The big dogs with the thick fur once needed for survival along the Iditarod Trail/Anchorage Museum

Old-fashioned Iditarod coming?

Temperatures along the Yukon River deep in the heart of Alaska had warmed up to near 50 degrees below zero this morning as the 49th state heads toward the start of what be a real, old-fashioned Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

The long-range weather report for the Interior from the National Weather Service office in Fairbanks did not sound encouraging for the dog drivers about to hit the 1,000-mile trail north from Willow to Nome.

“Temperatures will moderate by about 5 to 10 degrees by the middle of the week,” the NWS calculated there, “but well below normal weather likely holds through the end of the week, with the potential for a resurgence of cold next weekend.”

That would be the weekend that marks the start of Iditarod with the now ceremonial, just-for-show kickoff on the streets of Anchorage, followed by Sunday’s for-real start approximately 70 miles up the George Parks Highway in Willow.

The restart was moved there years ago because of concerns about global warming and the lack of snow closter to Cook Inlet. Neither is a problem this year. In fact, it is the opposite.

Just days ago, Joe Chatfield, a resident of Healy,  the Central Alaska city closest to the entrance to Denali National Park and Preserve, turned to social media to plead with the state to declare a winter snow and cold emergency there. 

The Denali Borough assemblyman said the area was facing a crisis “due to the extreme snowfall and high winds that hit our area over the past week. Three major snow events dumped a total of 3.5 to 5 feet of snow across the region, with accompanying high winds creating drifts of 5 to 12 feet or more. These conditions have made standard snow removal methods impossible for many residents….

“As a result, emergency vehicles cannot reach those in need, and people are now running critically low on fuel, food, and essential medications. Some have been stranded for up to 10 days…. A verbal request for emergency assistance was made on Tuesday afternoon, when it became clear that our own efforts to break through the snow would fall short – due to dwindling fuel supplies and temperatures plummeting to -40°F the following morning.”

The ‘real’ Alaska

Welcome to the Alaska of country crooner Johnny Horton circa 1959 – “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below)” – as opposed to the Alaska of the New York Times circa 2019 – “The Mush in the Iditaord May Soon Be Melted Snow;  climate change is forcing cancellations of, and changes in, sled dog races in Alaska and Canada, including the most famous of them all.”

And no, this is not to suggest that the planet isn’t warming. It is, but annual climate variations remain huge, and it is possible that climate-change heretic John Christy, who helped establish the satellite techniques to take the temperature of the planet, has a valid argument that the warming is a global change that falls short of a global crisis. 

Certainly, any musher in his or her right mind would prefer a little global warming to smile on the self-proclaimed “Last Great Race” at this moment, given the problems that have arisen in some bitterly cold races past.

With nighttime temperatures dropping to 30 degrees below zero in the Interior in 2015, the late, four-time Iditarod champ Lance Mackey froze his hands black and had to be helped along the trail north by his brother. 

In a 2009 race plagued by extreme cold, Hugh Neff froze his face, and two dogs died in the team of musher Lou Packer, who was left worrying he might lose the whole team and die himself after the trail ahead of him blew in with snow, leaving them stranded.

Ahead of them on the trail, yet another dog would have died from the cold if not for the efforts of musher Blake Matray, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy trained in survival. He found Kim Darst from New Jersey, a fellow rookie in that year’s race, in trouble with a badly hypothermia dog and got everyone into a tent.

Darst managed to save the dog by huddling with it in a sleeping bag until it warmed up. Darst and Packer were eventually rescued along with Matray, who wanted to continue with his team to Nome but was rewarded by the Iditarod by being told he couldn’t becuase he’d become part of the rescue effort.

Such is life for those at the back of the Iditarod pack on the trail to Nome. Matray, for his part, did not hold a grudge.

“If that’s the last thing I do in my mushing career – helping save a dog and it lives – I’ll hang my hat on that any day,” he said in an interview weeks after the race. Matray has yet to make it back to Iditarod, but clings to the hope of one day do so..

He continues to run dogs in Alaska, where he is today the Senior Airspace Manager for the U.S. Air Force in the Alaska Region, and said he is thinking about giving the race a shot after he retires.

If he does, he will find it a significantly different event.

Shrinking Iditarod

The 2009 race started with a field of 69, and the last-place finisher, red-lantern winner Timothy Hunt from Michigan, took more than 15 days, 14 hours to finish.

The race is now an event that Iditarod hopes to get wrapped up a lot quicker than that. On a slow track that started in Fairbanks and did a loop on the Yukon River last year to form what KNOM radio station in Nome labeled “the longest, slowest Iditarod in decades,”  the red-lantern finisher, Ebbe Pederson, arrived in Nome a full two days earlier than Hunt had in 2009.

Behind her, Jenny Roddewig was convinced to drop out at White Mountain, the penultimate checkpoint, “in the best interest of her team,” a phrase that has become an Iditarod euphemism for “you’re going too slow.”

“Jenny has been a great competitor in this race, ” that official statement said. “We
hope to see her on the Iditarod Trail in 2026.

Roddewig would later write on the Sage Mountain Sled Dogs Facebook page that “the dogs had given it their all, and needed more rest than I could have reasonably taken being at the very back and at risk of getting withdrawn” for staying longer than the eight hour mandatory at White Mountain.

Iditaord in 2016 allowed Brent Sass to spend more than a day at that checkpoint, but he was a contender. Or at least he’d a contender until he gassed his team so bad going into White Mountain that the dogs couldn’t be convinced to leave after the mandatory 8-hour rest, and he fell from third in the race to 20th. 

Sass would go on to win the Iditarod in 2022 before finding himself in so much #metoo trouble in 2024 that Iditarod banned him from that year’s race. He then split for a year in Norway, only to return to Alaska this year to discover that no one had forgotten what had happened in 2024.

He took to YouTube with a friendly interviewer to plead his innocence in the lead-up to this race,  but few seemed to have noticed. The YouTube counter shows only 4,900 people have clicked on “Brent Sass: Victory. Controversy. Legacy” since it was posted a week ago. 

Sass’s big complaint is that he didn’t get a fair hearing from Iditarod, but then there are a lot of mushers who could claim a space in that fully loaded boat.

So close

“It is incredibly difficult to know that we were so close, and that on any other Iditarod year we would have already passed under the Burled Arch (at the finish) and then some,” Roddewigg observed after he raced ended short of Nome last year. “(But) our kennel will never be competitive with a top Iditarod kennel, and we wouldn’t want to be. Our dogs are our family.”

She added that “we will not run Iditarod again.”

Along with being an always costly race to enter and a tough event to endure, Iditarod has become a competition requiring faster, race-bred teams than in the past, especially so for those at the back of the field.

And this year, it is looking like extreme cold might only add to the difficulties for them and everyone else on the trail.

To truly understand how brutal feels the cold in Interior Alaska at this moment, you really have to have spent days on the trail at 40- or 50-degrees-below zero, a temperature at which diesel fuel gels and hot coffee tossed into the air explodes into a cloud of instant ice particles that float away.

These are temperatures at which exposed skin can freeze in 10 minutes or less. The National Weather Service cuts that time down to 5 minutes at minus-45 in a 15 mph wind.

If you live in this kind of cold for days, a rise in temperature to 20 degrees below zero will  feel warm and a rise 10 degrees below zero will feel like a heat wave. Anchorage is expected to be at least that warm by race day, and most likely significantly warmer.

But Alaska’s largest city has witnessed an unusually brutal winter so far. The city saw record January snows, followed by the unusual cold snap at the end of February when nighttime temperatures dropped below zero and stayed there.

From January twenty-fifth to the end of the month, the National Weather Service reported the warmest nighttime temp was 17 degrees below normal and two days slid to 26 degrees below normal. But the Anchorage cold was nothing compared to that in the heart of the state.

“This December-through-February period is going to be their coldest in over 50 years” in Fairbanks, climate researcher Brian Brettschneider told Alaska Public Media late last week.

“… The most noteworthy thing is the number of minus 40 degree days,” he said. As of Feb. 26, the city had witnessed 22 days with temperatures of minus-40 or colder, “and it’s very likely to have two more such days,” Brettschieder said.

“And that’s the most of any winter in the previous 53 years. So we’re going to be up to about 24, and no other winter in that period has had as many as 20. It’s not a record, an all-time record….But this is really noteworthy for how many of the really deep cold days there’ve been compared to the last half century.”

Now it’s looking like this cold could hang on to make for one bitterly cold Iditarod. The last word could do  Horton “When It’s Springtime in Alaska; It’s 40 Below” hit from way back when, but maybe it’s better to leave it to Alaska’s own Hobo Jim:

Away up in Alaska
The state that stands alone
There’s a dog race run from Anchorage into Nome
And it’s a grueling race with a lightning pace
Where chilly winds do wail.
Beneath the northern lights, across snow and ice
It’s called the Iditarod Trail.