Under investigation in the Caribbean, Iditarod ‘expedition musher’ #2, Steve Curtis/The BP Press, Facebook
Iditarod dream dies and then….
As if this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race wasn’t enough of a disaster for “expedition” musher Steve Curtis, the Canadian now has bigger trouble in the warm environs of the Caribbean than he did in the cold of Alaska.
“As investigations continue, the Freeport property has become the focus of concerns that extend beyond the events of January 29. Allegations of unpaid vendors, questions about who was operating at and visiting the residence, and scrutiny surrounding business ties linked to kratom-related activity have combined to draw significant public interest.”
A company called Vivazen, which the Iditarod this year trumpeted as its important new sponsor, sells a “STRONG RELIEF KRATOM SHOT,” which it bills as “our best-selling Kratom Shot.” Vivazen is connected to Curtis through “Elevation Capital,” an investment fund Curtis runs out of the Cayman Islands, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Jeremiah Click, who identifies himself on LinkedIn as the “director of talent” at Elevation, promotes the supplement as a great investment and more. His pitch for Vivazen, however, makes the company sound more like an arm of Elevation Capital than an investment.
“A lot of companies talk about growth,” Click writes. “Very few actually invest in people the right way
once they get in the door. At VIVAZEN, we do.
“We are not handing someone a territory and wishing them luck. We are flying people out, training them in market (sic), putting them in front of executive leadership, and giving them real exposure to how the business wins: Ride-alongs. Classroom. Field work. Real development.
“This is a chance to step into a fast-growing brand, own a market, build something meaningful, and get paid for performance….Top earners are hitting $80K–$135K+ with uncapped upside, and for the right person this is more than a job. It is a real path to growth, ownership, and upward mobility.”
The Mayo Clinic’s take on kratom, however, shines a less attractive light on the company.
“Kratom: Unsafe and ineffective” warns the headline on the Mayo post describing the supplement. The copy below says that “people who take kratom believe that it helps them. But kratom hasn’t been shown to be safe or to treat any medical conditions.
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned people not to use kratom because of possible harm it can cause. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration calls kratom a drug of concern. Poison control centers in the United States received more than 3,400 reports about use of kratom from 2014 through 2019. These included reports of death. Side effects reported included high blood pressure, confusion and seizures.”
Kratom is reported as now banned in six U.S. states, Australia and New Zealand, a half-dozen European nations, and 18 countries in total. But it remains legal in the U.S., in general, and in the Bahamas.
Vivazen, the company selling the drug, is what helped Curtis become a late addition to the Iditarod after a June 2025 announcement that the event was creating a special “expedition musher” class to open the trail to 66-year-old Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke.
“As part of his ambassador role, Mr. Røkke has pledged substantial philanthropic support” to the tune of $295,000, the Iditarod said in a statement at the time. It added that Røkke had promised another $2,000 per head to come “for each official musher registered by November 28, 2025.”
Iditarod would end up with 38 mushers registered by that date, which should have brought Røkke’s contribution to the Iditarod up to $371,000. Whether that is the amount of money he handed over to the cash-strapped Iditarod is unknown. The operation is very guarded when it comes to its finances.
Steve Curtis at the Iditarod start in Anchorage/ITC Facebook
Late arrival
Six months after the Røkke announcement, on the eve of the 2026 race start, the Iditarod’s Facebook page revealed that there was to be “another Expedition Musher joining the trail for Iditarod 54! Steve Curtis, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and adventurer, is set to join the inaugural Expedition Musher class for the 54th running of the Iditarod.. 
Whether any village sports programs along the trail ever got any money out of that deal is another unknown. As for Curtis himself, some in Alaska immediately started raising questions about a man with a backstory almost too good to be true.
The Daily Hive in Vancouver, British Columbia, summarized that story this way almost a decade ago:
What that story failed to mention, as did Curtis in the interview that went with the story, was that the ZAG Group had closed its doors nine months earlier.
But Curtis talked to the Hive as if he were still running the company.
“When I was on vacation a year ago, I was thinking about how I give to charities with time and money. I started thinking about my company and what I wanted to do there. Our partners haven’t necessarily had the same opportunities as I did to give back,” he told the Hive. “So I decided to give 1 percent of our revenue to charity. Once we announced it, I noticed how quickly our partners embraced it. We have now given to numerous charities through our company giving program, Heartbeats, and it is our staff who run it.”
When Curtis abandoned Canada for the Grand Caymans, which his LinkedIn profile identifies as his present base of operations, is unclear. A fairly high-profile figure in Vancouver at one time – BCBusiness had him in the running for the manufacturing Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014 for his success in promoting “an energy drink called Zen-d” – Curtis disappeared from news coverage there sometime after the summer of 2018 when the website Vancouver Is Awesome announced the closure of his three-year-old “high-concept ZEND Conscious Lounge,” a dining establishment “known for their plant-based eats.”
Zen-D, the energy drink, appears to have disappeared from the market just prior to the restaurants openings. All that remains of it today is the URLL for http://www.zen-d.com website, which no longer works.
When the pandemic began two years after the ZEND Conscious closing, Curtis posted on Instagram about his “tough day at the office!” That post at “stevecurtis007” displayed an over-the-computer view of what appears to be the Caribbean.
On his personal webpage – steve-curtis.com – Curtis describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” and heavily promotes his low-income roots, the start of his first business at age 19 through the use of a “$500 credit card,” his struggle with cancer, and his climb of Mount Everest “while still battling cancer.
“The same discipline, preparation, and refusal to accept imposed limits that carried him to 29,032 feet while facing a terminal diagnosis is the same framework he brings to every investment, acquisition, and partnership. For Steve Curtis, Everest was not a personal milestone. It was a business philosophy made physical.”
Nowhere does Curtis, who has not responded to requests for interviews, identify specifically what form of cancer he battled, but The Georgia Strait, a Canadian publication, reported that it was an “advanced lymphoma that doctors said was untreatable and would kill him within two years.”
In a YouTube video, Curtis talks about a spot appearing on his skin and then more spots forming. The description sounds a lot like that of Cutaneous Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which has been described as “likely the rarest of all lymphomas involving the skin” by the authors of a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Cureus in 2021.
But the disease is treatable, as are other Hodgkin’s lymphomas. The “10-year survival is now above 80 percent,” according to English Dr. Peter W.M. Johnson, who published an essay in Hematological Oncology in 2023 pondering whether medicine was “reaching the maximum cure rate for Hodgkin lymphoma?”
Curtis, in his YouTube video, disses doctors and modern medicine as ineffective, and in the Strait article claims to have cured his cancer with “mind-body medicine” that led him to found the “Perception Medicine Foundation.” The Idealist website in 2015 described Perception as a “a nonprofit start-up/social venture dedicated to broadening our scientific and practical understanding of how the human mind directly influences the genesis, advancement, regression, and remission of disease.”
The organization once had a website at http://www.perceptionmedicine.org, but that link no longer works. Whether Curtis was or wasn’t near death from cancer is hard to ascertain, but his claim to having conquered Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on the planet, is true.
A fellow Canadian climber who accompanied Curtis to the 29,032-foot-tall mountain in Nepal confirmed that Curtis reached the summit. The climber described Curtis’s mountaineering skills as limited, but said Curtis was driven by a personal determination that made him believe he could do anything.
He apparently took that same attitude into the Iditarod.
Bad bargain
His determination, unfortunately, wasn’t enough to overcome his lack of experience on the runners of a dogsled. Needless to say, he didn’t get to Nome.
As it turned out, he didn’t get even halfway to Nome. But this wasn’t all Curtis’s fault. Part of his problem was that the late arrival to the expedition musher class didn’t get the deal that Røkke got.
The big-spending Norwegian got to start at the front of the race with his guide, 2020 Iditarod champ Thomas Wærner from Norway, and a team of helpers on snowmachines hauling mobile camps and extra sled dogs up the trail.
That support helped Røkke become the first musher to ever go from Anchorage to Nome in less than eight days via the Iditarod Trail. He beat the race’s top competitors to the finish line by almost a day and a half, a feat which would later lead The Nation magazine to describe him as “The Norwegian Billionaire Who Broke the Iditarod.”
Eventual second-place finisher but race winner Jesse Holmes, a former reality-TV-star, complained to the magazine that early in the race he and other racers “were shouted at – and nearly run off the trail -by Røkke’s posse.”
The interference didn’t last long, however.
With nothing but snowmachine-smoothed trail ahead, Røkke and his posse quickly outran everybody. It was a whole different story far behind at the back of the Iditarod pack where the race began for Curtis and guide Jeff King, a four-time Iditarod champ.
Curtis faced a trail torn up by all the sled-dog traffic in front of him and was reportedly not happy about it. During the race, rumors flew about his expressions of anger about the condition of the trail, but they were impossible to confirm given that Iditarod now requires race volunteers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in an effort to prevent them from talking ‘unfavorably’ about anything they witness along the trail.
Still, the juiciest of Curtis rumors popped up on Reddit where someone posted that “I heard an expedition musher pulled a gun on Iditarod staff in McGrath after they tried to get him (to) scratch because his team was sick. Then he took off with only 4 dogs and got arrested on the trail.”
No evidence was ever found to support anything even remotely like that happening, but a volunteer working in McGrath did tell friends about a particularly nasty Curtis explosion at the McGrath checkpoint. When approached to recount what happened, however, she wouldn’t respond.
All that is known for certain is that Curtis and King, who was on a snowmachine, arrived at McGrath, a checkpoint on the Kuskokwim River approximately 310 miles into the 1,000-mile race, more than a day after the last team in front of them left. And that Curtis’s team was officially listed as stopped in McGrath for two days before the Iditarod finally announced via Facebook that Curtis had “concluded his journey along the historic Iditarod Trail in McGrath, after traveling hundreds of miles with his team.”
In the same statement, King was quoted as “applaud(ing) Steve’s courage to endeavor on pioneering a new category in Iditarod. Despite very limited training aside on the trail, I was very impressed by his courage, character, and capability.”
There was more, most of sounding like it was written by a public-relations specialist, with Curtis being quoted saying “thank you to Alaska and to everyone who followed along and cheered us on. As a reflection of that gratitude, I am honored to fulfill my commitment of $50,000 to youth sports programs in the villages along the trail–communities whose spirit and hospitality make this journey possible.”
By then some Iditarod insiders who’d started digging into Curtis’s background were also reporting that he seemed to be a guy who didn’t always like to pay his bills. The Bahamas Press is reporting that as an issue in Freeport now, where the Curtis “matter is also drawing attention from neighbors, vendors and contractors connected to (his) residence. Several parties who say they performed construction-related services at the Freeport property allege they have not been paid for completed work. Those claims have been confirmed by several of the vendors.”
Whether King ever got paid for his Iditarod services is unknown. When the 70-year-old musher was asked the question in March and sent a Reddit post from a former Curtis employee alleging that Curtis regularly tried to stiff Indonesian kratom suppliers while refusing to pay contractors and vendors in Canada, King reacted as if he were President Donald Trump responding to a perceived insult:
What sparked such an outpouring of vitriol is unknown, but posts on King’s Facebook page would indicate he suffers greatly from Trump Derangement Syndrome, something shown to make a lot of Americans steam, and he has reached an age at which Grumpy Old Man/Irritable Male Syndrome, as it is now known, afflicts some males.
Or, it is possible that he was suffering from post-Iditarod depression. Whatever the case, he hopefully got paid because guiding is never as much fun as the people who’ve never done it like to believe.
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