Climate Change And COVID Threaten 50th Annual Iditarod Dog Sled Race In Alaska

Anchorage, Alaska, March 5 – Forty-nine mushers and their husky teams raced through Alaska’s largest city on Saturday to kick off the 50th annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. humble beginning.

The starting gate has been returned to downtown Anchorage a year after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted organizers to start the 2021 race in a secluded riverside location north of the city, away from the usual crowds of spectators.

The contestants forged an unusually warm and sloppy

conditions on the first day of the run, with temperatures fluctuating between freezes and thaws. Snow-soaked teams and spectators lined up on the city track.

Luckily for the mushers and dog teams more accustomed to cool and cold weather, the 11-mile (17.7-kilometer) part of Anchorage

the race is purely ceremonial in nature, the competition starts on schedule.

Sunday at Willow, about 75 miles north.

The shared track has been restored to its traditional 1,000-mile (1,600 km) distance from Anchorage to Nome on the Bering Sea after the course was shortened last year due to COVID. However, some pandemic restrictions remain in place.

Racers, volunteers and fans who gathered this year for the resumption of the Iditarod celebration in Anchorage have been ordered to wear masks and take other precautions to prevent the spread of the lingering virus.

The pandemic also forced a last-minute switch. Nick Petit, top driver, was forced to withdraw from the race after testing positive for COVID-19. Four-time champion Jeff King, who planned to miss this year’s competition, then stepped in to take Petit’s dog team to Nome.

King received a call from Petit on Tuesday afternoon. He said that Petit trusted him to run a “really good dog sled”.

“I think he knows that I know what I’m doing,” King said at the starting area in downtown Anchorage.

Other returning winners are Dallas Seavey, who took his fifth record win last year, and his father, Mitch Seavey, a three-time champion who holds the Iditarod speed record of eight days, 3 hours and 40:13 minutes.

Sled dog Riley Dyche during the ceremonial start of the 50th Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Anchorage, Alaska, USA on March 5, 2022. REUTERS/Kerry Tasker

The field also includes Pete Kaiser, who in 2019 became the first Yupik native driver to win a race, 2018 champion Joar Leifset Ulsom of Norway, and four-time winner Martin Bazer.

Both should be contenders for the title this year, Leifset Ulsom said. “A lot of them are really good teams,” said the Norwegian in the Anchorage starting area.

Seventeen mushers this year are women. The Iditarod is one of the few high-profile sporting events where women and men compete on an equal footing.

Humble start

The Iditarod has come a long way in the half century since it began in 1973 as a low-budget, groundbreaking event that attracted many amateur riders and took the winner 20 days to complete.

Now the best members of the Iditarod are professionals with sponsor logos using high-tech gear bearings. Teams are tracked using global positioning satellites and live streamed around the world to an audience via internet streaming services. Winners usually reach the finish line in just nine days.

Modern day racing has a lot of corporate support, although in recent years animal rights activists who denounce racing as cruel to dogs have pressured some companies to withdraw their support.

Climate change has brought about some of the greatest changes to the world’s most famous dog sled racing, as it has to much of life in the High North.

Three times, most recently in 2017, unseasonably warm conditions have forced the Iditarod to move its second day of relaunch — after a grand launch in Anchorage — far north to Fairbanks.

In 2020, flooding inundated the ultra-thin ice of the Bering Sea, which the teams had to bypass towards the end of the race. The three riders and their dogs had to be rescued from a coastal run just 25 miles (40 km) from Nome’s finish line. Participants who followed them had to be redirected further inland to avoid standing water.

The course, while running in full again this year, has been slightly modified with checkpoints relocated to minimize contact with Alaska Native villages, who remain vigilant for new coronavirus outbreaks due to limited resources. healthcare.

Organizers say such precautions are appropriate for an annual race commemorating the famous dog sled relay almost a hundred years ago to deliver diphtheria serum to Nome in 1925.

“Vaccinations, dogs and the Iditarod go back to the start of the race,” said Paige Drobny, a musher from Cantwell, Alaska, who is promoting vaccination on behalf of her sponsor, the Fairbanks Health Consortium.

Reporting by Yeret Rosen from Anchorage; Writing by Steve Gorman; editing by Richard Pullin and David Gregorio

Our Standards: Trust Principles.