I don’t know where this falls on the spectrum between good news and bad news, but it’s certainly news:
The (formerly) leading team’s dogs have packed it up and hunkered down somewhere along the trail on the frozen Bering Sea. There’s more to this story, of course. Evidently, two of the dogs got into a fight, and when the musher yelled at them, the whole team stopped running, and has continued to not run now for long enough that they’ve lost the lead.
If you’ve been following dog-sledding Twitter for a month or so, you understand it isn’t entirely unusual for dogs to not run when asked, although the stoppage happening at this point, with these stakes, is obviously noteworthy. These are dogs, and while you can train some dogs, these are still dogs—world-class athletes with the same brains as that animal in your home that has declared mortal war on the vacuum cleaner.
I don’t know how this is being covered by other media outlets, and I am far from a dog-sledding expert, but as a blog boy who does his digging on dogsled Twitter, it seems worthwhile to note that Nic Petit, the team’s musher, isn’t exactly someone who got into mushing for whatever fame and fortune it presents. This is a guy who used to live in his car with his dog and only got into mushing when a job in Wyoming presented itself where he could bring his dog to work. His aspirations include building a house with twelve doggy doors. We don’t seem to be dealing with Cruella de Vil here.
If you want to learn more about what just happened, and about Nic Petit, here are two articles:
Again, I’m almost the furthest thing from an Iditarod expert, but because I impulsively decided to blog about it a little more than a week ago, here we are.
Go dogs.
