The 49th state offers a variety of terrain and options for any musher. Whether it’s cold and flat, warm and hilly, snowy, or icy, Alaska’s varied terrain and unpredictable weather have something for any dog musher. And that’s what lures and keeps mushers here decade after decade.
From Iditarod champions and hopefuls, to sprint mushing’s fastest teams and hundreds of recreational and tour kennels in between, Alaska is home to the world’s densest population of dog drivers. So, where is the best place to live and move in Alaska? Well, that depends on who you ask. Dog mushing is Alaska’s state sport and has a long and checkered past.
Used as a primary mode of transport, it became formally competitive in the early 1900s with the All Alaska Sweepstakes, a 408-mile event from Nome to Candle and back. Alaska Natives and transient miners raced in the villages two decades before, betting on the fastest, strongest teams, but the Sweepstakes were the catalyst for today’s modern races.
Today, thousands of miles of dog-friendly trails in the state are used for racing, recreation, hunting, and travel. The Iditarod Trail is one of Alaska’s most historically significant trails. These days, the 1,000-mile race trail runs from Willow to Nome. Still, around the turn of the last century, the trail was used as a mail and supply route and began in Seward on the Kenai Peninsula.“Some of the toughest parts of that trail were on the Kenai Peninsula,” said Linda Chamberlain, a researcher, author and musher based outside of Homer.
Kenai Peninsula
“Heavy snowfall, blow holes on Kenai Lake, and glaciations made this stretch fantastically challenging.”Though many feeder trails from that original Iditarod trail still exist, the main trail was eventually replaced with a railroad and road system.
Today, mushers on the Kenai Peninsula still deal with heavy snowfall and inclement weather, though ever-changing climate behavior has significantly changed the winters even in the last two decades. About 15 miles past Homer, up East End Road, is a small congregation of mushers, including long-time dog driver Jack Berry.
Berry, who started running dogs in 1988 in Homer, has competed in six Iditarods and six Yukon Quests but has now turned his focus to open-class sprint racing. Berry was instrumental in bushwhacking old seismographic routes and blazing what are now destination trails for dog mushing and snow machining in the Caribou Hills, a multi-use winter wonderland with many trails, various terrain, and notoriously challenging weather.
Most of the trails are maintained these days by snowmachine clubs based out of Homer and Ninilchik. As far as Berry is concerned, the Caribou Hills offer the best long-distance training in the state. “The trails here are more conducive to toughening up dogs for tough races like the (Yukon) Quest,” Berry said. Berry was also quick to note that though training in this part of Alaska is often associated with warm weather, it’s easier for a dog team to go from warm training to cold racing than for dogs to train in cold weather and then travel to a warmer clime for a race.
“If you’re always training in warmer weather, it’s not as hard transferring over to cold,” Berry said. The Caribou Hills offer challenging climbs, steep descents, overflow, and wind, in other words, a little bit of everything except extreme cold. However, seeing 20 or 30 below at least a few times during the winter is common. There are a few downfalls to living with sled dogs in Berry’s neck of the woods. Fall training is highly challenging, and most mushers looking to race wind up trucking their dogs to add miles.
Berry has focused his dog mushing career on sprint racing for about five years. He made the switch to spend more time with his daughter. While the Homer area might be great for distance training, Berry said sprint training is challenging. Swamps that house bottomless mud pits don’t freeze until November, making speed training difficult.
But it wasn’t always like this, he noted. Less than ten years ago, Berry said you could be on a dog sled by mid-October, but these days, good snow doesn’t come until Thanksgiving or later. Berry said the wind is a constant battle in the Caribou Hills area for putting in groomed trails, as it can wipe them out entirely before you get home and hook up your first dog.
Most mushers who use the Caribou Hills depend on snowmachiners to break open trails once the snow does come because of the sheer volume of precipitation. Berry said the relationship between the snowmachine clubs and dog drivers is good. Further up the Sterling Highway in the Kasilof, Clam Gulch area is another, bigger cluster of dog drivers, which, like anywhere else in the state, includes Iditarod and Quest veterans, mid-distance enthusiasts, and recreational mushers. Colleen and Joseph Robertia have lived in Kasilof for eight years. They landed there after quickly realizing city life in Anchorage wasn’t for them. Soon after moving to rural Alaska, they were captivated by dog mushing and began Rogues Gallery Kennel a few years later.
“The upside is it’s never too cold to train here; the downside is it can often be too warm to train,” said Colleen, an Iditarod and Yukon Quest veteran.“Early in the season, our runs occur at about 5 AM, before work. In a perfect summer, we can get in a short run with a team in the morning and still have the day warm up enough to take the dogs swimming in the evening. Heading into winter is exciting, but since our falls and winters are so variable, there’s also a bit of unknown.
Some mushers have a very prescribed existence to their season. We definitely can’t, because every winter is different. We’ve had it snow as early as September and as late as January, and there are often numerous freeze-thaw cycles throughout the season,” Colleen explained. She added that living in coastal Alaska offers beach training, which is excellent for toughening up dogs’ feet and making for an honest pulling, tough brood.
“Usually by mid/late fall, we can truck the dogs to the Caribou Hills, our main winter playground. Early in the winter, it’s the best place to be. Snowmachines aren’t allowed there yet, so it’s still pure, innocent, and peaceful. Respected by the musher and not yet conquered by the snowmachiner, it’s very safe for the dogs,” she said. Like elsewhere in the state, Kasilof is becoming more populated yearly, so people are buying land, and trails are being closed off. In a good year, the Robertias can train out of their yard, but usually trim to more secluded spots to avoid dog-team traffic.
On the Peninsula, there are options for commercial dog food (Homer Hounds in Homer and the Kasilof Mercantile in Kasilof sell a variety of commercial kibble and meat). Though prices are slightly higher because of shipping, some mushers ship their food down from Anchorage, Wasilla, or Fairbanks.
Mat-Su Valley
Fish is abundant and readily available on the Peninsula and is the meat of choice for many. Kennels sprinkle the landscape from Kasilof to Sterling, past Anchorage to Eagle River and Chugiak. Knik, Wasilla, Big Lake, and Willow make up one of the state’s largest contingents of mushers, perhaps only second to the Fairbanks area. With excellent access to hundreds of miles of trails that span to Nome, and a few well-maintained sprint tracks with a maze of challenging trails in between, this area offers mushers endless possibilities. In Wasilla, there are a few options for commercial dog food and supplies, including Underdog Feeds and Animal Food Warehouse, with independent dog-food vendors scattered throughout the area.
The Mat-Su Borough is also host to many races throughout the season, and because of its central location within the state and relatively tame weather, it is a popular choice for mushers to set up shop. Land for mushers is affordable with excellent access, not to mention great views of Denali and the Alaska Range, which is why it’s home to many mushing legends and champions: the Redingtons in Knik; Martin Buser in Big Lake, and Egil Ellis in Willow, to name a few. Already established racers in Europe, champions Egil Ellis and his wife, Helen Lundberg, moved to Willow from Sweden in 2001.
Lundberg and Ellis said they chose Willow after finding a lovely property with great training possibilities. “Our fall training is done mostly on our own trails and gravel roads around the neighborhood. We go to Hatcher Pass or Nancy Lake Road for early winter training,” they said. Snow comes near the end of November, they said, but be prepared to meet a lot of teams out there, as Willow is a hot spot for dog drivers. Trucking the dogs is part of their winter regimen to give them variation in their training. The Aurora sprint track in Big Lake and the Montana Creek track near the Talkeetna cutoff are about 40 minutes away in opposite directions, but both are valuable assets.
Copper River Basin
Heidi Sutter and Darrin Lee are on the other side of Hatcher Pass, down the Glenn Highway to the Tok Cutoff, nestled just outside Chistochina in the Copper River Valley. They run a modest racing kennel and pride themselves on finishing the most grueling of mid-distance races, even with a small pool of less than 20 dogs to choose from.
After working together in 2000 on the Copper Basin 300, Sutter and Lee took note of the village of Chistochina and eventually moved there in 2004. Sutter and Lee are the only distance team in town, with three other sprint kennels making up the town’s mushing population. Endless possibilities exist with trails out of the yard, and the ground freezes early. There is a groomed sprint track nearby, which is on Native land and requires all non-members to get a permit, but other than that, there are no restrictions on where a dog team can go. A few other kennels are in the area, so don’t expect to meet other teams. As with anywhere in the state, hunters arrive in fall, which can make extra obstacles for the dogs and leave ATV trails a little rutted out. In winter, trappers keep trails open; as with snowmachiners, the relationship with mushers is symbiotic and necessary for most.
“We have maintained a good and friendly relationship with the local trappers and those from out of town,” said Sutter. “Usually, they are the only folks we see on the trail and are very polite. They pull over and stop their machines. More often than not, we stop alongside them and briefly chat about trail conditions and where trapping trails have been put in off the main trail.”
Because of the seclusion on the trails around Chistochina, Lee and Sutter set up tent camps, which they utilize all winter for training. One of the main trails they run on is the Copper Basin 300 trail, a notoriously challenging route.“Having the camp set up at different places allows us to do a mix of longer and shorter runs without coming home, but having a warm place to sleep is good practice for dogs in terms of running off straw,” said Sutter.
The Denali Highway
And though they don’t need to truck dogs to train at any time of year due to the abundance and variety of trails out of their yard, this summer, the duo took their team to Maclaren River Lodge, where they lived and worked for several weeks. Running dogs on the Denali Highway offered more miles earlier in the season. Commercial dog food and meat are available in Fairbanks and Wasilla. It is a fair drive but cheaper than in previous years when they lived off the road system. However, when the couple spent their days in Holy Cross, a Yukon River village in the western Interior, the dogs lived on mostly fish and scraps, a ritual still practiced by village mushers.
There are abundant mid-distance races close to home for Sutter and Lee, and though temperatures are often cold, living away from other kennels is the big draw for them.
Dealing with the cold is common in the Interior, but this region is home to most of Alaska’s mushers despite frequent spells of 40 below and colder. Cool climes in the Paxson/Denali Highway area keep Iditarod musher Zoya Denure running dogs all summer. She and husband John Schandelmeier, a well-respected dog man, spend their winters in Paxson and summers at home on the Maclaren River about 40 miles down the Denali Highway.
“The big advantage of winter training on Denali is the ability to do long runs under various conditions,” Denure said. Like others in small Interior communities, Denure enjoys the solitude of Paxson in the winter but said getting dog food and supplies is a bit more of a hassle.“We have a big trailer and can haul quite a lot per trip,” she said. “Sometimes when you think you need something, it is too far to go get it (so) you find you can do without or make it yourself.”“Paxson weather is a little harsher than Fairbanks,” she said. “This is a windy place (with) more snow than most of the Interior. We are cold earlier in the fall and much later in the spring.”She added that the only established trail is the highway itself in the winter, so much time is spent breaking and maintaining a trail system off the highway, much of which are Schandelmeier’s trapline trails.
Coupled with lots of overflow, both frozen and not, and wind, running dogs in and around Paxson is nothing short of an adventure. At the other end of the Denali Highway is Cantwell, then heading North on the Parks Highway are Healy and Nenana, all of which are home to several kennels, competitive and recreational. Fairbanks is perhaps the Mecca of dog mushing and home to hundreds of kennels.
Two Rivers
The largest congregation is northeast of the city in Two Rivers. Aliy Zirkle and Allen Moore, competitive distance and mid-distance mushers and guides, have their home base in Two Rivers, but travel around during the winter for races and tours. And while Two Rivers offers endless trails with various terrain and conditions, ample races, and the chorus of howls from nearby mushing neighbors, the untouched terrain has grabbed their attention. In past years, after the Iditarod in March, Zirkle and Moore packed up their dogs and some clients and headed north. Until 2010, the duo ran multi-day trips in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with guests, and though he’s run dogs all over the 49th state, ANWR is one of Moore’s favorite spots.
“The terrain looks like it did 10,000 years ago; completely untouched,” Moore said. “For us, being up there is relaxation after a busy season, with or without clients. We see a lot of wildlife and not a lot of people.”Permits are necessary to take groups into the refuge, and there are no snowmachines permitted, so all the trails Moore and Zirkle use, they put in themselves with dog teams and snowshoes. Back down in Fairbanks, follow the Steese Highway to the Elliot past Fox and you’ll find another cluster of Iditarod and Yukon Quest greats.
“I think we’re fortunate,” said Iditarod veteran Ken Anderson. “I’ve looked around the state, and this is one of the best places to train dogs. The winter season is dependable; it comes early and stays late.”Snow accumulation is a big question mark in Anderson’s neck of the woods, but he said they’re not digging out from massive snowstorms daily. In 2007, Iditarod champ Lance Mackey moved from Kasilof to the hills north of Fairbanks for, among other reasons, colder temperatures and easier access to mushing provisions. But, said Anderson, while the ground does freeze early, being higher in elevation makes for slightly more bearable dog-running weather. He said last winter, when it was five below at his house, it was 50 below in Fairbanks.
“In many of these races, we see cold weather, and you have to learn how to deal with it as far as the caloric demands of the dogs, the use of dog coats—we get a lot of practice dealing with cold weather here.”And while he lives in the hills, the Chena River and Jeff Studdert sprint track are a short drive away when he’s looking for flatter, speedier training runs.
Of course, living north of Fairbanks also means plenty of trips to the White Mountains National Recreation Area, a one-million-acre wonderland with 250 miles of maintained trails and cozy cabins to stop and rest at. It is an asset utilized by serious mushers, novices, and weekend warriors and offers hills, water, and wind along with breathtaking scenery and easy access points. Though there has been a slight influx of dog mushers in the Murphy Dome area since Anderson and his wife, Gwen Holdmann, moved there 15 years ago, there is very little private property for sale now, so he’s not worried about overcrowding.
Eurkea
Fairbanks offers a couple of options for commercial dog food, including Coldspot Feeds, and has many local mushing-gear designers, producers, and suppliers. It also has many mushing-friendly vets, some of whom still make house calls to large kennels. Heading up the Elliot Highway past the White Mountains to the Livengood turnoff, you’ll soon wind up in Eureka, a small community in the Yukon-Koyukuk Borough. For Brent Sass, a Quest musher and mushing guide, this winter will be his fourth in Eureka training dogs.“
Why Eureka? Because it offers everything!” Sass said. “It has every type of trail—vast open flats covered with three-foot tussocks; lots of overflow; tight, woodsy trails; big, big climbs both steep and long; road-grade summits; crazy steep downhills; rivers both big and small and on top of that there are several small villages that we go through which are perfect for checkpoint training.
”The weather is comparable to that of Fairbanks, with more snow, added Sass. But more than great trails and perfect weather for all kinds of training, Sass said the lifestyle is the best thing about packing up dozens of dogs and tons of supplies. “We live, eat, sleep, and breathe dogs,” he said. Sass, his three handlers, and 110 dogs are up there until spring and will leave for the Yukon Quest in February. When he and his crew aren’t running dog teams, they open up trails, trapping, and cutting firewood.
There are a couple of other kennels in the area and plenty of old time dog drivers in the surrounding villages to offer advice and assistance when they can, Sass said.“The people we are surrounded by out here are one of the main reasons that I make Eureka the best place live and train dogs,” he said.
Nome
Getting supplies in for such a large operation is the only drawback, said Sass, but it’s also part of the challenge, and satellite internet has made that chore much easier recently.“The bottom line is that Eureka allows me to focus and provides the perfect mix of dogs, people, and wilderness. There’s a reason why so many champions lived and trained in Eureka.”West of Eureka, and entirely off the road system on the Bering Sea coast, is the town of Nome, home of the famous burled arch that signifies the end of the Iditarod. It’s also home to many dog mushers.“For me, it was and always has been strictly recreational, although I think I’d prefer to call it adventure mushing,” said Sue Steinacher, who moved to Nome from Fairbanks with her dogs in 1985. One such adventure took Steinacher to the former Soviet Union on a two-week excursion via dog team.
Despite the treeless expanse around Nome, Steinacher said, if you have a good command leader, you can go anywhere across the hard-packed ice and snow. There is a boreal forest about 70 miles east of Nome, but Steinacher always loved running dogs across the sea ice.“Many Alaskans’ perception of Nome is that it’s all flat country, but we have incredibly low mountains that start just one to two miles inland from the coast and offer some spectacular scenery.
Of course, the wind is a high issue on the coast, and extended periods of terrible weather, so you move quickly when you can and hunker down when it’s bad,” she said. Besides the weather, one of the biggest challenges of having dogs in Nome is that you cannot keep them inside the city limits, and, she said, there are few options for living outside the city.
Most mushers live several miles away from their dog lots, and though it’s no longer a concern as she doesn’t have sled dogs anymore, she said it was hard not having the security of living with your team. Extreme weather plagues the coastal town each winter, burying dog houses and exhausting daily chores, but the country’s expanse and the people’s kindness made it more than worth it, Steinacher said.
And while getting supplies into the town could be costly, members of the Nome Kennel Club would organize a dog food barge to Nome once a year to help local mushers afford commercial food. Every community offers unique perks and challenges, and for most, there’s no question that Alaska is the best place to live and mush. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Dog mushers can be found everywhere in the state, from Bethel to Tok, and Aniak to Eagle. There are kennels large and small, races, fans, and tour operators in every nook and cranny.
There are excellent resources for anyone contemplating a move to Alaska: from old-timers willing to share their stories and knowledge to websites, shops, and even realtors specializing in finding that right piece of property. Land varies widely in price around the state depending on location but is readily available in most any location and with a quick search on a number of websites (craigslist.com, alaskaslist.com, sleddogcentral.com, mls.com, traplinerealty.com) the right spot can be found. The hardest part will be choosing between all the beautiful locations of Alaska.