Coping with Iditarod addiction

Three-hundred-fifty miles into Iditarod 2010, Karen Ramstead finally decided the time had come to do something about her addiction. There was no Eureka moment for the woman from Perryvale, Alberta, Canada, simply a growing realization the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race owned her rather than the other way around.

Always before she had embraced her addiction, but this year she finally hit rock bottom. She was struggling with a hand infected by a black spruce tree that went through it like a spear; the trail was rougher than usual; her dogs were unhappy; and her husband had been in a bad truck crash in Anchorage shortly after she left the city.

All of a sudden she found herself wondering why she was putting everyone in her life through the struggle.

"The Iditarod," she said, "is a pretty selfish endeavor."

By and large, mushers in this race give their all to the dogs. There often isn't much left for family or friends. Plenty try to get around this by dragging in others. Ramstead trains with her husband, Mark, but the real love of the sport is hers, not his.

The dogs have taken over her life and by extension theirs.

"My dogs are first and foremost our family," Karen said, "our pets." She has 65 to 70 pets. This, she admits, is too many. She'd like to get down to 50 or so, which would permit some racing and allow her to continue to raise Siberian huskies for show.

While the vast majority of Iditarod mushers now run so-called Alaska huskies -- which trace their bloodlines back not only to Siberians but to a variety of bird dogs and hounds as well -- the Ramsteads have stayed true to the old breed.

Karen wraps herself in their history and their classic good looks. Over the years, she's had any number of prize-winning show dogs in her Iditarod teams. She is more than a little proud of the fact that these beauty-pageant winners can still perform as the work horses of the Arctic they were originally bred to be.

No team of Siberians is ever going to win the modern Iditarod, but Ramstead believes the dogs still can compete. "There's good Siberian teams out there," she said. "I haven't finished last in a race since 2001."

As she talked about this at the McGrath checkpoint, where she decided to drop out of Iditaord 2010, Blake Freking from Finland, Minn., was far ahead on the trail with another team of purebred Siberians. She expected him to set a record for the breed once run by four-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser

That was back in the 1980s. Then a young visitor to Alaska from Switzerland, Buser ran Siberians for Earl Norris from Willow, a legend in Alaska sled dog racing. Norris twice won the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race. Norris, like Ramstead, loved Siberians.

He stayed true to them long after fellow Fur Rendezvous champs Gareth Wright of Fairbanks and George Attla of Huslia started the move away from them in favor of breeds with smaller bones, longer legs and bigger lungs. Wright's "Aurora huskies" were a cross between Siberians and Irish setters with some hound and who-knows-what-else rolled in.

They were known to be great sprint dogs, but there were questions about their ability to go the distance. Some questioned the toughness of their feet. Others said they would always be the hares bested in the end by the Iditarod-winning tortoises.

Buser changed that thinking not long after he married Kathy Chapoton and split from the Norrises to build his own kennel. Some of those one-time "sprint dogs" were in Buser's team when he won his first Iditarod in 1992. They later helped him set the Iditarod record time of 8 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes in 2002. The record still stands.

The Siberians were fading from the scene long before Buser won, but he sealed the door on their history. Now, the only people who run them are those like Ramstead and Freking, married to old, Jack Londonesque visions of the North, or those simply in love with the breed in the way people fall in love with all kinds of breeds from yappy chihuahuas to slobbering Bernese mountain dogs.

Karen's only complaint about her Siberians is that they don't live longer. The toughest part of being a dog musher, she said, is watching dogs once sleek and powerful age away to nothing.