Iditarod Ceremonial Start

Today was the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race...the "last great race on earth". Imagine the type of athlete you would need to be to run 50 marathons back to back. That's what these dogs do while pulling a sled. Today they started in Anchorage on "the avenue" (4th Avenue), and raced by us at Campbell Creek Park. People bid to get to ride in the sled for this ceremonial first leg. The leg ends in Eagle River, and the mushers put the dogs and sleds on a truck and drive them to Willow for the official start tomorrow, when the race to Nome begins - nearly 1,100 miles across the frozen interior of Alaska.

The orginal National Historic Iditarod Trail (one of the first four designated National Historic Trails in the U.S.) goes right by our house, and was the trail used to get supplies from Seward (before Anchorage existed) to the first gold mine in a town called Iditarod between here and Nome. That town doesn't exist anymore. In the winter of 1925, the Inuit Eskimo children in Nome came down with diptheria, and didn't have enough serum to go around. There are no roads to Nome, the sea route was frozen, and the engine on the only plane in Alaska that could make the trip froze up in a bad winter storm. So the serum went by train from Anchorage to Nenana (near Fairbanks), and the best dog teams in Alaska all gathered along the wilderness route from Nenana to Nome to relay the serum to the kids in Nome. Most people recognize the name of the lead dog who brought the serum in on the last leg, Balto. But the true canine hero was a lead dog named Togo, who was chosen to run his leg of the relay over the roughest part of the trip, and ended up running more than twice as far as any other dog. Balto was actually supposed to pass the serum on to another dog for the last leg, but the team veered off route and missed the exchange, so Balto ended up being lead of the last dog team on the run. Today the race commemorates that serum run to save the children, but the route changes each year based on snow fall. This was our first time to see the dog teams race . We'll get more pics tomorrow when the real start of the race occurs.