Photo by Jeff Schulz / Alaskastock.com
'Alaska, Where Men are Men and Women Win the Iditarod, (and again, and again, and again)'
By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
Sled dog mushing and Susan Butcher came up in a recent conversation at work, and I had to "pipe in" with a memorable experience of seeing her kennel from the riverboat Discovery near to where the Chena River and Nenana River come together, near Fairbanks. I think all 150 dogs were barking to be included when folks at the kennel started hooking up a four-wheeler to pull that summer day.
The Chena is known for recreational floating near Fairbanks and Hot Springs, while the Nenana is famous for its dramatic canyon and role in the Nenana Ice Classic, both offering unique Alaskan experiences with distinct characterstics, from the Chena's gentler journey through forests to the Nenana's wilder rapids and cultural significance.
Susan Butcher, the four-time Iditarod champion and kennel founder, helped inspire the popular phrase "Alaska, Where Men are Men and Women Win the Iditarod (and again, and again, and again," while she dominated the sport of mushing in the 1980's. My wife, born and raised in Fairbanks, I remembered, had a shirt that reflected that sentiment that her Alaskan dad had given her.
Susan Howlet Butcher was an American dog musher, noteworthy as the second woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1986, the second four-time winner in 1990, and the first to win four out of five sequential years. She is commemorated in Alaska by the Susan Butcher Day.
Susan Butcher introducing her newborn daughter Tekla to her legendary lead dog Granite. Image from Trail Breaker Kennel, owned by Tekla, debute a new sled dog and multisport race in March, 2024 in honor of Susan Butcher.
In a March 26, 2015 edition of "Cancer Today" by Jocelyn Selim, Butcher's experience in breaking the 'glass ceiling' of mushing is related.
"In 1985, Susan Butcher was a favorite to win the Iditarod, the grueling 1,000-mile-plus dog-sled race across Alaska’s empty interior that some consider the toughest athletic event on the planet. Over the previous five years, Butcher had enjoyed a meteoric rise from total unknown to top contender, including second-place finishes in the Iditarod in 1982 and 1984.
"Although a few women had completed the race in prior years, none besides Butcher had come even close to finishing among the top contenders. Many thought the race was too brutal to be won by a woman—a typical Iditarod at that time took close to two weeks to finish, during which time a musher might sleep for a total of 24 hours, all the while braving 100-mile-per-hour winds, blizzards with whiteout conditions and potentially deadly thin ice. "
"On the surface, Butcher seemed an unlikely person to shatter the Iditarod’s glass ceiling. Just 5 feet 6 inches and of average build, she was hardly physically imposing. Moreover, she wasn’t a native Alaskan. Born Dec. 26, 1954, she grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts," wrote Jocelyn Selim.
"Butcher knew at an early age that she wanted to escape to the wild. She moved to Denver when she was 17 and learned the essentials of mushing from a woman who raced dogs there. She also took veterinary technician classes at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, but had no interest in sitting in a classroom, instead preferring the outdoors. "
"Her family was skeptical when she decided to relocate to the remote Alaskan wilderness to raise and race dogs professionally. But Butcher was nothing if not determined. When, in 1975, the 20-year-old moved to the Wrangell-St. Elias Range, 50 miles away from the closest road, she felt she was exactly where she wanted to be," says Selim.
“She loved the outdoors. She loved the dogs. She loved the adventure and the solitude,” says David Monson, a successful musher who met Butcher in 1980, a year after she became the first person to lead a dog sled to the top of Mount McKinley. The couple married in 1985 and lived in a one-room cabin in Eureka, Alaska, where they ran a kennel and trained hundreds of dogs. “She was very competitive and focused on her dogs—that’s what really made her different.”
Susan Butcher (born December 26, 1954, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died August 5, 2006, Seattle, Washington) was an American sled-dog racer and trainer who dominated her sport for more than a decade, winning the challenging Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska four times.
Butcher began to train dogs at age 16. By 1972 she had moved to Colorado, where she attended Colorado State University in Fort Collins and raced a group of 50 Alaskan huskies owned by a local musher. Butcher moved to Alaska in 1975 to start her own kennel. A serious athlete from the outset, she broke onto the international mushing scene in 1979 after driving a team of huskies to the top of Mount McKinley (Denali).
Butcher first entered the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1978. The roughly 1,100-mile (1,770-km) Iditarod is the longest and most physically challenging of all sled-dog races. Butcher twice finished in second place (1982, 1984). She began the 1985 race with a solid lead but was eliminated from the competition when a moose charged across her path, killing 2 of her dogs and wounding 13. That year Butcher lost to Libby Riddles her chance to become the first woman to win the Iditarod. The following year, however, Butcher came in first with a record-breaking time of 11 days 15 hours 6 minutes. She was victorious in both 1987 and 1988 to become the only musher in the history of the sport to win the Iditarod in three consecutive years. She won for a fourth time in 1990.
Butcher retired from competitive sledding in 1994 and opened a kennel in Eureka, Alaska, where she housed more than 150 huskies and trained dogs year-round. She was considered by many to be one of the strongest and most-disciplined female athletes of the 20th century for her determination to rise to the top of a physically grueling sport that is dominated by men. In 2006 Butcher died of leukemia.
Recognizing her Champion tendencies, stories appeared about challenges in mushing life. In "Cancer Today" by Jocelyn Selim offers the following:
"In 1985, Butcher’s dogs were looking especially good, and many thought this would finally be her turn to win. As expected, she started out in Anchorage in the lead, well ahead of more than 60 other competitors. Then, about 120 miles in, Butcher and her dogs came face to face with a starving, pregnant moose that blocked the trail. Butcher, traveling at night, had no chance to steer her team away. The moose kicked her lead dog against a tree. Terrified, Butcher ran to the front of her team, waving an ax to try to frighten the moose into running away.
"It didn’t work. For 20 minutes, the moose kept coming at Butcher’s team of 17 dogs. The attack only ended when the next contestant, who happened to be carrying a gun, reached Butcher and her team. He shot and killed the moose, but the damage to her dogs had been done. Butcher, who minutes before had been driving the best team of her life, now surveyed the carnage. Two of her dogs were dead and 13 were injured badly enough that it wasn’t clear whether they would ever race again. Butcher and her team were flown to her veterinarian in Anchorage, where she slept in the veterinary hospital several nights with her teammates, " writes Selim.
"Meanwhile, a young woman, Libby Riddles, had taken a massive gamble in the Iditarod by heading out into a fierce storm that the other contestants had decided to wait out. Riddles’ gamble paid off with a first-place finish, and Butcher knew she had lost her chance of being the first woman to win the Iditarod. “Libby winning especially at the time frame that she won, which was only two weeks after the moose [accident] and when many of the … dogs who had lived through it were still at the vet [was difficult],” she said. “It was [a bit like adding] insult to injury of sorts, but it’s the lesser of the problems that occurred that year,” Butcher later recalled in another interview.
Butcher raised and trained dogs year-round at her home in Eureka, Alaska. Photo by Jeff Schultz / AlaskaStock.com
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