Author: Helen Hegener
Year: 2015
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Genres/categories:
Sports, Non Fiction
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ISBNs:
9780984397761
0984397760 |
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"Musher after musher agrees that no one - racers or officials - knew what to expect." ~Bill Sherwonit in Iditarod: The Great Race to Nome (Alaska Northwest Books, 1991)
On a cold morning in March, 1973, thirty-six mushers stood at the starting line in Anchorage, Alaska, looking down the trail toward Nome, over 1,000 miles away. Several years ago I set about tracking down and visiting the remaining mushers from the 1973 race who would share their stories, their memories of what it was like to be one of the original pioneers setting out on what has since become known as "The Last Great Race on Earth."
The very idea was astonishing, unbelievable, incomprehensible. Who in the world would race their sled dogs one thousand miles? Was it even possible? Would the dogs survive? Would the mushers? Over the years an aura has developed around that first race, and most fans know the lore and the rudiments of the story, how it was Joe Redington Sr.'s pie-in-the-sky dream, how he wrangled others into sharing the dream with him and doing the groundwork necessary to make it happen.
I have not included all of the still-living mushers' stories here; as many of them have written their own books, and many others did not reply to my inquiries, but much of my book is comprised of the verbatim words of mushers who made that first journey to Nome in 1973, captured through recorded and videotaped interviews conducted over a span of several years. They tell a captivating true story.
"And they still don't know what happened, because no one's ever asked us." ~Ford Reeves, who teamed up with Mike Schreiber to run the 1973 Iditarod
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