How’s this sound for a vacation? Paying your own way to the frigid Alaskan wilderness. Spending a week to 10 days in temperatures that can drop to well below zero, and examining the dogs that come flying into checkpoints every so often.Turlock veterinarian Doug Marks has done that, volunteering at the Iditarod three times in the past several years. This year, he couldn’t arrange for the time away, so he’s teaching a class on the race tonight through Modesto Junior College’s Community Education Department.”It’s really pretty amazing,” said Marks of the Iditarod, which started in 1973 as a reconstruction of the freight route traveled nearly a century before. Back then, dogsleds were the only feasible way to deliver everything from mail to ministers to Alaskan villages newly populated with folks looking for gold.Read more here: http://www.modbee.com/2012/03/05/2099440/turlock-veterinarian-to-share.html
