A not uncommon look for an Iditarod Trail north of Rohn described decades ago as some of the consistently worst trail on the whole race /Craig Medred photo

Last Great Race again abandons historic trail

So now it has come down to this: 20 miles of bad trail is enough to send the event that bills itself as the “Last Great Race on Earth” scurrying for an easier-to-travel course along the Yukon River from Fairbanks to Nome rather than challenging the breadth of the 49th state.

The late Joe Redington, the driving force behind the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from its start in 1973, must be spinning in his grave. His two intents when the race began were to preserve the Alaska sled dog and the historic route of winter travel between the ice-free port of Seward and Nome, the city of the golden sands, on the edge of the Bering Sea.

The dogs he wanted to save are no more. They had too much fur and too much muscle. Well-muscled, long-haired dogs bred to pull heavy loads and curl up in the snow to sleep were years ago bred out of the Iditarod line in favor of speedier hounds that needed to wear jackets to protect them from the cold and beds of straw on which to sleep to stave off hypothermia.

Meanwhile, the trail was increasingly improved, and in some places groomed, to make it easier for these dogs to run faster. This has been a good thing in that the trail has attracted more and more snowmachine riders and racers plus fat bikers to help cement the historic route in place, but it has changed the sled-dog race in ways Redington could never have foreseen.

More than that, though, it has changed the nature of competition and of the competitors. Now, instead of being adventure racers, they want to be doggie Formula-1 drivers, and so the race course has yet again been moved to the smooth, flat surface of the Yukon River.

Instead of thinking about how to make the race easier, Iditarod organizers should be worrying about what happened to the now-extinct, six-day races once the most popular spectator sport in the United States, and how the Mount Marathon Race in Seward has survived for 97 years. 

Speed records haven’t kept Mount Marathon alive all of these years. The spectacle and the challenge are why the race has survived, and why it has become so popular ordinary runners have to enter a lottery to have a hope of being able to participate.

The Iditarod, instead of encouraging participation, has discouraged it. Would-be Iditarod mushers now have to invest a year or two of their time and jump through extremely expensive qualifying hoops to get into the race.

All the rules making participation difficult were supposed to make the race safer for the dogs. The reality of all the rules?

The Iditarod field of 38 “experienced” mushers last year was the second smallest ever and of the 608 dogs, three dogs died. That is the same number of dead dogs as in 2008 when the biggest field in history – 98 teams – hit the trail with 1,515 dogs in harness or more than twice as many as last year. And it’s way worse than the bigger fields of less experienced mushers that ran in the six of 10 races in the 1990s when one or fewer dogs died.

The move to Fairbanks will make the race easier and faster, but will it make it better, especially from a marketing standpoint? And for any sport, that matters.

The spectacle

The image of the Iditarod was defined by the “Last Great Race” label pinned on a competition of an Iditarod that was as much an adventure as it was race.

This was an event that could once boast that fewer people had made it from Anchorage to Nome on the runners of a dogsled than have made the summit of Mount Everest. It will now likely be able to make this boast forever, but not because it remains that hard to get to Nome on the runners of a sled but because so few people now bother to try.

Eight-hundred-sixty-one people reached the summit of Everest in 2024, almost 23 times as many as attempted the Iditarod.

What the Iditarod used to lack in numbers, it once made up for in media appeal, but that had disappeared as the race has become more and more focused on a few top competitors and the bumblers who helped to make the news fell away.

The stories that were once there aren’t there anymore.

What was the highlight of last year? Dallas Seavey’s shooting a moose that attacked his dog team, maybe? Or the three dead dogs, which isn’t exactly the sort of thing Iditarod wants the race remembered for? The good news this year is that there is little likelihood of a moose getting into a team.

What was the highlight of Iditarod 2023? Three mushers with family roots tracing back to Alaska Natives at the top of the finisher’s list?  A musher with an Iditarod-famous name becoming the first winner in his family’s history?  Hint: He was a member of the Redington clan. The Iditarod Trailbreakers reaching Nome well ahead of him to declare “it’s all important to keep the race going forward and keep the race going fast?”

The 2022 highlight? Well, that is a lot easier. That was Brent Sass, who is now driving dogs in Norway after #MeToo trouble in Alaska, getting blown off the trail along the Bering Sea Coast only to right his sled and mush to a dramatic and first Iditarod victory after a bunch of notable Iditarod failures.

There was a time when those sort of stories were the norm for Iditarod coverage, but they’ve faded away as the race has become ever faster and the amateurs involved ever fewer.

Maybe instead of restarting the race in Fairbanks this year to stage a Yukon River event as a lenghy Tour de France “sprint stage” sans a spring at the end, the Iditarod should just fly all the teams to Unalkleet and start the race there.

The run up and over the Blueberry Hills can sometimes prove treacherous as can the crossing of Norton Sound if the winds are howling and behind waits scenic “Little McKinley.”

This might make for more attractive video than hundreds of miles the Yukon where the only excitement likely to come is if some musher is inattentive enough to suffer severe frostbite as sometimes happens in the Alaska Interior if temperatures are cold enough.

The U.S. Climate Prediction Center is, however, posting strong odds temperatures will be above normal in Alaska for the first week of the race now starting March 3 in Fairbanks. Thus providing friendlier temperatures to go with a friendlier race course.

What more could a modern-day Iditarod “racer” ask for?

How we got here

It isn’t by accident that the Iditarod today, even when run on the traditional, 1,000-mile course from somewhere in the Anchorage area – Knik, Wasilla or Willow – over the Alaska Range to Nome, looks little like what it was in 1977 when England’s Daily Mail labeled it “The Last Great Race on Earth.”

This was a phrase Dail Mail columnist Ian Wooldridge would echo two years later as the commentator for an Iditarod episode on the BBC’s “The World About Us,” and a phrase which Iditarod race organizers would later borrow and trademark/copyright as “The Last Great Race.”

The BBC segment went heavy on the challenges of what was then a rudimentary, often-poorly marked trail north. A musher on arrival in the ghost town of Iditarod, halfway through the race, announced that “you stop breathing when you lose the trail, and you start breathing again when you find it,” and another observed in Unalkleet on the edge of the “remarkably unfrozen” Bering Sea “that there’s a thousand time in this race you wish a helicopter would come and just pluck you off the trail.”

Wooldridge’s ’77 column had been more about how difficult the race was for a journalist to cover and how dangerous. After a hairy flight through the cloud-covered Alaska Range, he wrote that “we were luckier than the Spanish television crew who struck a mountain face and died.”

But he did manage to capture the character of at least one of the main competitors back in the day and of Nome, writing that “the Iditarod was won by Rick Swenson. Next morning, I breakfasted with Rick.

“‘I’d like a large glass of milk,’ he said to a waitress. She screwed up her eyes against the smarting irritation of her own cigarette smoke and delivered an immortal line: ‘You kiddin’ or somethin’, all we serve here is whisky, gin or vodka.’

“Rick explained, unnecessarily, that Nome is not quite like other towns.”

That comment – blunt and honest – pretty well defined Swenson, whose observations were always intelligent if sometimes lacking any sense of public relations savvy. As the late June Leonard once observed when the tiny cabin which she and husband Gene shared served as the Iditarod checkpoint at Finger Lake, Swenson could be a real dick when he wasn’t the opposite.

The comment came just before Swenson entered the door of her then-crowded abode bringing a gift, as he always did, that lit up her face with a smile.  This was the good Rick. The pain-in-the-ass Rick was a former Minnesotan driven by a burning desire to be the best at anything he did.

That drive helped him claim five Iditarod titles over the course of three decades and beat 1978 champ Dick Mackey to the Nome finish line only to have Mackey declared the winner because Mackey’s lead dog crossed the line first.

When Swenson wasn’t winning, Iditarods in those years he was always in the hunt with other mushers looking over their shoulders hoping they could hold his team off until the finish line. Three times he came second and 17 times he finished in the top five between 1976 and 2001.

That and his bluntness – something modern mushers better trained in public relations avoid – kept him always in the news with some loving him, some hating him, and his attitude toward the real athletes left largely unrecognized.

There is no telling how many top-five finishes Swenson could have notched if he’d really tried. Twenty-four times between 1976 and 2004, Swenson finished in the Iditarod top-10, a record to which no other musher comes close. And this despite the fact that he invariably backed off on the stretch run along the Bering Sea coast to Nome if he’d decided victory was out of reach.

An old friend, the late Jerry Austin, noted that behavior and described Swenson as a “stupid, old, dog lover.” Swenson himself was more pragmatic, contending it didn’t make any sense to ask a dog team to give its all along the coast if there was no hope of victory.

Suffice it to say, the man was a complicated character like Redington before him and Susan Butcher after. Butcher was the woman who in 1986 booted Swenson from the throne of the king of the Iditarod Trail and then ruled over most male mushers for much of a decade.

Her inevitable feuding with Swenson, and an almost always difficult trail, annually provided material for plenty of Iditarod drama every March. It also pushed the Iditarod to its height of popularity in 1989 when Alaska Magazine, then a significant publication, plastered Butcher’s face on its front cover and Swenson’s on the back (or vice versa depending on a reader’s feelings about the two) and asked readers to “vote for your favorite.”

A defining rivalry

From 1986 to 1993, Butcher – the race runner-up in 1982 and 1984 – owned Swenson. She finished first four times in those years and was never worse than third.

In 1987, Swenson – who always preferred to chase rather than lead if possible on the Bering Sea coast – thought he had Butcher right where he wanted her. Their teams hit Safety, the last checkpoint only minutes apart. Swenson’s plan was to pass Butcher somewhere in the last 20 miles between there and Nome.

The plan didn’t work. His team quit. No matter how much Swenson petted and coaxed, nothing changed. Finally, at 9:15 a.m., he let them rest, went into the Roadhouse and famously ordered a Coke with a shot of whiskey.

“That’s embarrassing,” he said at the time. “I’ve never had that happen to me in my whole life.”

The next year, with a then Swiss musher chasing Butcher up the coast, a third-running Swenson told a UPI reporter that “493,000 people (roughly Alaska’s population at the time) want anyone but her to win. I know Martin Buser has a chance, but she’s got lots of experience. I’m hoping for him like anyone else, but I guess we’ll be stuck with this crap for another year.”

The chasing Swiss musher, Martin Buser, would later falter and Swenson would pass him to again finish second. His comments about Butcher, meanwhile, would add fuel to the fire of a race-defining rivalry.

A woman possibly even more driven to win than Swenson and often as cantankerous though way better at PR on the national level, Butcher – with help from partner and eventual husband Dave Monson – in the late-’80s revolutionized how the race was run and following on a precedent-setting victory by Libby Riddles hoisted Iditarod onto the international stage at a time when women’s sports were on the rise.

Thanks to Butcher, Alaska became the place where “Men Are Men and Women Win the Iditarod,” and the Iditarod became known to much of America as  “that race some woman wins every year.” Her bitter rivalry with Swenson in those years also helped set the stage for what might have been the greatest race in Iditarod history when Swenson in 1991 walked his team through a life-threatening storm on the last leg of the race along the Bering Sea coast in order to claim his fifth and final victory.

Butcher and a gang of other top mushers behind turned around fearing they might lose the trail and die in blowing snow and whiteout conditions that cut visibility to near zero at times. Swenson kept going, often at the front of his team, sometimes down his hands and knees to look for the scratches of snowmachine runners on ice to show him where the trail had been.

“I didn’t know she had turned around,” he told reporters at the finish. “But I wasn’t going to give up. I wasn’t going back. I was going to Nome and I knew I could do it….”

Then he added, in perfect Swenson character, that “maybe she’s gotten a bit soft with four victories under her belt.  She’s going to have to get six now if she wants to be the top dog.”

That was the Iditarod then. This is the Iditarod now:

Reality TV star Dallas Seavey comes through a 2014 storm to arrive on Nome’s Front Street with a race announcer on a loudspeaker shouting out to the crowd that Seavey is “making Iditarod history; let’s hear it for the Iditarod champ Dallas Seavey,” only for Seavey to claim he didn’t know he’d won.

“Why are you asking what did I do?” he tells Iditarod.com frontman Greg Heister at the finish line. Heister answers that “you just won the Iditarod two-thousand fourteen.” After which the conversation goes like this:

Seavey: “You’re kidding me.”

Heister: “Yes dude.”

Seavey: “There was my dad behind me, right?”

Interestingly, no mention was made of Aily Zirkle, the musher who’d been at the front of the race until she stopped at the Safety checkpoint to wait for the winds to ease. Seavey later claimed he never saw her team parked there, which makes it even more curious that he’d mention his dad at the finish line instead of asking the obvious question:

“What happened to Aily? She was in front of me.”

Was it real or was it reality TV? Only Seavey knows. But Iditarod.com did in 2021 admit to staging scenes for its online Iditarod “news” coverage with Seavey the actor. Still, there have been no confessions of such behavior in 2014.

Whatever the case, the race had clearly moved a long way on from what it was in the bad old days of Swenson, Butcher and Joe Redington and all those contenders with nicknames: The Shishmaref  Cannonball, the Canadian Cowboy Smith, the Flying Anderson Brothers, the Yukon Fox and more.

Real life characters

‘Redington, now known as the father of the Iditarod race, was born and bred a gypsy. Tagging after a father who off and on was a farmer, cattleman, roustabout, hunting guide and basketmaker, Redington spent some of his boyhood in the seamy parts of big cities and more of it in little towns like Kingfisher, Okla., Kintnersville, Pa. and Spearman, Texas,” Sports Illustrated’s Cole Phinizy wrote in 1976. “During World War II, when almost everybody settled down to his assigned task, Redington was as much a gypsy as ever. He started in the horse artillery, then got into a motorized unit, later became a flying sergeant and after that a paratrooper. From that lofty pinnacle he sidestepped into airborne artillery and finally saw action on le Shima at ground zero in a heavy tank battalion.”

Redington would never change. He was always an operator, sometimes a bit of a conman. When he found out the G.I. Bill, paid $100 a month to homesteading, livestock-owning, ex-servicemen taking husbandry courses, he enrolled in one although it was questionable whether his only animals – 46 dogs – qualified as livestock.

The milk from one of his nursing bitches did, however, help him win a milk competition because of the high concentration of protein and butterfat, Phinizy reported. Redington always has some scheme or another going with Iditarod being a part of one.

He turned breeding and selling sled dogs, leading sled-dog tours and helping to train would-be mushers into a business, and a thriving Iditarod was good for that business. The Iditarod is no longer thriving and Redington is long gone.

So, too, Butcher who quit the race to start a family and died prematurely in 2006. Swenson, meanwhile, turned his back on the Iditarod shortly after Seavey was discovered to have a doped team in 2016.

Good luck on tracking the once Iditarod-dominant musher down for a comment on the Iditarod’s decision to again this year abandon the Iditarod Trail in favor of a run down the Yukon River from Fairbanks to Nome because of 20 miles of tough sledding.

But Swenson-Butcher era trail mate Duane “Dewey” Halverson, a one-time Iditarod runner-up and for years a major contender, did question being “worried about 20 miles of trail with dog teams that are more than happy to slow down when commanded to do so. Especially if that section is run during the heat of the day.

“I call that an opportunity to flex your control/training of your dog team in conjunction with trail conditions. I call that adapting and (converting) a bad-trail situation into an out-of-the box race strategy.”

Halverson did, however, add that he didn’t want to be seen as a “way back in my day guy” given how Iditarod has changed. And it is changed. It is questionable how many of today’s Iditarod mushers could get a team “to slow down when commanded to do so.”

The race is nothing like it was during the early years when some mushers were still running trapline dogs that were trained to go and, more importantly, stop on command. A lot of that training has been abandoned.

The dogs of Jessie Holmes, another reality TV star and now Iditarod contender, were so uncontrolled that when they got off their chains in Wasilla in April 2022, he couldn’t call them back. He didn’t manage to round them up after they jumped a 15-pound Havanese pet named Lucky tethered in his owner’s yard.

Lucky’s owner later turned to Facebook to describe how Holmes got his dogs back:

“I saw Lucky being attacked by a group… of dogs and when I tried to stop the attack, the dogs were aggressive and would not allow me to approach,” Liza Tulio McCafferty wrote. “The owner was standing at the top of the hill watching. It wasn’t until I started screaming for help and telling him to retrieve his dogs, did he come down to get his dogs. He was not initially able to get control of his dogs. Eventually, he was able to retrieve Lucky and placed him on our deck. Lucky was unresponsive and his intestines were hanging out. His neck was gouged and was bloodied from the attack; he was dead.”

Aggressive dogs generally weren’t tolerated on the trapline because if you have to live with such animals every day they become a headache. As Central Alaska musher Julie Collins observed in Fur-Fish-Game magazine in 2012, “we value big, tough, laid-back huskies for trapping. But such sled dogs are a rare commodity these days, when most mushers demand speed. Today’s intense 30- to 60-pound sled dogs don’t much resemble our heavy-coated, big-boned working dogs.”

Some Iditarod dogs are only marginally socialized these days – former Iditarod champ Sass had a prized lead dog killed by other dogs in his team after they chewed loose from their gangline and attacked while the team was parked during a training run, an event he then tried to cover up – and many aren’t trained to come when called.

That latter issue led the Iditarod to adopt a rule requiring that “all dogs must be physically tethered at all times.” It came over the objections of four-time champ Buser, a musher who has long taken great pride in his dog training skills as well as his dog driving ability. He appeared before the board to argue against such a rule in 2011.

“Buser passed around photos to show his dogs loose in checkpoints,” the Iditarod board minutes from that time reflect. “He urged the Board not to pass reactionary rules and rules that were not good for the dogs. He noted that just because every musher can’t turn his/her dogs loose in the checkpoint isn’t a reason that those who can not be allowed to do so. He asked the Board to reconsider the rule that was recently passed that required that dogs be tethered at all times. He asked that the evolution of the sport not be stifled.”

Buser was ignored as have been those who have warned against the Iditarod losing the spirit of a race vested in the struggles of mushers and dogs overcoming wilderness obstacles. The Iditarod managers of today don’t seem to under that the race’s marketability depends on more than a race to see who can get to Nome the fastest.

If someone wants to get to Nome fast, they can take a snowmachine. The racers in the Iditarod-trail-sharing Iron Dog can get there in a couple of days – not seven or eight – even with mandated rest stops along the way.

Speed might be an inherent part of the Iditarod. This is afterall a race. But speed alone was not meant to be the beating heart of the Iditarod. The beating heart might better be described by an old report from along the trail that can be found in the 1988-89 archives.

The report records a group of six mushers teaming up to help Don Burt, a long-time

Iditarod volunteer who’d rolled a 350-pound Polaris snowmachine into Dalzell Creek in the days when getting through the Dalzell Gorge was a significant challenge.

The archives record that “it was snowing a heavy, wet snow when on the fourth day of the race (Burt) left Rainy Pass and then entered the Dalzell Gorge at a narrow entrance about 12 feet wide.  He saw open water, so he drove over an ice ridge on one side.  The bridge gave way and suddenly the snowmachine was upside down in three and half feet of water. 

“He stood on top of the snowmachine track and waited knowing that mushers would soon be coming through the gorge.  Jan Masek arrived and began to help Burt.  Jerry Austin, Lavon Barve, Susan Butcher, and Jacques Philip soon arrived as well.  Snow was shoveled and mushers helped upright the snowmachine.

“Don took a short break, poured water out of his bunny boots, wrung the water out of his socks, and went back to work.  One of the mushers hooked his dog team to the snowmachine.  The other mushers got behind the snowmachine and pushed.  Jerry Austin helped get the snowmachine going and Burt drove it slowly up the steep hill.

“‘When I reached the top, I looked down and all the mushers were clapping and cheering. I thought I had made it but there wasn’t much snow and I didn’t get much traction,’ (Burt said. ‘Then I rolled over the edge and turned over and over four times before settling on the slushy bottom.’ To the rescue, Rick Swenson, who hooked his snowhook to the snowmachine and pulled it up a steep hill, sideways.”

In today’s Iditarod, the race leaders might be way more image-conscious than Swenson, Butcher or the rest ever thought of be, but the days of front-running mushers stopping to help pull some trail-breaker’s snowmachine out of a creek are long gone.

None of the serious contenders are going to alter their “race schedule” for that. On the way to an Iditarod-record sixth victory last year, Seavey didn’t even want to alter his race schedule to deal with a dog badly injured after a moose stomped through his team.  Seavey shot and killed the moose.

Because he also didn’t want to slow down to oversee the salvage of the animal’s carcass as required by Iditarod rules, he also ended up being penalized two hours for breaking a rule. He managed to nicely work the penalty into his rest-run schedule for the race and won the Iditarod going away.  

Luckily, the injured dog survived. Three others didn’t in a race marred by an unprecedented number of dead dogs for such a small field of competitors, the second smallest in race history. Those deaths have yet to be explained with the Iditarod in October announcing only that the causes of death in all three cases were “undetermined.”

The race has since moved on from worrying about dead dogs and is actively promoting the Fairbanks restart and a trip down the flat, frozen surface of the Yukon River as necessary for the “safety of all participants – including the dogs, mushers, and volunteers,” although mainly the route change is about the top mushers who lobbied for a faster trail.

As far as the dogs are concerned, the problem with bad trail – a “20-mile stretch just before the Salmon River, 20 miles from Nikolai,” according to an Iditarod statement – had an easy enough solution. All the Iditarod had to do was make an announcement like this:

“The 20 miles of bad trail before the Salmon River has created some concerns about possible injuries to the dogs. Accordingly, we are establishing a speed limit of 5 mph through this section of trail to encourage mushers to walk their teams. This section of trail will be marked at the beginning and end, and mushers will be informed that anyone completing it in less than four hours will be penalized. Given that we have constant GPS tracking of the teams, we can calculate when they enter and leave this section of trail. Anyone who makes the run in less than four hours will at their 24-hour rest be assessed a time penalty equal to any amount of time under 4 hours, plus a 25 percent increase to make it clear that the race committee means what it has said about a 5 mph speed limit.”

Such a statement would make the Iditarod look like it really is “all about the dogs” as it now claims even though such a speed limit probably isn’t necessary. This section of the trail in question is nowhere near as challenging as that from Finger Lake to Puntila Lake or from Puntilla Lake up over Rainy Pass to Rohn.

The late Don Bowers, in a still-used trail guide, described the first 20 miles out of Rohn “as some of the consistently worst trail on the whole race,” but that is no longer the case. Much of the worst part of that trail was turned into a fire road during the Turquoise Lake fire in 2010. 

This first 20 miles of trail also ends near Farewell Lake where the trail climbs into some low, wooded hills and winds it way to an old buffalo camp about 30 miles from the Salmon River. Today, as when Bowers wrote his trail guide, this section is “mostly level plain for the rest of the way to Nikolai.”

The trail problem here, as was often the case in the past, is a lack of snow to cover the many patches of tussocks which make running on the trail a little like running on giant cobblestones. Before the old Farewell Burn grew back, this stretch of trail was often swept free of snow and bare making the tussocks a nightmare.

Reporters in the 1980s were drawn to Nikolai or McGrath to record the horror stories of mushers who made their way through this tussock-filled stretch. This appears to be the problem again this year, but the trail is better now than in the 1980s given the Iditarod once pulled a drag through the area to knock down the tussocks and the Bureau of Land Management built a bridge in the middle of nowhere over Sullivan Creek, which flows open no matter cold the temperatures.

The bridge is about 10 miles from what the BLM calls the “Bear Lake Cabin” to the east of the Iditarod Trail and about 10 miles from the Salmon River. As Bowers described, the approach to the bridge “has some nasty blind turns and a couple of ditches that are often open (water). Just take it easy in this area and you’ll be across with no problem.”

“Take it easy” is, however, easier with a dog team trained to slow down than one trained to always run as fast as possible.

“After Sullivan Creek, the trail continues to wind generally west-northwest, in and out of treelines. There may be minor seepage-type overflow from the adjacent muskeg on some stretches, but it normally isn’t much problem,” Bowers added.

He also described Sullivan Creek itself as “too deep to ford,” but as someone who went wading in the creek to free a companion’s snowmachine in the years before the bridge was built, this reporter can attest to the creek being fordable as well as to the problems caused by soaking yourself from the waist down and filling your boots with water at 40 degrees below zero.

That the trail almost everywhere is today vastly better than in the early 1980s is part of the story of what has become of the trail in general. It has been steadily improved over the years and sometimes rerouted to make it ever more of a “race course” and less of a wilderness adventure.

Gone completely is the run from Knik or Wasilla to the Flathorn Lake with its tight twists and turns and some nasty downhills. So, too, the trek across the Dismal Swamp to the Susitna River and across the river into the woods.

The historic trail that snaked north from the Susitna through the sometimes bitterly cold forest to Rabbit Lake and then on to Skwentna was long ago abandoned in favor of the smooth, groomed surface of the Susitna and Yentna rivers. And eventually the Iditarod restart was moved north to Willow to ensure a quick entry onto a well-traveled and maintained snowmachine trail along those rivers to Skwenta.

Beyond Skwentna, there was always pretty good trail across the big muskegs and few patches of woods to Finger Lake, and it is even better trail now thanks to more snowmachine traffic. At Finger Lake, though, the adventure once began with a steep, narrow and winding descent to Red Lake, where Swenson once complained ABC’s Wide World of Sports would wait at night to turn on its floodlights in the eyes of descending dog teams to cause mushers to crash.

That trail was widened and smoothed over the years, and so to the trail along the frozen beaver ponds and creeks from there to the fabled “Happy River Steps.”

In the early years of the race, the Steps caused some spectacular crashes, but year by year Iditarod trail-breaking crews became better and better at building the route down to the river and what was once a dreaded obstacle along the trail became more of a demarcation point for the start of the climb to Puntilla Lake where some difficult side-hilling could still cause problems.

(You can get something of a taste of the original trail at 31:10 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqmeZ7YdJdU. The old, Wide World of Sports films of the race are, unfortunately, nowhere to be found online.)

From Puntilla Lake to Rainy Pass, the trail was never all that difficult unless the winds started to howl in the Upper Happy River valley, but from the Pass on, a the route that was in 1910-11 described as “fraught with hardships” become ever easier – moved up onto a hillside to avoid “sled-buster rock” and once back in the gorge north of the creek, rebuilt for each year’s race with ever better bridges where the trail snaked across Dalzell Creek from one side of the gorge to the other.

No more did mushers find themselves stopping to cut brush to throw down into the flowing waters to fill the space between the icy banks on either side so they could get their sleds across.

Still, the trail remained nasty in places even then beyond Rohn. There was the so-called “buffalo tunnel,” an opening through stunted spruce so narrow that if a musher even tilted the sled the wrong way he or she risked the handlebar being ripped off.

And then came the “glacier,” a cascading platform of overflow ice that sometimes stalled teams and forced mushers to work together to get over it, and after that the windswept and tussocked filled Farewell Burn, once the sight of Alaska’s largest wildfire, where the trail often alternated between steep, rockhard snowdrifts the sled would bang into and snow-free tussocks patches into which it would descend.

The buffalo tunnel was widened to end the sled-breaking carnage. A new trail was built to bypass the glacier. The trees grew back in the Burn to lessen the drifts. And the Iditarod took a shot at trying to mechanically knock down the tussocks with machinery although the trail remains tussocky to this day.

The bridge at Sullivan Creek was a big improvement, too. Beyond it, thanks to local snowmachine traffic,  a musher was almost guaranteed good trail to Nikolia and from there on to McGrath, Takota and the old mining camp of Ophir where the trail set off into a wilderness now so desolate and wild that it is almost scary.

This was the region labeled the “Inland Empire” at the height of gold mining days when the riches flowed from the various camps into the now ghost town of Iditarod where it could be moved by dog team to Seward.

In 1910, a former stagecoach driver from the Black Hills of North Dakota led a gang of dog teams “from Iditarod (to) Seward with a quarter million dollars worth of gold lashed to his dogsled,” the Iditarod Historic Trail Alliance records. “The scene was set for a spectacular robbery, but the 63-year-old Griffis knew that the Alaskan winter was deterrent enough to robbers.

“Thirty-seven days later, his three teams and their guards arrived unscathed in Seward. Until World War I, Griffis protected the Iditarod gold trains carrying up to $1 million worth (the inflation-corrected equivalent of about $31 million today) of gold on their annual trek to Seward. It is to his credit that the gold was never stolen. (Not until 1922 was a gold shipment stolen – $30,000 worth (nearly a $1 million equivalent today) by a roadhouse operator and his confederate, an Iditarod prostitute.)”

Back in those days, there was a roadhouse about every 20 miles along the trail. By the 1930s, they were gone as the Alaska Railroad connection from Seward to Nome and the ever-increasing use of airplanes in the north replaced dog teams. Today, it’s hard to even find ruins along the trail.

And now, as Joe Redington once feared, snowmachines have largely replaced dog teams along the trail. Dog teams are now rarely found in Alaska villages, in part because of the cost of dog food, and the dog teams of the Iditarod abandon the trail for an easier route when the going gets tough.

Not so the snowmachine racers.

While the Iditarod decided to tuck its tail between its legs and go to Fairbanks to start a race down the Yukon River, the Iron Dog racers not only made the run up the trail to Nome, but pushed beyond Nome to Kotzebue before turning around to come back through Nome and follow the Iditarod Trail back to Big Lake, near Willow, for a Saturday finish.

Race winners Robby Schachle and Brad George told the Frontiersman, a Palmer-Wasilla area newspaper, that there was a 50-mile stretch of trail between Rohn and Nikolai that was badly lacking snow, which most modern snowmachines need to their tracks to spin onto under seat heat exchangers to provide cooling for their liquid-cooled engines. But this didn’t seem to slow them down much in an era when snowmachine racers have become the hardmen of the Iditarod Trail.

Or maybe the new, true hardmen (and women) are the fat-tired cyclists in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, 27 of whom are now on the Iditarod Trail and bound for Nome.

They were among the 92 endurance athletes, most of them cyclists, who set off up the trial over the weekend with most bound for McGrath and the finish line of the ITI 350.

A former 350 winner, Tyson Flaherty from Fairbanks, made it there in 44 hours and 50 minutes, the second-fastest time in race history.

“Folks are reporting fantastic (trail) conditions, so everyone, including the frontrunners, has been moving quickly,” Rugile Kaladyte reported from McGrath for Bikepacking.com.

The Invitational, which includes cross-country skiers and runners as well as cyclists in the field, has been ever growing; the Iditarod steadily shrinking.

One can’t even begin to imagine what John “Ironman” Johnson or, for that matter, Joe Redington might make of all this were they still alive today. But it is worth considering that great sporting events – like those six-day races once were – don’t just up and die, they most often slowly fade away.