Alaska’s new $5.5 billion musher and early Iditarod leader
Billionaire musher hangs tough
Billionaire “Expedition Musher” Kjelle Røkke put down his marker as one of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race’s top dogs in 2026 by leading the field of 36 teams into the Alaska Range on Monday.
Technically, the wealthy, 66-year-old Norwegian isn’t supposed to be in the ‘race’ per se. He paid the Iditarod Trail Committee approximately $300,000 to enter as an all-new, never-before-heard-of, non-competitive, trail-touring expedition musher with permission to join in the fun with the help of a guide and a team of aides to help with his dogs.
The guide, 2020 ditarod champ Thomas Waerner, followed Røkke out of the Finger Lake checkpoint, where begins a climb of approximately 50 miles to the Rainy Pass opening through the mountain range that separates Southcentral and Interior Alaska.
Ahead on the trail beyond Finger waited the fabled Happy River steps – a steep, switchback descent to the confluence of the Happy and Skwetna rivers that is famous for sending dog teams tumbling.
Wealth, however, has its privileges.
The Happy steps promise a smooth, snowmachine-groomed luge run to the bottom for the first musher to arrive there. Unfortunately, the trail gets worse and worse with every team that passes, as mushers worried about the speed of the descent stand on their drag brakes.
These brakes – a chunk of studded snowmachine track hanging between the sled runners – cut a trench in the trail. With each passing team, the trench gets deeper and wider. For the first few teams, the trench generally remains shallow enough and narrow enough that a sled will straddle the groove.
But it doesn’t take long for the trail to become impossible to straddle, or for the bank on the downhill side to get busted apart, and then all hell often breaks loose. The worst thing for an Iditarod musher is to be the last driver down the steps.
Iditarod could have put the officially non-competitive Røkke at the back of the Iditarod field to get the full Iditarod-rookie experience, but nobody in their right mind would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for that.
The budget-rich are different
This fun appears to have been reserved for the second-tier “expedition musher,” Canadian Steve Curtis, who as far as can be determined, offered the Iditarod only $50,000 – a fraction of the payment made by the Norwegian who once palled around with the late, ultra-wealthy and now infamous Jeffrey Epstein.
Curtis was behind the last team into Finger Lake. Presumably, his guide, four-time Iditarod champ Jeff King, was with him, but King’s arrival wasn’treported because he wasn’t on the runners of a dogsled.
He was on an easier-to-manuever snowmachine, which is a handy piece of machinery for helping out a dog team that gets into trouble.
How good late-entry Curtis’s sled-handling skills are an unknown, but a variety of sources report that Røkke has spent a fair bit of time in Alaska this winter honing his. So, at least, he isn’t a doofus on the back of a dogsled.
But the run from Finger Lake to Puntilla Lake at the entrance to Rainy Pass, a stretch of trail that involves some nasty sidehilling, did appear to slow Røkke down. Five teams actually in the race passed the Norwegian duo before they reached the Rainy Pass checkpoint.
This did not, however, appear to quell Røkke’s competitive fever. Waerner and Røkke were only about an hour behind the race leaders going out of Puntilla.
