American Snow Dogs

This is not the American Kennel Club.  These are real American dogs of merit running long distances on real snow.

This is not fantasy.  This is Alaska.  See more large, beautiful pictures from the race here.
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Ladies First?

Aily Zirkle is the lady to beat.

This could be a good year for the Iditarod ladies.

Sure, four-time champion Lance Mackey pulled out of Finger Lake first, followed by 70-year-old Jim Lanier of Chugiak, but 2000 Yukon Quest champion Aily Zirkle of Two Rivers is running third.

Also in the game is last year's winner, 49-year-old John Baker of Kotzebue, the first Inupiat Eskimo to win, and the first Alaska native since Jerry Riley in 1976.

Another pair to watch are Wisconsin twins Anna and Kristy Berington. They are the first twins to ever run the Iditarod. Kristy came in ninth in this year’s Yukon Quest.
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Anna and Kristy Berington are likely to do very well.

The Last Dog Has Crossed the Line

The last dog has crossed the Iditarod finish line with no canine or human deaths during the 1,1610-mile race run by more than 1,100 dogs.

Jamaican dog sled team rookie Newton Marshall finished in 47th place, covering the distance in 12 days, 4 hours and 27 minutes.
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Lance Mackey Wins Fourth Straight Iditarod

Lance Mackey arrived in Nome Alaska at 2:59 pm Alaska Time yesterday, with 11 dogs, and is the first musher in Iditarod Race history to win four back to back Iditarod Championships. His time: eight days, 23 hours and 59 minutes. Mackey gave all the credit to his dog team and especially his three year old female lead dog, Maple.

Lance's father, Dick, was won of the founders of the modern Iditarod, and won the race in 1978. Lance's brother, Rick, won the race in 1983.



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Jamaican Dog Sled Team to Run Iditarod

The Jamaican Dog Sled team will be running the Iditarod.

Jamaican musher Newton Marshall took off yesterday and may do very well as he is running with some of the best dogs from three-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey's kennel. Marshall has been training with Mackey in Alaska in recent months.

In 2009, as a sled dog rookie, Marshall came in 13th out of a field of 29 mushers in the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest. This man is not a one-run wonder.

Marshall started off with strays adopted from the Jamaican SPCA and ran his sled on wheels in Jamaica. In 2005, Jimmy Buffett heard about him and decided to sponsor his dog sled exploits. This year Lance Mackey supplied the dogs for his run, and some expert on-the-ground training as well.

Any question of who I am rooting for? And yes a movie has to be in the works!

But of course, the man to beat is Lance Mackey Himself, who is out to win his fourth straight Iditarod. As the Associated Press put it:

Both knees are shot, injected with synthetic cartilage until he can have surgery next summer. His right arm is still healing from a major operation to fix a staph infection. He continues to deal with other side effects of cancer.

But Lance Mackey is gunning for his fourth consecutive win in the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

In Alaska they make them tough as nails, one way or another.
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The World's Top Athlete Has No Paper Pedigree

The top athlete in the world is not in the Olympics. He's on the Iditarod, and he doesn't have a Kennel Club pedigree, notes a recent article in Outside magazine.

It's 6:15 A.M. as I approach the home of one of the world's greatest athletes. His name is Tony, and he lives in a tiny plywood shack about 30 miles outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. By all rights, he should be exhausted. He got up at four and ran 22 miles in a mid-September, pre-dawn chill, and he wasn't running on nicely paved roads. He ran across fields and through muddy ruts on dirt trails while he and a few teammates tugged against harnesses attached to an ATV. By any measure, it was an absurdly tough workout, and it was even more remarkable because this was Tony's first hard run in months. So I'm amazed to see him standing outside his door, looking refreshed and eager.

As you may have guessed, Tony is a sled dog, which means he's a mutt, with a little Siberian husky in the mix, who's been specially bred for speed, desire, and resilience. When Tony's in peak condition, his VO2 max—a measure of his ability to take in and use oxygen in the bloodstream—tops out at more than 200 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. (Back when Lance Armstrong was racking up multiple Tour de France wins, his famously high VO2 maxed at around 85.) Tony may be a little flabby now, but in a few months, when he's competing in the Iditarod, he'll be able to run an average of 100 miles a day over eight or nine days, working at 50 percent of his VO2 max for hours on end. As part of a team, he can run sub-four-minute miles for 60 or 70 miles.

It turns out that DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- is studying sled dogs to see if they can find out how to improve the performance of humans under war-time stress.

Also interested in sled dogs is the Diabetes Action Research and Education Foundation. And here's why:

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT to look at Tony, because he's pretty slight, but he's fed a diet that's mostly fat—up to 60 percent. "You'd kill a pet dog with that," says Erica McKenzie, a professor of large-animal medicine at Oregon State University who's studied sled dogs with Davis. If people ate such a diet, we'd all be diabetics living—not for long—on Lipitor. "

The Iditarod Sled Dog Race starts Saturday, March 6th and goes for about 12 days as the dogs run the 1,600-mile long course.

• Related Post
  ** The Genetics of Iditarod and Crufts
  ** Alaska: Made by Special Dogs of No Special Breed
  ** You Make an Iditarod Winner with Good Dog Food
  ** Poodles In the Iditarod?
  ** Lance MacKey Wins the Iditarod ... Again
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The Westminster Iditarod Team

From The Onion.
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Lance MacKey Wins the Iditarod ... Again

Lance Mackey has won his third Iditarod in a row with Larry & Maple running as lead dogs. Mackey was about six hours ahead of the second- and third-place mushers, Sebastian Schnuelle of Canada and John Baker of Kotzebue. Larry has been one of Mackey's two lead dogs for three years in a row.

How does he do it?

Well, he's a very good musher, he's been pretty lucky, and he has a team of top dogs who are well-trained and very well-conditioned.

And what does he feed those dogs while he trains them? Well one big part of the menu is a dog food with CORN in it!

Corn? Oh. My. God. How could he?

Well, the same way almost every working dog in the world, from bird dog to working terrier, and from Iditarod dog to racing greyhound, is fed a dry dog food with a significant amount of corn in it.

Corn works, and there is not a single study that shows putting corn in dog food is bad.

Not a one. Quite the opposite.

Does that mean that the dogs are mostly eating corn? Of course not, and especially not during a race when 10,000-12,000 calories a day are being sucked down per dog. You need a lot of fat and protein to get 12,000 calories inside a dog. That said, when the dogs are training (i.e. the other 350 days of the year), calorie intake is a lot less than during a 1,000-mile race, and dried kibble is a large part of the diet -- kibble with corn in it.

As for feeding 80 dogs at a crack, try to do it without a kibbled dog food or a fish wheel located right outside your cabin!

• Related Post
  ** You Make an Iditarod Winner with Good Dog Food
  ** No Evidence One Dog Food Is Better Than Another
  ** Dog Food: Let's Try Science!
  ** Poodles In the Iditarod?
  ** Feed Me Like a Wolf
  ** The Genetics of Iditarod and Crufts
  ** Alaska: Made by Special Dogs of No Special Breed
  ** A Brief History of Dog Food

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You Make an Iditarod Winner with Good Dog Food

See more Iditarod video here

"Corn is crap."

That's a line you won't hear from the winners of the Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race.

The Iditarod is a 1,161 miles long, stretching from Willow to Nome, Alaska, and it is usually run in 8-15 days (depending on weather) by teams of 12-16 dogs who are almost all cross-breed huskies.

The key to winning the Iditarod is not just having good dogs, good luck, and a good musher who makes few (if any) mistakes: It's also having dogs that are top shape and which can routinely run hundred-mile days.

Someone who knows what it takes to win the Iditarod is Lance Mackey. Lance won the 2007 and 2008 Iditarods back-to-back, and he was also a top-10 finisher in 2005 and 2006.

In 2007 and 2008, Lance also won the Yukon Gold race (1,000 miles from Whitehorse, Yukon to Fairbanks, Alaska), a race he also won in 2005 and 2006.

To top it all off Lance Mackey has also won the Copper Basin 300 Championship this year (a repeat win from 2006), and had previous wins in the Kobuk 440 Championship, and the Knik 200 Championship.


Lance Mackey, Iditarod, 2006.  Photo by Carl Auer.


So what does Lance Mackey feed his dogs while they are in training and running 3-4 times a week ?

He feeds them a dog food that contains CORN.

And Lance Mackey is not alone.

Eddy Streeper and his wife Amy also feed their dogs in training a food that contains corn.

Eddy has won the Canadian Open Championships 11 times, the Anchorage Fur Rondy twice, and the Open North American Championship in Fairbanks. His wife, Amy is a two-time Open North American Champion.

And, of course, these world-class working dog men and women are not alone.

Most of the working gun dogs, bear hounds, working terriers, pig dogs, and racing greyhounds in this country are fed dog food that has corn in it as well.

In fact almost all working dogs eat bagged kibble, and most of that kibble has corn in it.

For example Martin Buser, who has won the Iditarod four times (including the fastest time ever) powers his dogs with Eagle Pack Power Formula, which is a dog food made with corn.

Hans Gatt, the 2002, 2003, and 2004 Yukon Quest winner uses the same food.

Four-time Iditarod chamption Susan Butcher powered her teams to victory on Purina Pro Plan's HiPro --a dog food containing corn.



As for Lance MacKey and the other top mushers named in this post, they train their dogs on Redpaw Poweredge 32K a dog food that lists corn as the #2 ingredient, and which is "designed for competitive training."

Putting corn in dog food is NOT a mistake, says Eric Morris. Morris is a competitive long-distance musher who created RedPaw dog food specifically for the training of long-haul endurance dogs.

In a post entitled "Is Corn Really Bad for my Dog," Morris notes that much of the "information" about corn and dog food found on the Internet today is simply wrong, and has been wrong for many decades.

He writes:

When feed manufacturers first began making dry pet foods decades ago little was known about how these diets would affect a dog. Based on the industries experience with making animal feeds, corn was a primary ingredient. Due to the industries lack of knowledge on canine nutrition and how to properly process the grains these dog foods did not perform well and often resulted in poor stools. Corn was given the blame for all of this and that stigma is still persisting to this day and is often used as a marketing tool.

Over time the industry has learned more about canine metabolism and how corn can affect digestion and the production methods have progressed significantly. This new knowledge has given the pet food manufacturers the ability to use corn and various other grains in their formulations without any dietary complications provided the feed is formulated and processed correctly. In some cases the use of corn is a significant advantage in dog foods.

A great example of this is Redpaw Poweredge 32K dog food. This is a dry kibble dog food with the primary ingredient being fish complimented with poultry and pork. Since Redpaw bases all of it’s formulations on the overall performance of dogs in real working conditions the company did not base their formulations on the marketing and ingredient list. The formulations are based solely on performance so all potential ingredients were considered.

In the case of this one dog food, corn was the absolute best grain source to compliment the other ingredients. Using corn as the grain component resulted in a final formulation the yielded a high protein dog food with complete and balanced amino acid and fatty acid profiles. This synergy was not possible using any other grain. Redpaw also understands that if the grain is ground properly and then cooked under the ideal conditions that the starches in corn can be completely digestible allowing them to take advantage of the protein and fat portion of the corn. The cooking process that Redpaw uses allows for the complete unfolding of the starches. It is very similar to the process of making popcorn. Under the proper temperature and pressure the starches from the corn are encouraged to completely unfold and pop up like a piece of popcorn. As we all know popcorn will begin to breakdown in water. In a dog, these starches begin to breakdown as soon as they enter the dogs digestive system and do not contribute to any digestive problems.

An interesting note is that the Redpaw Poweredge 32K mentioned above is the top performance dog food in the sleddog racing circles. This one dog food has has more top ten victories the past two years running than any other dog food on the market. This feed was even responsible for the unprecedented back to back victories in the Yukon Quest and Iditarod sleddog races two years running. So when someone tells you that corn is bad for your dog, simply look at the results of Redpaw, it speaks for itself.

Is this more puffery from another dog food manufacturer?

Well, as Morris notes, look at the records of Lance Mackey, Marin Buser, Eddy and Amy Streeper, and all the rest who are winning in competitive sled dog trials after training their dogs with Redpaw Poweredge 32K, Eagle Pack Super Premium, or Purina HiPro.

Could it be -- just maybe --that they know something about corn that hyper-ventilating food-faddist on doggie list-servs do not?

Which is not to say that I would recommend a couch-potato dog start chowing down on Redpaw 32K or Eagle Pack Super Premium.

These two dog foods have a 20 percent fat content, which is probably the minimum needed for dogs running several hundred miles a week, but which is too rich for dogs not engaged in such competitive training.

Feeding the average suburban dog a 20-30 percent fat diet (most mushers add fatty meat to their dog kibble during really heavy training days and during the race itself) is a bit like a suburan homeowner chowing down on the same high-energy foods as olympic swimmer Michael Phelps.

Remember: If a dog (or a human) eats like an athlete, but does not work out like an athlete, the result is predictable -- FAT.

So what should your dog be eating?

In my book, most dog owners cannot go wrong with any grocery-store bought Purina or Pedigree product with a fat content of about 10 to 12 percent, and a protein content of about 25 percent.

And, of course, it will do your dog no harm if you supplement this diet with an occasional frozen chicken wing, fried egg, or handful of snap beans.

Of course, for the average couch-potato, agility-dog, or ball-chaser, almost any dog food will be fine.

The main thing, is simply to not feed your dog too much.

Veterinarians and human doctors rarely see dogs or humans in trouble from nutritional deficits.

On the other hand, both see dogs and humans every day that are dying from obesity.

With food (both human and canine), quality is generally less important than quantity, and less food is almost always a better health choice than too much.

And as for the folks who are busy lecturing the world about the evils of corn-based dog food, be advised that these people are full of hot air.

There is not one long-term, peer-reviewed, double-blind study which shows that corn in dog food is bad. Not one.

But there is the track record of Lance McKey, Martin Buser, Buddy Streeper, and all the rest, which suggests the exact opposite.

The lesson here is that corn is NOT crap, even if some of the advice to be gleaned from list-servs and dog food faddists is.

• Related Links:** Let's Try Science!
  ** No Evidence One Dog Food Is Better Than Another
  ** Feed Me Like a Wolf
  ** Canned Beaver as Dog Food?
  ** A Brief History of Dog Food
  ** Dog Food Secrets "They" Don't Want You To Know** Alaska: Made by Special Dogs of No Special Breed
  ** God Himself Tips His Hat for Governor's Last Run** Poodles In the Iditarod?
  ** The Genetics of Iditarod and Crufts

Alaska: Made by Special Dogs of No Special Breed

Craig Medred, the Outdoors Columnist for the Alaska Daily News (now there's a good job) writes that grade school kids who are promoting the Malamute as Alaska's state dog are "barking up wrong tree":

In no state in the nation has the common canine played a more important role than in Alaska, and for that reason the students at Anchorage Polaris K-12 school and Rep. Berta Gardner, D-Anchorage, deserve a heap of praise for their efforts to make the malamute the state dog.

The only problem is they've got the wrong pup.

Not that there is anything wrong with the malamute, an historic Alaska breed believed to trace its roots back to the first wolves domesticated by Natives of the Arctic Coast. It's just that there's a much better candidate:

The sled dog.

Yeah, that's right. The basic, generic, unpretentious sled dog.

He or she might be a malamute or part malamute, or a Siberian husky or part Siberian husky, or a German shorthair or part German shorthair, or an Irish setter or part Irish setter, or a Targhee hound or part Targhee hound, or a cross between a black-and-white dog and a mongrel.

Whatever the case, this dog is the essence of all that is best about the 49th state:

• We don't care where you came from.

• We don't care what you look like.

• All that matters is that you can perform.

For the Mahlemut Inuits of Kotzebue Sound back in the days before the white people arrived in Alaska, the malamute was that dog.

For the adventurers and prospectors who first opened Alaska up to the rest of the world, the "Esquimax'' dog or the "Indian'' dog was that dog.

For the men who hauled the freight that helped build the early gold mines that were Alaska's economy before the oil began to flow, the "big dog'' -- be it a mixed breed of Saint Bernard, husky, Newfoundland, or what-have-you -- was that dog.

Over the years, almost any breed of dog more than 20 pounds or so seems to have served time as an Alaska sled dog.

"Gillie Jacko had a bunch of Airedales,'' wrote the late Gus Jensen, an Athabascan elder from Iliamna Lake. Jensen once hauled the mail by dog team from Iliamna to Pile Bay Village, Pedro Bay, Chekok and Goose Bay. Bill Vaudrin, a writer and Iditarod veteran who died tragically at the age of 32 in a 1976 car accident, got Jensen and a bunch of others to detail their memories for a book titled "Racing Alaskan Sled Dogs.'' Jensen lived through the period when the sled dog was to Alaska what the horse was to the West.

The sled dog, in all shapes and sizes, opened the frontier.

"I remember old Charlie Dennison from up at Lake Clark was trying to haul a 1,200-pound boiler home from Roadhouse (Iliamna) for his sawmill,'' Jensen wrote. "He son, Floyd, had 13 big dogs that time. He used to brag he threw away 80- and 90-pounders. But he got stuck.''

Dennison called for help. A massive towline was lashed together. Other dog teams were called in for muscle. Thirty-five canines of all sorts ended up harnessed to the stuck sled.

"Young Harvey Drew had great big, mixed-breed dogs -- Saint Bernard, husky, malamute, German shepherds -- and I was running nine big mail dogs,'' Jensen wrote, "(and) those Airedales of Gillie's were up front barking and yapping, and that sled mowed down everything in its path, snapped dry trees 8 and 10 inches through like they were kindling."

The sled dog was the workhorse of the historic early Alaska.

Eventually, of course, the internal-combustion engine came to replace man's best friend as the power of the North, but the sled dog had by then earned such a prominent place in our history that it will never go away. The sled dog is still out there today running for competition or for fun, and he or she remains very much the any-dog that made Alaska.

"The best cross I ever had was a springer (spaniel) with a Johnny Allen (husky) bitch,'' Gareth Wright, the legendary dog breeder from Fairbanks, wrote in Racing. Wright's Aurora huskies -- a cross between Irish setters, wolves and Siberian huskies with some hound and only-Gareth-knows-what-else rolled in -- helped him win the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race and the Open North American Championship in Fairbanks back in the day. But the reign of the Aurora husky didn't end there.

Aurora huskies helped power Wright's daughter, Roxie Wright, to the first Fur Rendezvous win by a woman and towed grandson Ramy Brooks to victory in the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. The Wrights were a dominant force for a long time in Alaska sled-dog racing, and who knows, but that they might not have been more so if Gareth had bred more of those springer-spaniel crosses.

Unfortunately, he wrote, that "was an accidental breeding, and before I found out how good the pups were, I sold the female. There were six (pups) in the litter, and I ran them in 1947 when they were 15 months old and came in second by 4 seconds in the North American. ... Those were the toughest and fastest dogs I ever saw.''

They were special dogs, but of no special breed.

They were simply sled dogs of the sort you'll see line up on Fourth Avenue in downtown Anchorage for the start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in March.

Look at these dogs closely, and you can see the blood of just about any dog you want to imagine in the mix somewhere: Huskies, hounds, retrievers, pointers and even, occasionally, what appears as if it might be some hint of the malamute or even the wolf. Here is the great melting pot of the canine world.

America, as President Barack Obama so well illustrates, might be the world's greatest racial and ethnic melting pot, but Alaska clearly holds the distinction in the canine world. The grand stage for man's best friend in Alaska doesn't revolve around Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show prettiness, where judges fret over whether a dog is true to its ancestor's breed.

No, the grand stage of Alaska centers on the sled dog trails where it really doesn't matter who your ancestors were; it matters only that you perform like Paul Gebhardt's "red dog,'' the 2000 winner of the Iditarod's Golden Harness award for the best lead dog.

Like so many others, red dog was a mix, a mongrel, a cross breed. But all of that became irrelevant because he was a first-class sled dog with a big heart, a powerful body and an overwhelming determination to please.

Alaska was, in part, built on the hard work of dogs like this.

They are the dogs that deserve our recognition for their role in our history.

Not this breed or that breed over which the fans of each could no doubt argue for days or weeks, but that easily defined dog that could be yours or mine or anybody's in almost any shape or size -- the sled dog.

Is that a great article, or what? A hat tip and big thanks to J.R. Absher for bird-dogging me to it!


This Iditarod Standard Poodle Team (they placed in the middle of the pack) ran from 1988 thru 1991. For more information (and a great song), click here.


Two teams of sled dogs in 1912: Siberians on the left, and mixed domestic dogs on the right.


A mixed set of Yukon sled dogs in 1922.


Frederick Cook, artic explorer, with a sled dog that looks like a collie in 1908.


This Dyer-Keen team set the record from Seattle, Washington to Nome, Alaska in 35 days in 1906.

God Himself Tips His Hat for Governor's Last Run

Northern lights in Alaska, aka, the aurora borealis.


The sum total of what PETA knows about animals in general, and dogs in particular, could be written on the head of a pin with a felt tip.

As Gina noted in a recent post on the Pet Connection blog, PETA expresses great concern whenever a well-loved pulling dog dies on the once-a-year Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, but we hear not a peep out of them about the ONE TON of dead animals that they kill every month and push out their back door for the incinerator man to haul away.

No matter. What are you going to do about morons and hypocrites, ignorants and self-aggrandizing goofs? They will always be with us.

And let us hope the men and women of the Iditarod will be as well. The Anchorage Daily News ran this wonderful article the other day which sums up how these folks feel about their dogs. Sometime a short story tells quite a lot:

By Kevin Klott March 11th, 2008

Lead Dog's Ashes Spread Where He Often Ran Best

Governor's last great race ends at Bishop Rock, where Gebhardt says goodbye.


UNALAKLEET -- Feeling melancholy from pouring the ashes of his dead lead dog on the Yukon River, Paul Gebhardt dug deep for happiness late Saturday when he watched green northern lights dance in the sky.

Traveling in and out of the fog banks between Nulato and Kaltag, the lights illuminated the sky so brightly that even Gebhardt's dogs took notice. Running with their ears pinned back from a slight headwind, all but one dog looked to the heavens and watched the aurora borealis show.

"I'd never seen them do that," Gebhardt said. "It was something out of a Disney movie.

"I was just laughing," he said. "It would have been a beautiful picture."

Hours before, Gebhardt had been mourning Governor, a 4-year-old that died suddenly four months ago at the musher's Kasilof kennel. Gebhardt took out a bag with ashes of his prized lead dog and spread them along the Iditarod Trail.

Governor was just reaching his prime when he died Nov. 2. He had led Gebhardt to a second-place finish in last year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. But Governor, a rock eater all his life, swallowed a quarter-sized rock and it killed him.

Instead of burying him near the kennel, Gebhardt decided to spread Governor's ashes at Bishop Rock -- the halfway point between Ruby and Kaltag where Governor often ran best.

"He was always good on the river," Gebhardt said. "So it made sense."

With 13 dogs traveling by the glow of Gebhardt's headlamp, he cut a hole in the bottom of the bag and let Governor's ashes spill out as the team ran.

"Mitch (Seavey) was right behind me, so his team was running right through Governor," Gebhardt said. "That's probably why he's ahead of me now. He's got Governor dust." >> Read the rest

A musher rests with one of his dogs during the 2005 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
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Poodles In the Iditarod??

Lance Mackey of Fairbanks, Alaska has won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race this year -- his second win in as many years.

Lance's father and brother, Dick and Rick Mackey, are previous Iditarod champions.

Lance Mackey and his team will go into the record books not only for winning the Iditarod this year, but also because he won the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest race earlier this year (his fourth four Yukon Quest in succession), making his kennel one of the greatest to ever put runner to snow pack.

Other great mushers of years past include Rick Swenson, who won the Iditarod five times, and the late great Susan Butcher who won it four times, along with other four-time winners, Doug Swingley, Martin Buser and Jeff King.

In other news, an 18-year old Alaska woman has become the youngest person ever to finish the Iditarod. Check it out.

For one of the best Iditarod stories ever check out this web site about the Iditarod Poodle Team. No, this is not a joke. This pack of standard poodles competed in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from 1988 thru 1991. Love the song!

God bless America, land that I love.
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