“A sled dog, without him, we would not have survived this world”
It was 2:32 p.m. on the first official day of this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race when Ryan Redington drove his 14-member team of huskies out of Willow straddling wet snow atop the rails of his featherweight sleigh. “Hike!” he called out. His signature lime green parka popped with color against the wide sky – a cloudless blanket of blue with sunny temperatures as high as 34°F. “T-shirt weather,” said his Inupiat mother Barb, perhaps the event’s biggest booster. Her husband Raymie Redington, Ryan’s father, rode with his son toward the starting line standing behind the handlebars of the sled. The tarp-lined chute lent a backstage vibe as they met the ceremonial archway with signage shouting “START” in all caps. There, enthusiastic fans lined two waist-high walls that guarded the storied Iditarod trail, a seamless stretch of banners branding this year’s race sponsors – among them an aspiring gold mine and a national oil and gas company. On the musher’s race-bib above the number “17”, Redington wore another sponsorship emblem, this one for a statewide telecom corporation, and on the face of his black snow cap, the trademark for a rural Alaskan air carrier.
Redington, 39, is a “veteran” by competitive racing standards, though he has a baby-face compared to the grisly-looking mustachioed mushers of decades past, those who formed icicles on their facial hair. A father of two, he has an innocent smile and kind eyes that crinkle at their corners, early but wise Crow’s feet. Leading his team this year are littermates Henry and Senior. Redington’s dogs come from two different kennels: his and his fathers. “I feel honored to have some of my dad’s dogs on my team,” he said. “It’s going to be the best of our two kennels combined, so I hope to make my family proud.”
A fellow musher sold one of the huskies to Redington weeks ahead of the Iditarod. Mike Williams, Jr., of Akiak, recovering from appendicitis, dropped out of the Iditarod in midFebruary. As race day approached, he reported he was in good health but was still in no shape for the grueling dayslong and often sleepless trek across mountain peaks and tundra totaling nearly 1,000 miles to Nome.
“Albert is a cool dog,” Redington said of his purchase from Williams. “The dog finished fourth in last year’s Iditarod with Wade Marrs.”
Raised in a family synonymous with the Iditarod, Redington could list names of mushers past and present and how he knew them. Marrs was sort of a childhood friend who grew up in the same Cook Inlet community of Knik, just north and west of Anchorage. Williams, a Yup’ik racer, was about the same age and, like Redington, was born into mushing through his father, Mike Williams, Sr. Upon the race’s fiftieth anniversary, such connections were emblematic of how tight-knit the mushing scene had become in Alaska, and in his case and many others, how mushing dynasties had formed across generations.
Ryan’s grandfather, Joe Redington, Sr., is known as the “Father of the Iditarod” for starting the race in 1973. Redington’s dad Raymie raced fourteen Iditarods, including the first in 1973, and his late uncle
Joee placed in the top ten twice. All three are in the Mushers’ Hall of Fame. Redington likes to say he’s been mushing “ever since he could hold onto the sled.” Once, he said he took a team of dogs from a visiting racer from Sweden without asking, a daylong joyride that spurred an allnight search party. He was ten. At the time, his heroes were those who were changing the game: Charlie Boulding, Martin Buser, Susan Butcher. But there were others that drew him in and for deeper reasons, mushers like Herbie Nayokpuk, nicknamed “The Shismaref Cannonball,” whose Inupiaq fans in his mother’s home village of Unakaleet started cheering for him well before he even reached a point where he could hear them.
“I think it’s really cool to have a Redington in the race this year,” he said. “And I definitely think about my family in Unakaleet and how cool it is to be Inupiat and to be in the race.”
This year’s 50th running of the Iditarod will see four Alaska Native mushers competing with Redington, this week. Also on the trail will be Pete Kaiser, the first Yup’ik to win the Iditarod in 2019. Dena’ina Athabascan musher Richie Diehl makes his third attempt at a win after placing in the top ten in 2018 and 2021. And Apayauq Reitan (Inupiaq) is returning after a rookie debut in 2019 where she is making history in becoming the first openly transgender woman to participate in the long-distance race.
In many ways Native participation in the 50th Iditarod bears little resemblance from the humble, early days when Kool-aid marked the finish line in Nome. Fewer Natives, are mushing less, though for reasons that aren’t easily explained. But with only five Alaska Natives who have taken home the top prize in the past, they are victories that matter to a people in a place whose very identities are connected to mushing culture.
The Iditarod bills itself as “the last great race on earth” – such marketing flirts with ancestral mushing, though the focus largely celebrates the colonization of Alaska. Joe Garnie was born in 1953 to parents who survived a pair of pandemics in the Inupiaq village of Teller. He began mushing for subsistence by the age of six. At sixteen, he was forced to attend the Chiloco Indian School, a federal boarding school in Oklahoma made scandalous for beating its students that at times resulted in death. “The emotional scar that I got from that place shook the very foundation of my being,” Garnie said. The following year, he transferred to Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon where the abuse was less severe. There, he bonded with other Alaska Natives like Mike Williams, Sr. of Akiak near Bethel. At the time, both left their respective villages with fresh memory of what life was like before modern disruption – before the oil boom and the extractive economy that forever transformed land and life across the young state. Garnie returned to Teller just as the inaugural Iditarod was set to begin in 1973, a mega-marathon from Anchorage to Nome along the ancient routes once traversed by his Inupiaq ancestors, an appropriated postal route glorifying Alaska’s Gold Rush Era.
The first race was a formidable experiment achieved by the will of grizzled dreamers, gutsy thrillseekers and Native mushers who felt right at home. Thirty-six teams signed-up, and 22 teams finished — 23 if you count the Yup’ik brothers, Robert and Owen Ivan of Akiak, who ran together that year. Garnie’s uncle John Coffin was among the first race’s ten Native competitors. It took him 23 days, six hours, 43 minutes and 29 seconds to complete the trail. He finished in ninth place, one of six Native mushers represented in the top ten, earning a combined total of $24,200 in prize money. While the trophy may have gone to Dick Wilmarth, a miner and trapper from Red Devil, Alaska, it was Native mushers like Bobby Vent, George Attla and Herbie Nayokpuk who made names for themselves in that first Iditarod, a trend that would uplift other Indigenous racers in those first few years.
In the beginning of the Iditarod, mushers ran their dogs by day, set-up camp at night, and at times, snowshoed to break trail for their teams for miles. Garnie entered his first race in 1978 at the age of 25 after a trifecta of wins by Athabascan mushers Carl Huntington in 1974, Emmitt Peters, the “Yukon Fox,” in 1975, and Jerry Riley in 1976. The winning streak inspired more than just Garnie. In 1976, nearly half of the 34 entrants that year were Native racers. But whatever momentum had been building hit a snag when Riley was short-changed his prize money. He was supposed to get $12,000, but instead received $7,200. Iditarod organizers blamed it on the budget. “Finances were tight in 1976,” said Dick Mackey in his 2001 autobiography, One Second to Glory. “Those of us on the board never knew if the race was going to survive,” he said. In the end, Riley was the only winner in Iditarod history that never got the full prize money he earned. By the time Garnie had entered the race in 1978, the number of Native entrants had started to wane from roughly 40 percent of all entrants to 20 percent. That year, Dick Mackey took home the Iditarod trophy and top prize of $12,000.
Garnie wasn’t expecting to get rich off of competitive distance mushing, but he made a living out of it. From his first Iditarod, he went on to compete in fifteen races and countless other long-distance events over the years. Like so many Native mushers before him, running with his dogs was first a way of life before it ever was about competition. “Our culture is sled dogs,” he said. “Even back when we had sod houses, we made a place for our dogs; they’ve assisted our lives, here.” But when Garnie returned to Teller after boarding school, he noticed there were fewer dog teams around the village. Also, strange new machines called “snow-gos” or snowmobiles had arrived. Innocently, he asked his uncle if these contraptions could outrun the dogs. “He thought I had lost my marbles,” said Garnie. It only took him one try at hunting with a snow machine before he rejected the whole idea. “It was a very odd situation because this was all happening at a very influential time in our lives when we weren’t here.”
Garnie and his boarding school friend, Mike Williams, Sr., know each other’s phone numbers by heart, a testament to the bond they formed over an unorthodox education intended to erase their Indigenous identities. “The bad side of boarding schools is that they are having a rapid change on our traditional way of life,” Williams explained. “And I think we’re going to have to talk about it more to heal because a lot of people had bad experiences.” He went on, “We’ve lost a lot of people to suicides so we’re going to have to deal with that, too.” Such dialogue between the two Native men hardly met the mushing-specific talking points of all other racers, but then again, their clear-eyed perspective on mushing went beyond trophies and prize money. Garnie, who is the only person in Teller to keep sled dogs anymore, told me that he hasn’t come across any young people interested in carrying on mushing traditions. “A lot of ways are getting lost in our culture,” Garnie said. “And one thing we should always remember is a sled dog, without him, we would not have survived this world.”
Ryan Redington was the first musher to arrive at the Rainy Pass checkpoint Monday morning about 150 miles from where the Iditarod began. In between, he made two shortstops in Yentna and Skwentna a team he described on Facebook as feeling strong. But there was a moose they encountered and this bothered Redington. A snowy winter had made survival difficult for the large animals; deep snow caked with an unusual layer of ice meant herds were getting stuck and starving. More than anything, they were scared of predatory wolves. It was no wonder, then, why one agitated moose attacked a team of sled dogs during a day of training weeks earlier before the big race, in Fairbanks. “I might rest a little longer just to give somebody else a chance to scare that moose off,” said Redington as his dogs fed on kibble and slept on beds of straw.
After four hours of rest, Redington paced his team towards Rohn testing his sled-handling skills on steep and icy trails. But it was Albert whose stamina started to wane, the four-year-old male that he had bought from his Native mushing friend, Mike Williams, Jr. The dog was limping by the time the team reached Nikolai where he arrived at 8:11 a.m. Tuesday. It was a slower run across the mountains, rough and windy – but he had longtime family friends to look forward to visiting. “It’s so cool hearing stories from when my Dad and Grandpa raced,” he said. Added to these were the volunteers taking care of Albert, including arranging a flight for him back to Anchorage and transport to Redington’s Knik kennel.