“People see her as a wonderful dog musher, and she most definitely was,” Tekla Monson says of the late musher Susan Butcher, a four-time champion of the Iditarod. “But she was (also) an amazing mother… She was dedicated to being a mother.”
Monson speaks from direct experience; she’s the daughter of Susan Butcher and David Monson. Tekla and David – along with Susan Butcher and David Monson’s other daughter, Chisana Monson – remembered Butcher and celebrated her legacy this weekend at the Old Woman cabin, a landmark on the Iditarod trail between the Kaltag and Unalakleet checkpoints.
KNOM’s Laureli Kinneen was there:
