Tuckered out cyclist Jay Petervary recovering in a cabin at the Rainy Pass Lodge a decade ago/Craig Medred photo

The “Last Toughtest Race” underway

With minimal fanfare, what has become the Iditarod Trail’s biggest sporting event launched north on the trail Sunday, a day after the winners of the second biggest Iditarod event – the Iron Dog snowmachine race – wrapped up a 1,000 mile run to Nome followed by another 1,000-mile jaunt back along the trail to Kaltag and then up the frozen Yukon River to Fairbanks.

For the fourth-time in the last six years, the Palmer-Wasilla duo of Tyler Aklestad and Nick Olstad led a parade of Iron Dog teams across the finish. More than 16 of those teams, each comprised of two competitors for safety, would have crossed the finish line before the Iditarod Trail Invitational mob put wheels, skis and feet on the trail.

Both of these races now dwarf the much better-known Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in size. Only 34 mushers – not counting the Epstein-linked billionaire who bought his way into the event with a nearly $300,000 donation and his guide – will tow line for the March 7 start of that race.

More than three times as many competitors started the Invitational, including past winner Jay Petervary, who is lucky to be alive to do so, and within the next day or two, almost three times as many are expected to finish an Iron Dog that started with 116 racers as will begin the Iditarod dog race.

We are in a different world now than we were in the 20th Century in so many ways.

The Idiarod starting field once pushed near 100, and the Iron Dog was a smash-em, bash-em event where it was common for half or more of the field to fail to finish either due to crashes, mechanical failures or injuries to the drivers.

There were a variety of factors that drove this shift, the big one being technology.

Today’s snowmachines are far more durable than those of yesteryear, and they are – and this is a big thing – much kinder to the rider. Sophisticated suspension systems have taken a lot of the pounding out of snowmobiling, as the rest of the world calls what Alsakans call snow machining.

Better, more comfortable machines have also served to make snowmachines the cars and trucks of winter in rural Alaska, where frozen rivers, streams and lakes have long served as roads. The change this brought mirrors the change that motor vehicles brought to the rest of America.

A snowmachine “parking lot” outside an Alaska village school/Facebook

As the machines got better, people drove them evermore. Sadly for America’s public health, some people now go nowhere without the help of a machine because urban designers began designing cities and suburbs for motor vehicles instead of for people and because, let’s face it, Americans are the fundamentally laziest people in the world.

A significant number of them think anything more than 100 feet is too far to walk across a parking lot to get to a store and will circle a lot for a long time looking for a spot within their walking range, and it only gets worse on the streets of some major cities, where disagreements over who gets parking spaces have led to brawls. 

The machines that made our lives better have, in some ways, altered human behavior for the worst, and they have brought changes to the Iditarod Trail and travel on it that cannot be ignored.

That thin, white, winter snake through the wilderness that becomes a “trail” only after the snow flies is a way different animal today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and way, way different than it was when the dogsled race started all the Iditarod madness in 1973.

A changing trail

For a decade, the dogs pretty much had the trail to themselves even though this was changing fast due to a 1970s explosion of interest in Lower 48 snowmobiling that at one point created a large, motorsport racing scene and lured 100 different manufacturers to start building sleds. 

The Winnipeg to St. Paul I-500 Snowmobile Race, which covered 590 miles from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to Saint Paul, Minn., in the 1970s attracted, at its peak, 385 racers to what SnoWest magazine described as a “grueling course,” a label that would later be attached to the Iditarod dog race.

A lack of snow stopped the I-500 in 1980, and it eventually faded away. But the races of the 1970s remain a big deal that mirrored the Iron Dog races of the 1980s and 1990s.

“The 1975 running of the Winnipeg to St. Paul I-500 was famously difficult; of the 374 sleds that started, just 22 would finish the race three days later,” Silodrome, a webzine of “gasoline culture” records.

Competitions with these sorts of results drove constant technological innovations that made snowmobiles better and better and better. The benefits of better technology trickled north to Alaska, and the sleds soon created a whole new set of winter trails north of Anchorage in the sprawling Susitna River valley, with the Iditarod Trail chief among these.

Enter the late Joe Redington, the father of the dog race and the biggest Iditarod Trail booster the 48th state ever knew. He was always looking to get more people on the trail, knowing full well that the best way to cement it in place was to make it popular.

Thus he threw his weight behind several Iditaevents that California ultracyclist and ultra-race organizer Chris Kostman would later call “a string of human-powered, gruelathon, knock-offs, starting with a 200-mile Iditaski in 1983 and a 100-mile Iditashoe for snowshoers in 1986 for winter sports enthusiasts.

Biking on snow was then in its infancy, but there were already people who’d recognized the opportunity offered by the increasing number of snowmachine-packed trails and had begun riding them.

This wasn’t exactly new, either. Winter biking in Alaska had been somewhat common on the frozen rivers of the Interior during Goldrush days, but it was about to witness a revolution.

The late Terrence Cole’s history of the first winter cyclists in Alaska

In those first years of human-powered sports on the Iditarod Trail, however, skiing and snowshoeing remained big things, at least by the standards of a sparsely populated land with long, dark winters and a certain appreciation for those who could endure.

Shawns Lyons, a colorful Anchorage character, became Alaska famous for dominating the snowshoe race from its beginning nearly to its end. He won the race nine times before snowmachines killed it by packing a trail so hard and firm that snowshoes became clackety-clack inconveniences that disturbed the silence of the long winter nights for people hiking on the trail.

The snowshoe race eventually transitioned into a foot race in which competitors could wear whatever they wanted on their feet. Some now carry snowshoes for conditions where they think the webs might prove useful; others don’t, thinking the webs nothing but excess weight needing to be packed along the trail.

As for the skiers, they held on in force for years after Dan Bull, another true Alaska character, added the Iditabike to the mix in 1987, and later helped pull the skiers, snowshoers, bikers and more into the one big tent of the “Iditasport Human Powered Ultra-Marathon.”

Bull created the “Iditarod Extreme” to extend the 100- and 200-mile snowshoe and ski races then staged in the valleys of the Susitna and Yentna rivers up over the Alaska Range to the community of McGrath. This would become the norm for the race in the years to follow.

Bull also actively promoted competition between the skiers and the newcomer cyclists, and by the end of the 1990s had grown Iditasport into a three-headed monster – bike, ski and run – that attracted 165 competitors, more than are now allowed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management permit required for staging competitions on the Iditarod National Historic Trail.

Iditasport reached its peak in 2001 when Bull signed Red Bull as a major race sponsor. Yes, that Red Bull; the energy drink company now valued at something more than $22 billion and heavily involved in sports promotion around the globe.

In 2001, Bull also altered the format of the race and offered prize money for the winner of an Iditasport race to Finger Lake, an Iditasport Extreme race to McGrath, and an Iditasport Impossible race for the full 1,000 miles to Nome.

Fairbanks skier Bob Baker beat the bikes to Finger Lake to win the Iditasport. His victory would mark the last time that happened in any of the Iditasport races.

Pat Irwin from Tennessee, who was then building a bike shop business in Anchorage, won the Extreme, and Colorado’s Mike Curiak, who was destined to become another Iditarod Trail legend, claimed victory in Nome.

All of them struggled to collect the promised prize money, and none of them ever reported getting very much of it. Curisak said he was just happy that Bull carefully packed his bike after the race and paid to ship it back to Colorado.

Shortly after the race, Bull faked his death and fled the state. It was then revealed that the Anchorage owner of a moving business had some big financial and personal problems. He’s now reported to be living at an undisclosed location in Washington state.

His legacy, however, has lived on in Alaska, although it no longer looks anything like a competition between skiers and cyclists.

Even when the modern version of Iditapsort becomes a pushathon rather than a ride, the are skiers find themselves left behind/Craig Medred photo

Rise of the wheel

According to archeologists, the wheel was invented about 6,000 years ago, and wherever there were surfaces on which it could roll, it replaced the skid – of which the ski is but one variation – because rolling friction is a fraction of sliding friction up until the point a wheel bogs down in mud, sand or snow.

Thus Iditaskiers had an advantage over Iditabikers only so long as trails were soft and the bikers were on narrow tires that cut into even packed snow rather than rolling atop it.

Unfortunately for the skiers, it didn’t take the wheelmen long to figure this out. Steve Baker of the long-defunct Alaska’s Icicle Bicycles welded together two standard mountain-bike rims in 1988 on which to mount a wider tire for better flotation on snowmobile trails.

At the start of the 1990s, Simon Rakower of Fairbanks arranged for the production of  44mm wide “Snowcat” rims, which ruled the Alaska snows for most of that decade. But rims and tires were destined to get ever wider.

Down in New Mexico, Ray Molina, a rider of soft desert sands who’d ridden the soft snow of Alaska on Snowcats in 1996 and left disappointed by their performance, cut some in half and welded them back together to create an 80mm wide.

This became the prototype for the Remolino rim, which helped turn a once ski-dominated event into a cycling extravaganza. The cross-country skiers who once ruled the race were destined to become a novelty.

The cyclists quickly passed then and by 2014, were threatening to overtake the dogs. Fairbanks’ Jeff Oatley that year rode the 1,000 miles from Knik to Nome in 10 days, 2 hour and 53 minutes.  The time was so fast it would have won every Iditarod dog race prior to 1995. And it was a time 12 hours faster than that which won the dog race for Jessie Holmes last year. 

Holmes was slowed by some bad trail, but there is no doubt that the Iditarod isn’t as competitive as it once was either. This is what happens as racing events lose participants and/or stature, or as technology changes the game.

Times change. Sporting events change. It is evolution

There were only eight skiers among the 121 people who started the  Invitational this year. And as this was written, the fastest of them, Fairbanks’ Tucker Costain, a former cross-country runner for the University of Montana and the 2025 winner of the Invitational’s ski class, was already 72 miles behind race leader Justinas Leveika, a Norwegian cyclist nearing the 150-mile mark. 

Rise, fall and rise

.The Iditasport, with its classes for skiers, snowshoers, cyclists, skijorers (skiers pulled by a dog or dogs) and even a triathlete category for those choosing to ski, snowshoe and bike, died with Bull’s financial implosion and was reborn as the Invitational with bike, ski and foot classes.

Then it began growing once more.

The same might be said for an Iron Dog race that was on the ropes near the end of the last decade.  It reorganized, regrouped and started growing once more. Now, like the Invitational, it is up against the limit on competitors set by U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Meanwhile, the Iditarod dog race is so far from its permitted limit that the number is irrelevant.

There are reasons for this, too. The costs of competing in the Invitational or even the Iron Dog are a fraction of the costs of competing in the Iditarod, especially for people living Outside of Alaska, who must meet costly Iditarod qualifying standards along with covering the inherently high costs of keeping and training a dog team or leasing one from an Alaska musher.

Some were once happy to engage in this financial struggle to try to claim the distinction of becoming one of the few, the proud to make it to Nome in the self-branded “Last Great Race.” But the Iditasport and the Invitational cut into that brand by bringing a new group of tough guys and gals to the finish line in Nome.

In 2018, a group of them struggling through a ground blizzard along the Bering Sea Coast just outside of Nome paused to help some stranded Iditarod dog mushers, saw to it that the duo would be safe enough until rescuers arrived and then pushed on into the storm as if out for a walk in the park.

Such occurrences have taken some of the shine off what it means to be a tough, old Iditarod musher, and transfer it elsewhere. The Invitational is now something of a go-to for middle-aged athletes from the Lower 48 and Europe looking for an ultimate adventure to impress their friends or just themselves.

Seventy-six percent of this year’s competitors hail from the Lower 48 states or another country, and the best marketing the Invitational gets comes in the stories they tell their local news organizations when they go home.

The dog race might want to take note. It’s badly short on new blood again this year. There are only two mushers from Outside, one from New Hampshire and the other from Massachusetts, joining long-time veteran Jesse Royer of Montana in the starting field. And the only foreign mushers (not counting the Norwegians) are two Canadians, one of whom – Michele Phillips, who runs a sled-dog tour business at Tagish Lake in the Yukon Territory – is back for her 14th race.

Why? Because she can’t help herself.

No great fame

None of these races is all that prestigious in the 21st Century. None can survive anymore on the promise of generating fame as was the case with the Iditarod after Libby Riddles became the first woman to win. She subsequently became an international celebrity.

The late Susan Butcher then followed Riddles into the winner’s circle to cement in place the idea that Alaska is “Where Men and Women Win the Iditarod.” The Iditarod reached its peak in the public eye as a battle of the sexes raged in the years that followed.

It has now been 36 years since a woman won. The Iditarod has lost that catchet. Meanwhile, the ever increasing number of Invitational competitors pushing on for the full 1,000 miles to Nome (23 are headed there this year) has taken some of the shine off the Iditarod’s claim to being “The Last Great Race.”

And, of course, all real Americans love motosports of any kind to the benefit of the Iron Dog.

(As a personal aside here, having snowmachined the Iditarod Trail to Nome, having traveled significant parts of it on foot or skis and some small parts by bike, and having covered a lot of Iditarod dog races and personally run dogs for years, I’d still argue that the Iditarod, in general, remains The Last Great Race.  But only becuase of the difficulty of keeping a dog team in shape both physically and mentally for 1,000 miles. That’s way, way harder than it looks. Getting yourself moving is only a matter of willpower. The one exception I would make is for Oatley and Phil Hofstetter, who made it to Nome almost as fast as Oatley, and whoever follows in their wheel tracks. To grind away day after day at the speeds they did while short on sleep and with the fatigue level ever rising is mindboggling. That is truly an effort at a “Last Great Race” level.)

Which is not to downplay the difficulty of the Invitational.

For the fat-tired cyclists, who make up by far the biggest group of competitors in Alaska’s “Tour de Remote,” there are bigger challenges to be faced than climbing into the Alps and Pyrenees during the Tour de France. Frostbite, hypothermia, potential avalanches, thin ice, open water flowing despite temperatures down to 30 or 40 degrees below zero, stalking wolves and angry bison are all on the list in Alaska.

The spectacle of the other, world-famous Tour is, on the other hand, nowhere to be found. There is a good reason for this, too, and it is the same one that threatens the future of the better-known, far more costly to stage Iditarod dog race:

Money.

The Invitational lacks a solid base for financial support. There are no cities and villages with funds and a wish to promote themselves as in France. The first third of the race has only two clusters of people that can even be called communities, and most of the villages along the route, with only a couple of exceptions, have no real economies.

Thus they have little to offer the race other than the welcoming embrace of a warm place to sleep when temperatures fall far below zero, something they do with an overwhelming friendliness.

Meanwhile, the market for fat bikes isn’t big enough to draw in any serious bike industry interest in promotion. And the gear worn in the Invitational – similar as it is to that worn by others engaged in outdoor winter sports – attracts only a little sponsorship funding, because the money there is arguably better spent on more popular sports or competitors in them or on more visually “extreme” athletes.

Some Burton jacketed dude flying off a cliff on a snowboard looks a whole lot more exciting than some guy pushing a bike through a blizzard, if anyone gets video of the biker at all given the lack of media interest in covering any of these Alaska events.

Who can blame the media? The logistics make coverage costly, difficult and often uncomfortable. This isn’t the Tour with the good food and wine of France. Not to mention the guarantee of a hotel with clean sheets at the end of the day.

Crawling into a tree well under the overhanging branches of a spruce tree to ease into an old, down sleeping bag without pulling in too much snow to dampen a few hours’ sleep is not how most modern journos want to end a day of covering anything.

Which is not to suggest there aren’t some more than adequate places to stop along some sections of the trail. A personal shout out here to the Yentna Station Roadhouse, the Skwenta Roadhouse, and the Rainy Pass Lodge, where I enjoyed many a decent meal, sometimes late at night or in the wee hours of the morning when most businesses would be shut down, while covering this race in past years.

And particularly to Carl and Kirsten Dixon, an internationally renowned chef, who for a long time owned Winterlake Lodge adjacent to the Finger Lake checkpoint and invited me in like a high-paying guest rather than some journalistic interloper, with Carl often happy to crack a very good bottle of wine.

(Winterlake was one of the few places along the trail where I enjoyed that luxury, or paused to grab more than a few hours of sleep. Enjoying a couple glasses of wine was a good excuse to spend more time in bed, given that steering a snowmachine north from there on the regularly bad trail to Puntilla Lake with even slightly diminished capabilities is even dumber than walking from the bar out to your car or truck after one too many).

Back on the trail

But now we’re off the trail in this story, with Winterlake being a good place to get back on the trail, because that is where the real “fun” starts for everyone in every one of these Iditarod races.

From Finger Lake, the Iditarod drops down a steep and snaky trail to Red Lake, winds its way around the edge of that waterbody prone to overflow, and then heads east for the Happy River on what can be a pleasant cruise through a winter wonderland or a visit to a snowy hell, all depending on the trail conditions.

And this is pretty much the story from there to Nikolai, 140 miles to the north. There have been years with deep snow slowing snowmachines and dogs and forcing cyclists to group into pushathons (the Invitational’s slow-moving version of a peloton) for tens and tens of miles.

In 2009, heavy snow bogged the race down for days in Rainy Pass when then-race organizer Bill Merchant’s heavy-weight, go-anywhere, pig of a snowmachine couldn’t punch through. Three years later, snow slowed the race so much that runner, walker, snowshoer Tim Hewitt led the race to Rainy Pass.

Then again, there have been years with tens and tens and tens of miles of trail with little or no snow that made fat-tired cyclists wish for even faster rolling mountain bikes, while mushers and snowmachiners, who need snow for their runners and for intercoolers on the sleds with water-cooled engines cursing, were left cursing; and skiers were forced to take off their skis and walk.

Anchorage cyclist Bill Fleming on a not uncommon, snow-free stretch of the Iditarod Trail north of the Alaska Range/Craig Medred photo

There’s snow

Ok, so the good news for almost everyone this year was and is that there is snow, and not too much unpacked snow. Or at least there wasn’t at the start of the Invitational.

The snowy blip in the weather passed days before the race began and a white sidewalk welcomed the lead riders. As this was written at midday Monday, the temperature was reported to be 23 degrees beneath cloudy skies in Skwentnawith a similar temperature reported at Puntilla Lake beneath cloudy skies along the trail ahead.

Race leader Leveika was already through Finger Lake and on his way to Puntilla with a 7.5 mph average speed, indicating that he’d found firm trail allowing him to ride almost all the way since the start. His 8-minute-per-mile pace might seem slow, but one has to remember the trail climbs almost steadily from the Susitna-Yentna rivers confluence to Rainy Pass with a lot of ups and downs thrown in from Finger to Puntilla.

Leveika is on a pace that would allow him to reach McGrath in less than two days.  Defending champ Tyson Flaharty from Fairbanks, a three-time winner of the hotly contested Invivational 350, made it from Knik to McGrath in 1 day, 20 hours and 53 minutes last year, leaving him just two hours shy of a record that then Anchorage-resident John Lackey set in 2015 with near-perfect trail conditions.

Leveika, however, appears to be heading into less-than-perfect trail conditions. The National Weather Service report for Puntilla today said this:

Denver 7 News two months later reported that the cyclist had been riding along a straight section of a rural country road in broad daylight at “midday when (the) 16-year-old driver tried to pass him and then hit the bike. The driver was ticketed for careless driving.”

The crash broke Petervary’s wrist, elbow and back. The bone in his upper arm was snapped in half. He was taken to a nearby hospital in serious condition.

What happened to the driver has never been reported.

“At this point, the driver who hit White has not been charged,” the TV station reported. “Denver7 checked in with the Colorado State Patrol and the 20th Judicial District Attorney’s office for an update. The DA said they believe CSP’s investigation into the July crash will be wrapping up soon, and a decision on possible charges will be made after that.”

As is the norm in these cases, there was no further news coverage. The collision, which could easily have killed Petervary, was allowed to slip away as if it never happened. If the final outcome was similar to what happens in most of these cases, the teenage driver likely got off with a $150 to $300 ticket.

Careless driving is a lesser charge than reckless driving in Colorado. According to the Anshor Driving School, it is generally considered a Class 2 misdemeanor traffic offense, “which usually means a fine between $150 and $300 and up to 90 days in jail ,though jail time is rare for first offenses.”

According to the school, ” there are (also) valid defenses; especially if you can show that your driving was reasonable given the circumstances. Maybe you swerved to avoid a hazard, or the weather made it tough to control your vehicle.” (Apparently drivers aren’t expected to slow down on slippery roads in Colorado.)

Petervary, for his part, spent months in recovery after being smashed. Finally back on the bike nine months later, he told Pedaled.com that he felt his “back injury on every ride and all day long, but as long as I am not in severe pain, the happiness that I get from riding masks the discomfort.”

He, at that time, had no thoughts of being able to ride any event.

“I have nothing in the future that I am planning for,” he told Pedaled’s Eddie Clark and Dan Hughes. “Early in my recovery, I put certain event goals on my calendar but couldn’t do any of them….I have now accepted I cannot plan an adventure, but instead I am currently on the biggest adventure of my life.”

Against that backdrop, it’s fully understandable that his Saturday observation in Anchorage was mainly that he was glad to be back in Alaska “for a fun adventure however I do that. It’s my first event back since I got hit. So, no matter what happens, I have something to be proud of and celebrate getting back to doing something I love.

“It will be what it will be.”

What it will be, at this point, is looking pretty good. But there appears to be a real adventure ahead.

Petervary understands that better than most. There was a night years ago when I let him break trail for my snowmachine across part of the Happy River Valley. Why? Because the trail was so blown in that it was impossible to find any sign of it in a headlight.

Petervary’s feet, however, told him where it was. He could walk and push his bike along the trail, but if he stepped off it, he immediately went in crotch deep. I’d thankfully followed his foot and bike tracks for miles to catch up to him, and then stopped to chat before suggesting he might as well push on and I’d follow.

I sat around for a while, then fired up the snowmachine and quickly caught him. We repeated this a couple of times until we got into a brushier area where the trail was only partially blown in, and I took off for Rainy Pass and Rohn. Petervary later thanked me for giving him an easier trail to find on his way to the Pass, although it was still a long push to the top before the start of a great ride down to Rohn, which is often the case on the Iditarod Trail.

The weather there can change trail conditions from good to bad, or vice versa, in a matter of hours and sometimes even faster. It’s going to be an interesting evening in Puntilla.

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