of those first years today talk with pride about how tough it was in the old days, but no one ever complains about the improvements, either.

It is a different race today. Tougher? Maybe, maybe not. When you figure the race usually took more than two weeks in those early years, now it's done in eight days. Racers may be better equipped, but they are going faster on less sleep too. Perhaps it's just a different kind of tough.

It's like the time my son complained about how hard sports practice was.  He thought by the time he was a senior it should be easier because he was better at it and knew more. I used the example of a sprinter.  His big goal is a 10-second hundred-yard dash. After he does it, do things get easier? No, they get harder, because now he wants to run a 9:98 and that is going to be even more difficult.

Safe to say, anybody who competes and finishes that race has accomplished something major in respect to the outside world and can take pride in it but that racer also can still tell next year's rookie how tough he had it last year.

Along with the heritage of Alaska, this book celebrates the accomplishment, for individuals and as a tremendous amount of teamwork in the group effort it takes to put on a race the magnitude of the Iditarod. Some of those original team members are responsible for producing this book

Iditarod: The First Ten Years website

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