My goal on this day was to get one or two good shots of each of the mushers and their teams. In this gallery are two images of each. The first 20 images are the ones I posted first on Facebook. The second 20 are the other half.
In the late 90’s I used to live close to the Dog Mushers Hall where the race started. Back then I explored the trails a lot. As a result, I knew exactly where I wanted to set up to get these shots. I could have photographed the teams at the start, but thought it would look a lot better on the trail in the woods. I walked down the trail about a quarter mile past where it enters the woods and set up at the end of a long straight stretch where the trail takes a slight zig zag of about 10 feet as another trail crosses it. This allowed me to be about 8-10 ft off the trail and yet look right down the trail as the teams approached and then to get a good shot of them as they passed me.
The first team left the start at 1 pm and then other teams started every 2 minutes after. Altogether there were 20 teams. Only three teams were from the Fairbanks area. The rest were from other parts of Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, a team from Germany, and a mixed team from Korea and Alaska.
And this race was fast. The race covered just over 20 miles and by the time the last team had left the starting line and I had walked back up to the start/finish, the first team was approaching the finish, just over an hour from their start. If you figure speed, these teams were traveling at around 20 mph, covering a mile in about 3 minutes. These dogs are athletes, they love to run, they love to pull, and at the finish line, it was all the handlers could do to get some of the teams stopped.
This was the second race of three with the total times combined to declare a winner after the final race. The starting order on this day was determined by their finish in the first race with the fastest teams starting first. In the last race it will be reversed and the slowest teams from the second day will go first. Because of the staggered start, each team is timed individually which makes it a bit hard to assess who is first until all have crossed the finish line.
I’ve also been asked why these don’t look like what many think of as sled dogs, huskies or malamutes. One of the things I noticed when I first attended a race in Fairbanks is that sled dogs did not match my expectations. If you go to see the long distance races, what might strike you first is how small the dogs are. They are built for endurance and like any endurance athlete, they are not going to be necessarily big and muscular because that is extra weight they would have to carry. Then there are the sprint dogs like in this race that are much more muscular, are much more able to exert a lot of power over a “short” distance. Just like in human athletes, form follows function. The dogs are bread for use rather than appearance.
Sled dogs in the arctic predate the appearance of huskies or malamutes and are and were a distinct breed. In today’s racing kennels, there have been some crossbreeding with other types of dogs to bring in characteristics to improve the lines. Even so, the Alaska sled dogs are a distinct breed. One of my friends has a kennel of her own where she has tried to carry on some of the traditional bloodlines from villages that predate dogs coming up with colonists and settlers. Those dogs all love to pull, but they very greatly, some are white, others black, some mixed colors, some large, some small.