Gavan Hennigan/Faceook

Leave it to a stubborn Irishman to define the spirit of the Iditraod Trail.

After more than 32 days in bitter cold and high winds on the 1,000-mile trek from Knik to Nome, having tried valiantly to break trail across 100 miles of endless snow in Alaska’s old and long-deserted Inland Empire only to retreat and camp for days in extreme cold, and having been ruled out as an “official” finisher in the Iditarod Trial Invitational 1000, 44-year-old Gavan Hennigan finally marched into the City of the Golden Beaches on Thursday.

The winners of the Invitational 1000 had already gone home, and so too the winners and other finishers in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, who’d arrived earlier amid much fanfare after less two weeks on a groomed trail north.

Hennigan spent a lot of time searching for the same trail after pushing on when the lack of a trail across the snowy nothingness of Interior Alaska forced an exodus from the Invitational in McGrath. Hennigan’s perseverance was of the sort the late and iconic Gov. Jay Hammond described 41 years ago in a letter penned to Dorothy Page, one of the founders of the Iditarod dog race.

The event destined to be labeled “The Last Great Race on Earth” by London’s Daily Mail was  but two year’s old when Hammond made these observations:

“In these times, when more Americans seem to be looking for more convenience and ease, you are going in just the opposite direction,” he wrote. “Not all of us are able, or probably would even want to participate in the Iditarod race, but the fact that some do lets us all know it is possible.

“Just knowing that the adventure is there can have a soothing effect upon the majority who wear suits and ties and sit behind a desk for most of their day.”

The Iditarod was then a much, much different race than it is today. It was a race of dogs and mouche, the commonly English version of which became “musher.” Today, it is a race of dogs and people who sit on sleds pulled by dogs.

When Hammond wrote of “Americans…looking for more convenience and ease,,” he could not know that this American desire would transform what was “The Last Great Race.”

That race was a difficult adventure race. Simply finishing in Nome defined victory for most. And finishing wasn’t easy.  Thirty to 40 percent of the mushers who started the race suffered defeat at the hands of brutally cold weather and inherently bad trail.

All different

Over time, the weather moderated slightly and, far more importantly,  trail “improvements” made the trail “better” which led to the arrival of the sit-down sled that made the ride easier for the dog drivers.

Still, from the 1980s until early in the new millennium, 20 to 30 percent of Iditarod starting field’s regularly failed to make it to Nome.

When British reporter Ian Wooldridge first covered the race in 1977, it was indeed what his newspaper had decided to label it – “The Last Great Race on Earth” –  and it would stay much the same for a couple of decades.

In the early years, some mushers didn’t even make it from Knik to Skwentna, the first checkpoint on a then-overland trail that featured a couple of significant hills between the race restart line and the Susitna River and some rough trail through the often bitterly cold lowland forest between the river and the checkpoint.

And from Skwentna on, the going only got more difficult. There were reasons why the Iditarod was a two-week-long dog race in the 1970s, and why eventual five-time champ Rick Swenson once described the greatest Iditarod finish ever as the 14-day, just-under-15-hour race run by the late Emmitt Peters, the Yukon Fox, in 1975.

Who knows how fast the Fox could have made it to Nome on the much-improved trail of today, but there is no doubt he would have been there days sooner.

A 66-year-old Norwegian billionaire with limited training as a musher, who bought his way into the race and was allowed a team of snowmachines hauling extra dogs and helpers to make his journey to Nome easier, made the 1,000-mile run to Nome in under eight days this year.

The record set by Kjell Røkke would have been impossible in earlier times if for no other reason than that hauling the extra dogs along on trailers behind the snowmachines would have been a nightmare given the condition of the trail.

Consider that in 1985, the year Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the race and vaulted the Iditarod onto the international state, the race was twice shut down because snowmachines were having trouble breaking out the trail ahead and Iditarod couldn’t get enough food flown into checkpoints to provide for the dogs if the dog drivers of the day decided to break out the trail themselves on snowshoes.

That 1985 race took 18 days and ended with Riddles pushing off alone through a Bering Sea coast blizzard to win. There was no film crew from the “Iditarod Insiders” accompanying her with bright lights and a willingness to jump off their snowmachines to provide help when she struggled in that storm, as would prove the case with Brent Sass on his way to victory in 2022.

Bad boyfriend Sass would proclaim his behavior honorable becuase he told the camera crew, “do not touch me,” so as to avoid race-prohibited “outside assistance.” And everyone would ignore the outside assistance provided by the comfort of the lights and the snowmachines marking the trail Sass had lost, not to mention the comforting presence of help nearby in a storm.

Swenson, like Riddles before him, had none of this on the way to his last victory in 1991. For 50 miles, he pushed through a roaring storm that turned back all of the Iditarod’s top contenders save for Martin Buser.

Often, Swenson was at the front of his team instead of riding behind it because the dogs couldn’t find the trail. Swenson searched for the scratch marks left by the skis of snowmachines on the ice or hardened snow and follwed them.

The winds were so bad and the cold deep enough that he took his thinnest-coated dogs and put them on the leeward side of the team to protect them from hypothermia.

Mitch Albom, then a columnist for the Detroit Free Press and on the trail covering the 1991 race, would later write that someone in a bar in Nome asked Swenson why he “went out in a blinding snowstorm when almost everyone else turned back. No one could find you. You could have died!”

“‘Aw, hell, I wasn’t gonna die,’ he snapped. ‘Not as long as I stayed on the trail. Besides, what’s my life worth, anyway? If I had to go back and listen to 365 days of that crap (about) ‘How come women keep beating you?’ Blah, blah, blah. I’d just as soon be dead.'”

The reality was that it was indeed possible Swenson could have died out there if he’d lost the trail. That risk was the reason most of the race leaders turned around and retreated to the White Mountain checkpoint.

If there had been snowmachines with them to light the way, as Sass was the case for Sass, it is probable that Butcher – not Swenson – would have become the first musher to win five Iditarods, given she had the faster team along the coast.

So many changes

The simple reality here is that the now self-branded “Last Great Race,” having stolen the Daily Mail label and trademarked it, isn’t what it was when those words were written.

The challenges that made it the Last Great Race have been increasingly eliminated in a desire to turn Iditarod into more of a doggy NASCAR or Formula 1.

The restart, the beginning of the real race, has been moved north along the Parks Highway from the Wasilla/Knik area to Willow to provide access to a snowmachine highway on the Susitna that turns north at the confluence with the Yentna River to follow it to the race’s first checkpoint at the Yentna Station Roadhouse.

This route follows a flat, regularly used snowmachine highway for the first 125 miles of the race, where the old route used to climb up and over the hills between Knik and the Susitna before crossing it to then snake through the woods to the first stop in Skwentna.

The new trail is much easier than the old. Beyond Skwenta, up into the Shell Hills, the trail can still sometimes get rough, but over the years it has become ever less so thanks to the grooming done by Iditarod “trail breakers” on snowmachines.

I well remember helping Chicago’s Bob Bright free his stuck team’s towline from a stump in the middle of these hills in 1983 while the then-director of the Chicago Marathon whined that “this isn’t a trail.”

By the standards of most of America at the time, he was right. In places, the Iditarod Trail resembled a hard-to-follow animal trail more than a trail made by humans. This was especially so north of the Finger Lake checkpoint.

The trail there used to start with a harrowing descent to Red Lake, but that ended not long after Carl and Kirsten Dixon bought a former hunting camp at the lake in 1995 and turned it into a wilderness adventure lodge. One of the winter attractions was mushing, and so Carl built a carefully groomed trail down to the lake on which to guide tourists. 

But beyond Red Lake, enough hazards remained along the trail that reporters waited at the Rainy Pass checkpoint, knowing they were guaranteed horror stories about this section of trail and probably an injured musher or two to interview.

As late as 2007, four-time champ Doug Swingley crashed his sled on icy trail above the Happy River, reported cracked ribs and a possibly dislocated thumb, and dropped out of the race at the Rainy Pass checkpoint at Puntilla Lake.

For years, the drop from the last of the infamous “Happy River Steps” descending to the confluence of the Happy and Skwentna rivers was basically a cliff. A Daily News photographer and I helped musher Paul Rupple catch his team there one year after they came literally flying off the drop and pitched him off the runners.

By the 2010s, the Iditarod trail breakers were regularly “fixing” this obstacle by building a snowy, off-ramp that offered a gentle descent to the river bottom. There were patches of sidehilling trail from there to Rainy that remained and remain difficult, but this entire stretch of trail is nowhere near as hard as it was in the past.

The same is true of the trail from the Rainy Pass checkpoint north across the upper Happy River valley to Rainy Pass itself and then down into the Dalzell Gorge. Poorly marked trail out in the valley once caused problems, but then eight-foot tall tripods with reflectors were installed along the route, and the Iditiard started marking the “race trail” so well with reflectorized lathe that in the summer now the old lathe makes the trail across the valley look almost wooden.

Without the lathe, it is still possible to get lost out on the plateau, as I did one year while trying to punch through to Rainy Pass on a snowmachine to provide a trail for a bunch of Invitational racers holed up at the Rainy Pass Lodge. The tripods aren’t close enough together to be found in 100-foot visibility, and the trail itself can easily blow in and disappear.

But with enough reflector-topped lathe stuck in the ground, navigation gets a whole lot easier. And easier has been an Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race goal for years now.

Down in the Dalzell Gorge north of the Pass, the trail was long ago rerouted up onto a hillside to avoid a once infamous “sled-buster” rock, and the Iditarod started building bridges across Dalzell Creek where the trail weaves from bank to bank.

The first time Iditarod photographer Jim Lavrakus in skied through there in 1983, there were no bridges, and in a couple of places where the trail dropped down to the creek bed to cross it on bad ice, the banks on the opposite side were so steep it was difficult to get back up onto the trail.

DeeDee Jonrowe split her old toboggan sled up the middle on this section of trail in 1983. But in Rohn, Larry ‘Cowboy’ Smith helped her stitch its plastic bottom back together with rope, and she managed to make it north from Rohn through the “buffalo tunnels,” up and over the “glacier,” and across the then-notorious Farewell Burn and a free-flowing Sullivan Creek to Nikolai.

The latter three obstacles are now all gone.

When Lavrakas and I followed one of the last mushers to leave Rohn north in 1985, the buffalo “tunnels” – so named for a skinny trail snaking through peckerwood spruce – were so narrow that the skis of our snowmachines were regularly banging trees on either side, and the trail was littered with parts and pieces for busted dogsleds, and gear from the sleds of mushers who’d hit bumps that tilted their sleds and sent them crashing into the trees.

Where the buffalo tunnels once worried every musher, there is now a nice fire road. As for the “glacier,” actually a series of frozen, cascading overflows that could be a bitch to get up and over whether by dog team or snowmachine, a trail was built around that in the late 1980s.

The tussoked old Burn and Sullivan Creek still remained problems, however. Lavrakas’s snowmachine didn’t quite make it across the latter in 1985, which led to my jumping into the creek to help free his sled and in the process filling my boots with water in a temperature somewhere between 40- and 50-degrees below zero.

This was the sort of adventure Iditarod mushers dealt with then. There is now a metal bridge across the creek, so no one has to worry about the water. And the Farewell Burn has grown up such that young trees now keep the wind from blowing the tussocks bare.

Not to mention that the Iditarod for years pulled a drag along this stretch of trail to break those tussocks down, and so it doesn’t take as much snow as once was necessary – snow that would reguarly blow away when the Burn was a burn – to cover them.

Beyond Nikolai, local snowmachine traffic between that village and McGrath always provided pretty good trail, and it was the same from McGrath to Takotna, but there were again challenges beyond.

In 1983, I watched Cowboy Smith’s team break trail for much of 80 miles from Ophir to the old ghost-town of Iditarod. From an airplane, it was an awesome sight to see his dogs powering through an unbroken white expanse, no matter how tactically stupid the move.

Rick Mackey, who passed through the ghost town in the heart of the old Inland Empire after a number of teams had helped improve on the trail Cowboy broke, won that year’s race. Behind a team that had tired from too much trail breaking, Smith finished third.

Butcher, the eventual four-time Iditarod champ, looked perfectly positioned to win that ’83 race when it hit the Yukon. But on the run north from Grayling, she followed a bunch of other mushers off the Iditarod Trail onto a village race trail where they went the wrong way for hours before one of them realized they’d long been traveling east when they should have been traveling north.

By the time they got back on the Iditarod trail, Butcher’s team was behind several others, and she basically threw in the towel at Kaltag.

Losing the trail like this was a common Iditarod problem in those years, but that changed over time with village sled dog races largely gone and trail-breaking snowmachines always at the front of the race, or at least at the front of the race when they want to be.

There were a few times when race leaders complained that the trail breakers wouldn’t break trail for them and announced they would sit at a checkpoint until more teams arrived, which eventually altered the outcome of some races.

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Altered strategies

This rarely happens now, as evidenced by the disappearance of the “jinx” once attached to leading the race to halfway. It has now become almost the norm for the race winner to reach halfway first, with the trail breaking snowmachines not far ahead.

Former TV reality star Jessie Holmes did this last year on the way to his first Iditarod victory, and did it again this year on his way to defending the title.

The 2025 race, it must be noted, also ran on a new Iditarod course, one with the restart moved Fairbanks to avoid rough trail.  Thus instead of mushers beating themselves north on tough trail through the Alaska Range, they sat on their sit sleds and ran most of the race along the flat surfaces of the frozen Nenana and Yukon rivers.

This never happened in the old days. Prior to 2003, the race followed the traditional trail no matter what. This was the case even in a few years when avalanche conditions in the mountains north of Rainy Pass made the trail dangerous.

Iditarod went so far as to bomb the surrounding mountains in 2006 to minimize the risk. I remember years earlier snowmachining over avalanche rubble covering the trail to a depth of eight or 10 feet. And there was at least one other year when the avalanche potential was significant enough that I breathed a sigh of relief upon reaching Dalzell Creek itself and being out of the danger zone.

All of this – all of it – is what led the Daily Mail to hang the title of “The Last Great Race on Earth” on the Iditaord and much of it, if not most, has been abandoned in favor of providing a better track on which to set speed records.

Mushers who once struggled to stay on the runners of their dogsleds as the race went north can now ride much of the trail perched comfortably on the seats of their sit-down sleds. The Last Great Race remains a Last Great Race for the dogs, who worked as hard as they ever did or more so.

But for the dog drivers, well, the Iditarod Trail Invitational now contains more of the spirit of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, as Hammond described it all those years ago when determination and perseverance were valued as much as speed.

In 1987, the late Col. Norman Vaughan was told he was out of the race because he was too slow. But Vaughan, like Hennegan in the Invitational this year, refused to accept the order and kept going.

The “81-year-old man drove his dog team down a wet, bare street in Nome today to complete the 1,157-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, six days behind the final official race finishers and 13 days behind the winner,” the Los Angeles Times reported after the race was done that year. 

Vaughan would become an Alaska folk hero for pressing on when told to quit. He is now in the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame. 

Things would turn out much differently after car salesman Tim Triumph pulled a Vaughan in 1995, however. Pressing on in defiance of Iditarod orders made Truimp the star in a short film which won top honors at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival in 1997, but anything but a star in the eyes of Iditarod officialdom.

The description of the film pretty well explains why. “Dead Last: A Tale of Triumph”  is billed as the story of how Tim Triumph became a hero and the most celebrated rookie musher in Alaska’s Iditarod race.

Back-of-the-pack mushers getting this sort of attention always irritated the Iditarod’s top contenders and the Iditarod powers that be. I well remember Triumph’s race because I was back in Anchorage that year, editing race coverage with reporter Peter Goodman, who was destined to go on to considerable journalistic success, in the field reporting.

To say Goodman got sideways with two-time and then defending Iditarod champ Buser during that race would be an understatement. In Buser’s defense, he was under a lot of stress in 1995 as he battled to keep Montana’s Doug Swingley from becoming the first non-Alaskan to win Iditarod.

An immigrant from Switzerland who had by then fully and completely embraced Alaska and the Alaska lifestyle of the time, Buser was chasing Swingley, who was destined to win, up the Bering Sea coast when Goodman shifted the Daily News’ attention to Triumph’s struggles and his defiance of the Iditarod’s order to quit.

Buser went ballistic about the shift in coverage from the race leaders to some bumbling boob, and his anger badly rattled Goddman, a reporter new to Alaska from the Lower 48.

All I could tell him was not to worry about it becuase he was now in Alaska where the Iditarod dogs bark a lot but seldom bite. God knows, five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson and I had more than a few difficult moments along the trail when I was the reporter in the field, but we always managed to make up.

Buser and Goodman never made up, but much more than that, race-changing fallout followed the ’95 race.

Iditaord rule 36, which once stipulated that teams could be removed from the competition if they were behind the leaders by three days in McGrath, just before halfway into the 1,000-mile race; four days in Galena, just beyond halfway into the race; or five days when the race reached the coast at Unalkaleet, was significantly modified. 

The sole intent of this rule, which followed Vaughan’s earlier misadventures in the race, was to save the Idiarod money. The faster the race moves, the sooner Iditarod can shut down checkpoints and save the cost of staffing them. The McGrath, Galena and Unalakleet checkpoints were identified in the early rule becuase all have sizeable (by Alaska standards) and regularly served airports, making them the cheapest places from which to fly dogs and dog drivers back to Anchorage.

You’re out!

The new rule ignored objective cut-off times and was changed to say “a team may be withdrawn that is out of the competition and is not in a position to make a valid effort to compete. The Race Marshal may consider, but is not limited to, weather, trail conditions and the overall pace of the race when invoking this rule.”

In practice, the goal of the new rule became to get the laggards out of the Iditarod as fast as possible. As a result, the 12-day difference in the finishing time between the winner of the inaugural Iditarod and the musher who collected the red lantern at the tail end of the race steadily shrank.

It had already been cut about in half by the start of the new millennium and was down to four days on the 40th anniversary of the Iditarod in 2013, when the self-proclaimed Last Great Race was still a pretty big deal. Sixty-six teams entered the competition that year.

The field was down to half of that at 33 last year, and the difference between first and last was down to four days. The field was 34 this year, but only after the last-minute addition of a former champ to make things look better, and the time between first and last was under three days.

Eighty-eight percent of the field finished in 2024, and the percentage would have been the same this year if not for the death of a dog in the team of Mille Porsild, which led her to withdraw from the race under the threat of being disqualified.

The Iditarod’s whacky, quit-or-your-fired, dog dead rule – implemented to placate animal-rights activists – stipulates that if a dog “expires,” a musher’s options are “(a) voluntary scratch…or (b) withdrawal…unless the death was caused, as determined by the race arshal, to be due to the inherent risks of wilderness travel (example, moose encounter), nature of trail, or force beyond the control of the musher” such as the team being run down by a snowmachine as has happened in some past races.”

Porsild took the first option and “voluntarily” – wink, wink – scratched.

Behind her, one starter – Jaye Foucher from Wentworth, N. H. dropped out – after apparenrly injuring a knee on the still most demanding stretch of the Iditarod Trail between Finger Lake and Rainy Pass.

Iditarod reported that an “extended windstorm” forced her out, but on Facebook she posted that “folks will tell you that Iditarod will cost you an arm and a leg to run…. but for me it appears it may have cost me a knee as well. After seeing an orthopedic doc this morning, it’s looking like I most likely tore out the meniscus repair that I had done 18 months ago on the race.”

The other three mushers that failed to reach Nome this year were described by Iditarod as having quit in the best interests of their team, which is the usual Iditarod code for mushers being convinced or coerced into dropping out because they were judged to be “out of the competition.”

And Iditarod now makes sure they stop – unlike Triump and Vaughan – by removing their dog food and gear from checkpoints farther along the trail and barring them access to those checkpoints.

The Invitational is a different game. There was no thought given to telling Hennegan to stop, and no trail-breaking help provided him when he decided to push on from McGrath. The race does put in a trail to McGrath, which has made the fat-bike competition a pretty serious speed race, but beyond there, the racers are on their own.

In good years, if they get lucky, there is still a good trail left by the Iron Dog snowmachine race for more than 100 miles from McGrath to Ruby on the Yukon River. And in the bad years?

Tim Hewitt, one of the toughest individuals ever to trod the trail, his wife, Loreen, and Steve Ansell, a San Francisco ultra-runner, got in serious, life-threatening trouble on this section of trail in 2015. Then race director Bill Merchant, seeing the global-positioning-satellite (GPS) trackers on their sleds going nowhere for days, eventually contracted Ruby’s Allen Titus to go look for them.

Titus fund found Loreen and Ansell camped out in tough shape, with Loreen sporting a badly frostbitten thumb. Further back along the trail, he found Tim cold, demoralized, frostbit and asleep in a sleeping bag buried beneath the snow. Titus thought at first Tim might be dead, but he wasn’t.

He was at last ready to call it quits and give up, however, and Hewitt is not a man who gives up easily.

Seven years later, he decided to challenge a brutal storm on the Bering Sea coast and ended up with his face so swollen from exposure to the cold and blowing wind that he could barely see. He did make it to a safety cabin with which he was familiar in the Topkok Hills east of Nome and eventually pushed the “come-get-me” button on a Garmin In-Reach personal locator.

Loreen, who’d stayed home, contacted Nome Search and Rescue and the organization’s volunteers, who do a busy business along this stretch of the Alaska coast in winter, showed up to retrieve Tim. He was then 67 years old. He is now 71 and still talking about Iditarod adventures.

As Cowboy Smith observed when he led the dog race into Kaltag in 1983 only to have problems prying his frozen fingers off the handlebar of his dog sled, “there’s plenty of time to rest when you’re dead.

Such was once the spirit of “The Last Great Race on Earth.” Now, it’s pretty much moved onto a different event. Times change and businesses, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race being very much a business, recognize this and adapt.

Or they fade away.

The dog race today sort of looks like what the Tour de France might be if it had decided to go with the “more convenience and ease” of which Hammond spoke and put Tour riders on e-bikes to get the race over with faster.