When did dog sledding start?

Answer 1

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race first ran to Nome in 1973, after two short races on part of the Iditarod Trail in 1967 and 1969. The idea of having a race over the Iditarod Trail was conceived by the late Dorothy G. Page. In 1964, Page was chairman of the Wasilla-Knik Centennial and was working on projects to celebrate Alaska's Centennial Year in 1967.

She was intrigued that dog teams could travel over land that was not accessible by automobile. In the early 1920's, settlers had come to Alaska following a gold strike. They traveled by boat to the coastal towns of Seward and Knik and from there, by land into the gold fields. The trail they used is today known as The Iditarod Trail, one of the National Historic Trails as so designated by the Congress of the United States. In the winter, their only means of travel was by dog team.

The Iditarod Trail soon became the major "thoroughfare" through Alaska. Mail was carried across this trail, people used the trail to get from place to place and supplies were transported via the Iditarod Trail. Priests, ministers and judges traveled between villages via dog team.

All too soon the gold mining began to slack off. People began to go back to where they had come from and suddenly there was less travel on the Iditarod Trail. The use of the airplane in the late 1920's signaled the beginning of the end for the dog team as a standard mode of transportation, and of course with the airplane carrying the mail, there was less need for land travel. The final blow to the use of the dog team came with the appearance of snowmobiles in Alaska.

By the mid 60's, most people in Alaska didn't even know there was an Iditarod Trail or that dog teams had played a very important part in Alaska's early settlement. Dorothy G. Page, a resident of Wasilla and self-made historian, recognized the importance of an awareness of the use of sled dogs as working animals and of the Iditarod Trail and the important part it played in Alaska's colorful history.

She presented the possibility of a race over the Iditarod Trail to an enthusiastic Joe Redington, Sr., a musher from the Knik area. Soon the Pages and the Redingtons began promoting the idea of the Iditarod Race to the extent that Joe and Vi Redington moved to the Knik area from their homestead at Flat Horn Lake and they have never moved back. (Flat Horn Lake is approximately 30 miles out of Knik.)

The Aurora Dog Mushers Club, along with men from the Adult Camp in Sutton helped clear years of over-growth from the first nine miles of the Iditarod Trail in time to put on the first short Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1967. A $25,000 purse was offered in that race, with Joe and Vi Redington donating one acre of their land at Flat Horn Lake adjacent to the Iditarod Trail to help raise the funds. (The land was subdivided into one square foot lots and sold with a deed and special certificate of ownership, raising $10,000 toward the purse.) Contestants from all over Alaska and even two contestants from Massachusetts entered that first Iditarod Race, but a newcomer, Isaac Okleasik, from Teller, Alaska, won the race with his team of large working dogs. The short race (approximately 27 miles) was put on again in 1969.

The goal was to have the race go all the way to the ghost town of Iditarod in 1973. However, in 1972, the US Army reopened the trail as a winter exercise and in 1973, the decision was made to take the race the 1,000 plus miles to Nome. Redington and Page were instrumental in getting the first long Iditarod on its way to Nome in 1973, amidst comments that it couldn't be done. There were many who believed it was crazy to send a bunch of mushers out into the vast uninhabited Alaskan wilderness. But the race went! Twenty-two mushers finished that year and to date, there have been over 400 finishers. Mushers have come from Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Japan, Austria, Australia, Sweden and the Soviet Union as well as from about 20 different states in this country.

The late Dorothy G. Page, the "mother of the Iditarod" is quoted in the October 1979 issue of the Iditarod Runner on her intent for the Iditarod: " To keep the spirit of the Iditarod the same. I don't ever want to see high pressure people getting in and changing the spirit of the race. We brought the sled dog back and increased the number of mushers. It is really an Alaskan event. I think the fact that it starts in Anchorage and then ends in Nome has opened up a whole new area for people in Alaska. I think they appreciate that. It puts them in touch with the pioneer spirit."

Iditarod TodayThe race has started in downtown Anchorage since 1983. The teams leave the start line at the corner of 4th and "D" at two minute intervals, starting at 10 a.m. There are usually over 65 teams starting and some years even more.

The mushers follow multi-use trails through Anchorage and out to Tudor Road An telephone auction is held each year whereby fans can be a rider in a musher's sled from the start line for the first 8-9 miles. This auction opens on October 1 and closes at 5 PM Alaska Standard Time on January 31. The money raised is used to offset expenses of the race and to provide each musher who finishes the race after the top 20 (who receive cash prize winnings), with $1,049. This helps the mushers get their teams home. They mush along the Glenn Highway into the VFW Post 9785 in Eagle River. From there the dogs are loaded into dog trucks and taken home for the night. This is a ceremonial start and does not count in the overall time to Nome.

On Sunday, March 8, mushers will again line up at the old Wasilla Airport in Wasilla about 40 miles north of Anchorage. At ten a.m., the first teams will depart on their way to Nome.

From Wasilla, they travel to Knik Lake, the last checkpoint on the road system. Spectators may drive the 17 miles from Anchorage to Eagle River and the approximately 30 miles from Eagle River to Wasilla. It's about 13 miles from Wasilla to Knik. Once the mushers leave the Knik checkpoint, they are OFF the road system for the duration of the race.

It is impossible to predict the exact day or time that the first musher will cross the finish line in Nome. However, we expect it to be between 9 and 12 days, making it on second Tuesday or Wednesday. Doug Swingley, 1995 Champion, completed the course in 9 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes and 19 seconds to become the first musher from outside of the state of Alaska to ever win the Iditarod.

It is impossible to predict the exact day or time that the first musher will cross the finish line in Nome. However, we expect it to be between 9 and 12 days, making it on second Tuesday or Wednesday. Doug Swingley, 1995 Champion, completed the course in 9 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes and 19 seconds to become the first musher from outside of the state of Alaska to ever win the Iditarod.

Booms and BustsBy Don Bowers

Gold rushes were a major part of Alaska history beginning in the 1880's. The strikes near Juneau in 1880, the Klondike in 1896, Nome in 1898, and Fairbanks in 1902 helped define Alaska's very character. In fact, they directly resulted in the founding of three of the state's largest cities (Fairbanks is second, Juneau third and Nome seventh).

However, these bonanzas were only the best known of more than 30 serious gold rushes in Alaska from 1880 to 1914. In fact, the last full-scale, old-fashioned, frontier-style gold rush in the United States roared into life in 1909 at Iditarod, 629 trail miles west of the future site of Anchorage and half way to Nome. By the next year, Iditarod eclipsed Nome and Fairbanks to briefly become the largest city in Alaska with 10,000 inhabitants. It boasted several banks and hotels and even a newspaper, all supplied by regular sternwheeler service up the Innoko and Iditarod Rivers, tributaries of the mighty Yukon River.

Many gold districts in Alaska could be served by steamboats in the summer plying the many rivers lacing the Alaska interior. Nome, on the coast, had regular ocean going steamship service. Nonetheless, there was virtually no way to travel to any of these places when freeze up stopped the river and ocean traffic from October to May. By 1910, the need for year-round mail and freight service to the miners in western Alaska led the Federal government to survey and construct a winter trail from Seward to Nome for use by dog sled teams.

The original Iditarod Trail started at Seward (or more properly, about 50 miles north at the end of the under-construction Alaska Central Railroad, which later became the Alaska Railroad.) From the end of track, the trail wound along Turnagain Arm through what is now Girdwood, over Crow Pass, down the uninhabited Eagle River Valley and northward to the tiny trading post of Knik, the largest town on Upper Cook Inlet until the railroad town of Anchorage was found in 1915.

From Knik, the trail arrowed west through the wooded valleys of the Susitna and Yentna Rivers and climbed tortuously over Rainy Pass through the massive Alaska Range. West of the Range, the trail drifted across the vast Kuskokwim Valley to the hills west of McGrath, to the Innoko River mining district and the town of Ophir, another classic boom town ebbing even then from its glory days of 1907.

From Ophir, the trail rolled southwest through the ridge and valley country of the Kuskokwim Mountains to the bustling town of Iditarod. Swinging northwest from Iditarod, the trail pushed to the Yukon River, then due north up its frozen mile-wide expanse to the Koyukon Athabascan village of Kaltag.

At Kaltag, the trail angled back southwest along the 90-mile Kaltag Portage, known for centuries to Eskimos and Indians as a shortcut through the low coastal mountains to Norton Sound and the Bering Sea. The western end of the portage was anchored by the ancient Yup'ik Eskimo village of Unalakleet, whose name means "place where the east wind blows."

From Unalakleet, the trail swept north and then west around the rugged shore of the Seward Peninsula, passing through old Inupiat villages with names like Shaktoolik, Koyuk, and Golovin. Fifty miles before Nome, the trailed dropped down onto the beaches that had caused the rush to Nome a decade before. After more than 1,150 miles, the Iditarod Trail opened onto Front Street in Nome, then the site of North America's most notorious saloon row, whose proprietors at one time included Wyatt Earp.

The typical traveler on the Iditarod was a musher driving a team of twenty or more dogs pulling a massive freight sled capable of carrying half a ton or more. These mushers followed in the ancient traditions of Alaska Natives, who mastered the fine art of using dogs for winter transportation many centuries ago. Different Native peoples bred dogs for their particular needs over the centuries. The Malemiut Inupiat people of the Seward Peninsula developed a particularly hardy breed of sled dog that today bears their name: the Malamute.

When Russians and eventually Americans arrived in the North Country, they quickly discovered that dog teams were practically the only way to reliably move across long distances in Alaska when river travel was not possible. Indeed, they found that dogs were ideally suited for winter travel for a number of reasons.

Pound for pound, the sled dog is the most powerful draft animal on earth, and a team of twenty dogs averaging perhaps 75 pounds each can easily match a team of horses weighing more than twice as much. As a matter of interest, one dog has pulled more than half a ton in the canine equivalent of a tractor pull. As late as the 1960's Yup'ik Eskimos of Nelson Island moved much of their town, including entire houses, to a new site two dozen miles away with hundred-dog teams.

Dogs are faster than horses over the long haul, capable of maintaining average speeds of eight to twelve miles an hour for hundreds of miles (including rest stops), and can exceed twenty miles an hour or more on shorter sprints. Even better, dogs can be fed from the land with moose, fish, or caribou in the winter, while horses or oxen require expensive hay or grain. Moreover, heavy draft animals cannot use the snowpacked winter trails.

The early mushers used a mixture of breeds, ranging from Native types such as the Malamute and Siberian husky to various domestic dogs imported from the Lower 48. Some mushers even used wolves. To promote Alaska statehood, an Alaskan musher drove a team of wolves all the way to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933.

By 1900, dog teams were as common in Alaska as cars, ATV's, and snowmachines are today. Almost every winter photograph of early Alaska includes a dog team of some kind. These ranged from small family work teams used for hauling wood and water, to massive freight teams used for long distance movement of supplies, mail, and even passengers. The Iditarod Trail and other winter trails around Alaska (such as the old Eagle Trail from Valdez to Eagle on the Yukon River) were built primarily for the freight mushers, who occupy a special place in Alaska history. They manned Alaska's winter lifelines in the days before airplanes and modern communications.

The freight mushers on the Iditarod Trail would start out from Knik laden with mail, food, and gear for the isolated miners as soon as the river crossings were frozen. In November of 1911, for example, 120 teams headed west across the Alaska Range. Each day they would try to make 50 or 70 miles, stopping at roadhouses located about a day's travel apart. Many roadhouses were in villages, but some, such as Skwentna Station and Rohn Roadhouse, were isolated waystations not much different from Old West stage stops of half a century before. Mushers could get a meal and a warm bed, food for their dogs, and a place to wait out the storms that periodically swept the trail.

A trip to Nome could take three weeks or more. Mostly the teams hauled cargo, but passengers were sometimes carried in long sleds. (Most people who did not plan to winter over probably had taken the last steamboat out in the fall when "termination dust" began to coat the tops of the mountains.) The dog teams sometimes hauled out the season's gold on the return trip to Knik. According to Ron Wendt in Hatcher Pass Gold, 2,600 pounds of gold arrived at Knik on December 10, 1911, hauled by four teams. In December of 1916, no less than 3,400 pounds of the precious metal came out behind 46 dogs.

The trail was used every winter through the World War I era and well into the 1920's, with parts of it being used as late as the 1940's. The inevitable end for the Iditarod and other long distance winter sled trails in Alaska, though, was the airplane. The first airmail in Alaska was flown from Fairbanks to McGrath in early 1924 by legendary aviator Carl Ben Eielson, and the use of airplanes rapidly spread throughout the North Country. Alaska went directly from the steamboat and the dog team to the airplane, without the road and railroad building era that led to the dense road and rail networks of the Lower 48. (Even today, Alaska has fewer miles of highways than any other state except Rhode Island.)

But the sled dogs has one last taste of glory in early 1925 when a diphtheria epidemic (one of several devastating epidemics to sweep Alaska in the first part of the century) threatened isolated, icebound Nome. The nearest serum was in Anchorage and the first thought was to fly it to Nome. However, the only pilot in the Territory considered capable of braving the unpredictable weather was Carl Ben Eielson, who was on a trip in the Lower 48 and was not available.

Instead, a Pony Express-type relay of dog teams was quickly organized. The serum was loaded on the newly completed Alaska Railroad and rushed to Nenana, where the first musher took it westward down the frozen Tanana River to the Yukon. Every village along the route offered its best team and driver for its leg to speed the serum toward Nome. The critical leg across the treacherous Norton Sound ice from Shaktoolik to Golovin was taken by Leonhard Seppala, the territory's premier musher, and his lead dog Togo. Gunnar Kaasen drove the final two legs into Nome behind his lead dog Balto, through a blizzard hurling 80 mph winds.

The serum arrived in time to prevent the epidemic and save hundreds of lives. The 20 mushers had covered almost 700 miles in little more than 127 hours (about six days) in temperatures that rarely rose above 40° below zero and winds sometimes strong enough to blow over dogs and sleds. The serum run received worldwide press coverage and the mushers received special gold medals. A statue of Balto, the heroic lead dog, was erected a year later in New York's Central Park (it's still there).

But the day of the dog team as an integral part of Alaska's long-range transportation system was over. The bush pilots were in the ascendant, learning the techniques for flying the air routes now taken for granted by Alaskan pilots. Within a decade of the serum run, pioneer aviators like Noel Wien and Mudhold Smith and Bob Reeve were beginning to fashion a far-flung air transport network that today serves nearly as many scheduled destinations as all Lower 48 airlines together.

The Iditarod Sled Dog Raceby Don Bowers

Even after the advent of the airplane, dog teams continued to be widely used for local transportation and day-to-day work, particularly in Native villages. Mushers and their teams played important but little remembered roles in World War II in Alaska, particularly in helping the famous Eskimo Scouts patrol the vast winter wilderness of western Alaska.

After the war, short and medium distance freight teams were still common in many areas of Alaska even when President Kennedy announced that the United States would put a man on the moon. During the 1960's, however, it was not space travel but the advent of the "iron dog" (or snowmachine, as it's called in Alaska) that resulted in the mass abandonment of dog teams across the state and loss of much mushing lore.

To help save some of Alaska's fast-vanishing mushing heritage, Dorothy Page, a planner for the 1967 Alaska Centennial celebration, conceived of the idea of a dog race over the historically significant Iditarod Trail, which by then had been disused for many years. Local mushers' groups, with the leadership of Joe Redington, Sr., and retired Air Force Col. Norman Vaughan, threw themselves into the project. (Vaughan, by the way, was Admiral Byrd's dog wrangler in Antarctica in 1928. He later used dogs for search and rescue work in Alaska and Greenland during World War II).

With much volunteer labor (the start of a fundamental Iditarod tradition), the first part of the trail was cleared and a short race over the Susitna Valley portion north of Anchorage were held in 1967 and 1969. Finally, in 1973, with the Army helping clear portions of the trail not already in use as winter snowmachine trails, and with the support of the Nome Kennel Club (Alaska's earliest, founded in 1907), the race went all the way to Nome for the first time. Even so, the mushers still had to break much of their own trail and take care of their own supplies, and the winner of the first Iditarod, Dick Wilmarth, took almost three weeks to reach Nome.

The race is really a reconstruction of the freight route to Nome and commemorates the part that sled dogs played in the settlement of Alaska. The mushers travel from checkpoint to checkpoint much as the freight mushers did eighty years ago-although some modern dog drivers like Doug Swingley, Martin Buser, Jeff King, Susan Butcher, and Rick Swenson move at a pace that would have been incomprehensible to their old-time counterparts, making the trip to Nome in under ten days.

Since 1973, the race has grown every year despite financial ups and downs. The Iditarod has become so well-known that the best mushers now receive thousands of dollars a year from corporate sponsors. Dog mushing has recovered to become a north-country mania in the winter, and some people now make comfortable livings from their sled-dog kennels.

While the Iditarod has become by far Alaska's best-known sporting event, there are a dozen other major races around the state every winter, such as the grueling thousand-mile Yukon Quest, the Kobuk 440, the Kusko 300, the Klondike 300, and the Copper Basin 300. In a revival of age-old tradition, some entire villages and towns in rural Alaska become swept away in the frenzy of sled dog racing, and sled dog are now common in many rural areas where they were eclipsed by "iron dogs" only a few decades ago.

Alaska is the world Mecca for sled dog racing which has developed into a popular winter sport in the Lower 48, Canada, Europe, and even Russia. Mushers from more than a dozen foreign countries have run the Iditarod, and Alaskan mushers routinely travel Outside to races such as the John Beargrease in Minnesota, the Big Sky in Montana, the UP 200 in Michigan, and the Alpirod in Europe. A number of Alaskan mushers have even run races in the Russian Far East. The Winter Olympics are considering adding sled dog racing as an event and several sled dog races were held in Norway in conjunction with the 1994 games.

Although the race's fame causes many people to think of the Iditarod® Trail when they think of traveling to Nome, the trail is actually impassable during the spring, summer, and fall. Moreover, its routing is far from a direct course, taking about 1,150 miles to go the 650 or so airline miles from Anchorage to Nome. In addition, the race committee has routed the race to pass through a number of towns and villages missed by the original trail, and has adopted a northern route for even-numbered years to include more villages along the Yukon.

The checkpoints for the first half of the current race are Anchorage, Eagle River, Wasilla, Knik, Yentna Station, Skwentna, Finger Lake, Rainy Pass (Puntilla), Rohn Roadhouse, Nikolai, McGrath, Takotna, and Ophir. In odd numbered years the middle part of the race largely follows the original trail, from Ophir through Iditarod, Shageluk, Anvik, Grayling, and Eagle Island to Kaltag. In even years, it swings north from Ophir to Cripple, Ruby (heart of another old mining district), Galena, Nulato, and on to Kaltag.

From Kaltag, the home stretch is the same every year: Unalakleet, Shaktoolik, Koyuk, Elim, Golovin, White Mountain, Safety Roadhouse, and Nome. True to their predecessors, the mushers still run down Front Street past the still notorious saloons into the heart of the Last Frontier's last frontier town to the burled arch. Every musher's arrival is heralded by the city's fire siren and every musher is greeted by a crowd lining the "chute", no matter the time of day or night, or if he or she is first or fifty-first across the line.

Answer 2

Dog sledding is said to originate in northern Canada by the Inuit people who had once lived there!

Answer 3

I looked it up, it says it occurs in winter, however, places like Alaska, winter is over half the year.