If you were an early reader of The Barking Crow, after we hopped over from All Things NIT, you may remember that we like the Iditarod. We aren’t great fans—its overlap with the peak of college basketball season stretches us too thin—but we aspire to be great fans. We like the dogs. We like the history. We’ve never been to Alaska, but we would guess we’d like it. We love Fargo, and we would imagine Alaska to be like Fargo but thousands of times bigger and with mountains and all other sorts of photogenic stuff.
The Iditarod is still happening this year, but its form has been altered. Instead of the traditional Willow-to-Nome route following a ceremonial start in Anchorage, the ceremonial start has been nixed and the race will be an out-and-back from Willow to the uninhabited checkpoint of Iditarod. It’ll be 100 miles shorter than usual, and there’ll be a smaller field, but it’s happening!
To make it happen, the race is reportedly creating a bubble of sorts, with consistent coronavirus testing, though that’s more important for the support staff—veterinarians and the like—than it is for the mushers, who are socially distanced by the nature of the race.
It, like a lot of other things this month, is bringing back memories of this time last year, when the race finished shortly after lockdowns began in the United States. The race is always isolated, but with media coverage of it as thorough as it is, this wilderness aspect is sometimes lost, at least on me. Last year, the isolation was driven home. The mushers and their dogs, far from one another, out in the middle of the biggest wilderness of our nation, more vast than entire collections of states further down the continent.
That will still be the case this year. They might not be going to Nome, but they’re going into the uninhabited parts once more. The timelessness of it all is still there. The grandeur of the original journey—that of Togo and Balto—is still there. The isolation, which seems to be so much of what draws our hearts to the idea of Alaska, is still there.
Off they go again.
