A handful of mushers who finished the first Iditarod in 1973 are still alive and eager to reflect on a race that few expected to work out at all.
Joe Redington, left, and Orville Lake, right, present Dick Wilmarth of Red Devil the trophy for his victory in the inaugural Iditarod in 1973.
“I think it has essentially changed for the better over time,” said Dan Seavey, who finished third in the inaugural race, and has both a son and grandson who have gone on to repeatedly win the event he helped pioneer. The concept behind the first Iditarod was more out of place in the era that spawned it than it is now. The primary impetus was to revive long-distance dog mushing, which had yielded almost entirely to sprint racing and snowmachines across Alaska. There was no contemporaneous template for what mushers attempted in 1973 when they pulled their snow hooks up at Tozier Track on Tudor Road in Anchorage.
By all accounts, Redington was a force to contend with, possessed with uniquely efficacious passion and powers of persuasion that worked to draw in friends, colleagues, and investors as he marshaled resources to organize an experimental feat. For years, he kicked around the idea of a long-distance race across Alaska, although plans didn’t begin firming up until a few months before the actual start of the 1973 Iditarod. And even then, many plans were realized only in real time.
“That’s ignorance, basically. And I say that in all sincerity,” said Dan Seavey, who in addition to being part of the group that planned the first race is a retired history teacher. The race reaches the checkpoint of Iditarod during the 1981 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 13, 1981. “I ran this end of the race without a budget. All volunteers,” Farley said. “People in Nome loved to gamble, and they loved to volunteer, back in those days.”
. Race information was passed along via radio relays. Food drops were a fiasco. Skills and survival abilities varied wildly. Some of the entrants had a lifetime of experience with animal husbandry in the wilderness. Others were barely old enough to vote and had little experience running dogs. Dan Seavey’s 2013 book “The First Great Race” recounts the inaugural Iditarod in detail, pulling in interviews taped at the time, as well as some conducted decades later, and abundant primary documents. It’s a wealth of observations, recollections, and detailed descriptions of just how ramshackle and casual the whole thing was.
The discrepancies in canine quality were huge, said Perry, who authored “Trailbreakers,” a two-volume history of the Iditarod Trail and the sled dog race. Ken Chase was one of those who dropped what he was doing when he first heard mention of a great race on the radio at his home in Anvik.published by the Iditarod at the end of last year.
Schultheis helped put in trail just days before the race start, and after setting off made it only as far as Skwentna before scratching. There were no headlamps yet, and options for illumination at night were limited to flashlights that went largely unused. Mushers ran by daylight, and camped during the night, a far cry from the rhythms of how the race has since developed, where calculated run-rest schedules have divorced competitors from the dictates of any natural clock.
“Ptarmigan Valley, that’ll never get out of my mind,” Chase said. “I snowshoed for three days up that valley ahead of the dogs. Bud Smyth and Victor Kotongan and I breaking trail, ‘cause it stormed.”The dog food, by today’s standards, was miserable. At the time, it was hard to even get high-quality kibble in Alaska. And with little guidance available on how to feed a dog team running dozens of miles a day for weeks at a time, most competitors just sort of guessed at what they’d need.
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