The 51st annual running of the Iditarod starts on March 4, but this year there are fewer teams than usual.
Mike Williams Jr. doesn’t remember when he started mushing, but once he was strong enough to handle the sled dogs, it became his passion. At first, he mushed after school, taking his father’s dogs on 3- and 4-mile trails near his home in Akiak, Alaska. He ran the Iditarod for the first time in 2010 and has competed seven times since.
The Iditarod is Alaska’s best-known sporting event. Sled dogs and their mushers travel the roughly thousand-mile trail from Anchorage to Nome each year in March to commemorate the 1925 serum run, when a relay of 20 dogsled teams delivered life-saving medication to Nome to halt a diphtheria outbreak. The route is only passable in winter, when the rivers and lakes have frozen over.
Williams, the musher from Akiak, says that in the years since he began competing, he has noticed the changes to the landscape and how they’ve impacted the trail. He remembers one warm winter in 2014, when the trail was icy in some areas and reduced to bare ground in others. This made for such a bumpy ride that“That was a very tough year for training and racing, and running the Iditarod in those conditions for almost the whole race was very challenging,” he said. “And it was very humbling.
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