Thirty-seven mushers left Willow, Alaska on Sunday, headed for Nome nearly a thousand miles away, across frozen rivers and mountain passes where it drops to fifty below. Some will make it in eight days and some will take two weeks. Some will scratch at a checkpoint along the Yukon, load their dogs into a plane, and fly home wondering what went wrong. This is the 54th Iditarod. Jessie Holmes is leading, reaching the Rainy Pass checkpoint Monday ahead of the field. Ryan Redington, the 2023 champion and grandson of the man who started the race, was first into Skwentna. Pete Kaiser, who won in 2019 and joined this year's field just three weeks ago, is making his move through the interior.
Luke and I visited Jeff King and his team at Husky Homestead in Denali. Jeff has won this race four times and logged more than 150,000 miles on a dogsled. The Alaska Sports Hall of Fame says he has "distinguished himself by winning mushing events of all lengths more frequently than anyone," and his peers call him the Winningest Musher in the World.
He came to Alaska from California at nineteen in 1975, planning to stay one summer. He built dog teams the way other men build hot rods, pouring his spare time and money into them while he ran a construction business. In 1992 he set the business aside, and he won his first Iditarod the following season. "There are some things that are mystical and magical about the Iditarod," he said then. "I had to get over that. I had to believe that there's no reason I shouldn't be able to win it without a miracle."
In his first Iditarod, in 1981, he was crossing the treeless Beaver Hills at the halfway point on a moonless night when another musher came up behind him, headlight bright. As the team passed, a voice called into the dark, "Who goes there!? Who goes there tonight!?" Then, pulling ahead, "Jeff King! Jeff King from Denali! You are doing great! Keep up the good work!" It was Joe Redington Sr., who had dreamed up the race.
He told us about falling through the ice on the Yukon at forty below, two hours ahead of the nearest competitor, his team treading water and his sled sinking, and using his dogs as life preservers to pull himself out. He told us about his lead dog Salem, who stopped the whole team on voice command in a whiteout while Jeff stood a hundred yards back holding an injured wheel dog and watching his sled vanish over a hill. If Salem had kept running, Jeff would have walked to the next checkpoint and lost the race. "If I tried to get off and run, I couldn't do 20 yards of what they're doing for hours on end," he says. "They consume over 10,000 calories in a 24-hour period of this race."
The trail is older than the race. Caribou blazed it, then Athabaskan and Inuit peoples hunted and traded along it for generations, and after gold was found at Iditarod in 1908 it became the freight and mail route from Seward to Nome. Joe Redington Sr. and Dorothy Page conceived the race in the 1960s to preserve the trail and to save the Alaskan sled dog as snowmobiles replaced teams across the north. Dick Mackey, an early champion, put it plainly: "Sled dogs were being replaced by snow machines, and we wanted to show that snow machines are fine, but machines break down. Dog teams don't." A musher cannot force a team to run. The dogs have to trust the person on the runners, and that trust is earned over years of feeding, training, and sleeping beside them in storms.
Jeff is out on the trail right now supporting the new Expedition Class, helping guide first-time mushers across terrain he has crossed thirty times. "I think the Iditarod is evolving," he said before the start. "I'm willing to give it a try, and I'm glad to be a part of it." In about eight days a crowd will gather on Front Street in Nome under the burled arch, and the dogs that come through it will still be wagging their tails and pulling at their harnesses.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-last-great-race-the-winningest