The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has big problems. Some of them are financial. Most everyone has heard or read about those. Others are organizational and human. Some Iditarod insiders know about these. The general public does not, and yet the latter problems might far outweigh the former.

I spent the past two weeks on the trail on a snowmobile reporting on back-of-the-pack mushers, talking to people in checkpoints, and doing a lot of observing. Lots and lots of observing. The best reporting advice I ever got came from my father, who knew nothing about reporting. He was a medical technician turned small businessman turned welder who understood, as he told me, "You can learn a lot if you just keep your mouth shut and watch and listen."

What I saw when watching along the Iditarod this year was a race increasingly disconnected from rural Alaska. Small armies of mushers, veterinarians, checkers and other Iditarod types descended on villages and pretty much took over parts of them. In the best cases, there was some interaction between the villagers and the Iditarodders. There was often way too little. It was a noticeable change from the past.

The Iditarod used to belong to Bush Alaska. One of Joe Redington's dreams in founding the race was to keep the dog mushing tradition out there alive. When I covered my first Iditarod in 1983, I sometimes scrounged up dog teams in villages so I could go run dogs in my free time. Now you can't find enough dogs in many villages to put together a team.

The dogs are disappearing. The rural mushers who used to add so much Alaska richness to the fabric of Iditarod are already gone. No one has stepped up to take the place of Emmitt Peters, Herbie Nayokpuk, Clarence Towarak, Joe Garnie, Don Honea, Alex Sheldon, Ken Chase and the rest.

At Ruby on the Yukon River, I couldn't help thinking of Howard Albert -- a young, talented, up-and-coming musher who committed suicide long ago. I remembered sitting with Albert and Garnie around a campfire in the woods at Rohn one year talking about how painful it was for them to find themselves running behind "doctors and lawyers" in the race. Men who had spent their lives with sled dogs, Garnie and Albert didn't much hanker to being bested by those whose main connection to the sport was the financial ability to buy the best dogs.

Garnie eventually retired from Iditarod. Albert is gone. And the Iditarod has now been almost fully taken over by doctors, lawyers and businessmen. It has become a race for well-educated, well-to-do mushers from along the Alaska road system or Outside.

The blue collar mushers from the Bush are all but gone. In the field of 71 mushers in this year's Iditarod, there were six from rural Alaska, four of them Alaska Natives. Thirty years ago with a field of 36, 17 came from rural Alaska; most of them were Native. Twenty years ago with a field of 61, 10 came from rural Alaska, and most of them were Native.

The Bush used to be intimately involved with the Iditarod. The Bush used to feel part of the race. Mushers used to stay at the homes of villagers. No more, and because of this, the Iditarod is in danger of losing rural Alaska.

How bad is it? Well, let's put it this way:

Athabascan Emmit Peters from Ruby, one of the greatest champions the Iditarod has ever known, couldn't get into the Iditarod Banquet in Anchorage this year. There weren't any tickets left. Someone did finally find him one, but the next day he couldn't get onto Fourth Avenue downtown to say "hi" to the many Iditarod racers who remain his personal friends. Peters didn't have the right badges to hang around his neck. He tried to explain to one of the Iditarod guards charged with keeping the riffraff off the avenue clogged with riffraff that he was a past Iditarod champ, but that got him nowhere. Likewise, he was reportedly kept out of the finishers' chute in Nome when he went there to greet mushers at the end of the race.