Iditarod Ceremonial Start

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold....

The Cremation of Sam McGee

Robert Service

Esteemed Readers,

Today, (Mar 7th, 2009) was the ceremonial start of the 37th Iditarod in beautiful downtown Anchorage, Alaska. There is more on the Iditarod here. A friend here from Ilona's Bed and Breakfast and I drove downtown to immerse ourselves in the pageantry. There had been a lot of snow recently and the temperatures were in the mid 20F range. We dressed warmly and took off to see what there was to see.

There is no real narrative to accompany this travelog - I'm going to show you some pictures and videos that I took pretty much in the order they occurred. As a side note - I take some pride in the pictures I post here but I bow to your judgment whether I succeed in taking good pictures. However, these are not up to my normal standards and I apologize. As is normally the case at media events, the crowd is roped off from the Iditarod and I could not get close enough or get good angles to take good pictures.

Please note that there videos intermixed in this post, so don't miss clicking the start arrow to the see the short clips.

We parked on the outskirts of downtown and started to trek to the starting line in the middle of the downtown tourist area. That's when I noted that the high thin clouds were producing a Sundog over the downtown skyline.

The Iditarod race start line is on 4th Ave which runs east/west. The north/south grid of connecting streets behind the start lines are where the teams setup their sleds. Evidently they haul their sleds and dogs around in some very nicely set up trucks like this one.

We walked through these side street areas as we made our way to the start line. As you neared these staging areas you could hear the dogs whining and howling to one another - they set up quite a cacophony.

There was one dog still in the truck. I don't know if he was a reserve dog for later in the race, a second stringer or what. But he wasn't participating in the howling chaos.

The closer we got to the start line, the more prepared the dogs teams, sleds and mushers were. Here they are laying out the traces.....

Hooking up the dogs....

.....and loading the ceremonial passengers and mushers.

Evidently, selected celebrities get to ride the sled through Anchorage and out of town. Then once the ceremonial start is done, they stop, load the dogs in the trucks and run out to Willow, AK, where the real race begins.

Finally, here they are turning onto 4th Ave to get in the final start line queue.

As we walked up 4th Ave towards the starting line, there were sights to see.

Somewhere during this trek, my buddy tells me I walked past Gov Palin. Amazingly enough, I did not notice her. Neither did she run up screaming: "Geoff! Is that you!?" I cannot imagine how this could happen.

Finally we arrived at the start line. There is a bronze statue of Balto to mark the spot. I took these snaps a year ago. Click the first picture and red the inscription.

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The ugly yellow building is a fur store that has staked out the high rent property across from the start line and does a booming business. In this next picture, I am standing across the street from the statue which is just to the right of the Exxon advertisment.

The sun was still producing a sundog and I tried to image it and got this miserable result.

We watched several teams start......

I called home and let my daughter, Katie listen to a start through my cell phone. She was less excited than I had hoped for....

It had not warmed any and there is only so many times you can watch a race start before the shine begins to wear off the penny, so we started back to the car.

There is evidently a great Iditarod tradition - the grilled Reindeer Dog.

Since we were there for the total experience, we stopped and ordered one. Our Reindeer Dog chef was not your normally outgoing and enthusiastic hawker of sidewalk fare - he in fact displayed a sarcastic attitude toward life in general and his customers in detail. After he had cooked our dog, I took this picture of the dog and asked him to smile. He refused to smile stating: "That's extra."

Mike and his dogs are becoming famous.

On that note, the cold killed the battery in my camera and we returned home.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff