Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, one of the most famous mushing events in the world, gets underway on March 3 in Alaska, and as pre-event news stories circulate, they hit home for veterinarian and sled dog enthusiast Pam Barker of 83 Mile House.
Barker, who grew up in Alaska, witnessed her first Iditarod when she was 10 years old, when living with her family in the city of Anchorage. Back then, she says, it was more of a frontier town where it was quite normal to see a team of dogs pulling a sled through the downtown area.
The Iditarod was always a highlight, with 60 to 70 dog teams that ran up to 16 dogs a team. Barker says she would volunteer to go out at 3 a.m., before the race started, to paint identifying marks on all of the dogs.
The state of Alaska embraces the event, with remote villages along the route getting heavily involved in hosting the racers as they pass through, and schools offer a program that teaches students about the Iditarod.
Barker worked her way through university as a zookeeper in Anchorage, and hung out with friends who ran sled dogs. Later, while attending vet school in Washington State, she started racing her own rag-tag team of a Gordon setter, an English setter and a border collie.
“The border collie only went along with it because he felt morally obligated, but any athletic dog who likes to run, works.”
She was hooked on sled dogs, and after graduation in 2006, she jumped at the chance to volunteer as an Iditarod race vet, joining other vets who came from all over the world for the once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The Iditarod trail length from Anchorage to its finish point in Nome is roughly 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometres) and points in between those two centres are only accessible by sled, snowmobile and plane.
It’s takes about two weeks to run the course, and because mushers can only pack so much gear on their sled, additional supplies, such as dog food, has to be flown in to checkpoints by bush pilots.
Vets are also flown out to the checkpoints where they scrutinize every dog for problems. Barker says the dogs get fantastic care, while mushers pretty well have to fend for themselves.
“There are no physicians for mushers and it’s not uncommon for a vet to work on a musher.”
She recounts one case where the musher came into a checkpoint with his contact lenses frozen to the corneas of his eyes. During her experience at the race, at one checkpoint, the temperature dipped to -70 F (-56.7 C) with a 120 km/h wind.
“You just dress really warm in layers.”
Barker says she spent anywhere from one to five days at each of the remote checkpoints looking dogs over for soreness, pneumonia, weight loss, attitude and proper hydration. Vets also check vitals and act on any concerns of the mushers, and if deemed necessary, they will have a dog pulled from the race and flown back to Anchorage where it goes under full-time vet’s care at a women’s prison.
“The inmates consider it a privilege to care for the dogs.”
She adds the mushers are very tuned to their dogs and usually notice any slight change in their behaviour.
“It’s always the musher deciding to drop dogs from a race. It’s a family member for them and they’re not taking any chances.”
Mushers carry adequate gear to keep their dogs healthy, like booties and food, which includes kibble, fish, meat and fat, that is cooked on the trail and supplies them with the 10,000 calories they burn each day. They also carry and maintain a vet logbook, which is turned over to the vet at each checkpoint, she adds.
Barker compares the fitness level of sled dogs to that of Olympic runners and she says they fare well. They’re bedded down on straw and blanketed each night, while the musher might have to sleep in his sled if they haven’t made it to a checkpoint.
Of them all, Barker says mushers get the least amount of sleep because they have to cook and care for their dogs at each stop.
In the past, mushers also lost sleep finding their way back on course when trail markers were blown over in storms. Now, they are able to carry GPS devices, which can be used in emergencies.
More people have climbed Mt. Everest than done the Iditarod and Barker thinks seeing the event trail in the capacity of a vet was the way to do it.
“It was a great experience and a real commitment. I went to villages that people seldom go to and did things that I’d read about, watched on TV and talked to other people about. I even got to work with a musher who I’d followed since I was a kid.”
While she hasn’t raced a team in the Iditarod, Baker has done 20 or 30 other events of varying lengths with her 10 Siberian huskies.
In late January, Barker ran eight of her dogs in the famous Gold Rush Trail Sled Dog Mail Run from its start near Cottonwood to Barkerville. Participants were sworn in as official Canada Post mail carriers for the weekend and given a couple of bags of real mail to carry between the points. In total, there were more than 3,000 letters, destined for 51 countries, hand stamped with a souvenir Mail Run stamp and carried by dog sled.
Barker says she’ll do three or four races this year, and her husband, Craig Conklin, will be busy skijoring with their Gordon setter. When not racing, the focus will be on keeping the dogs in good physical shape and mentally tuned. They live outside in fenced groups of three and four and every day the gates between them are opened so they can run and play together.
“Owning sled dogs is like being a coach. You have to work with them and their differences all the time.”
