Many mushers are building out their sleds this year—expanding horizontally with trailers. But Ken Anderson is building up.
For his 15th Iditarod, Anderson devised a system so he could sleep while the sled was moving. “I had a big master plan to go almost nonstop,” he said.
He also had a trailer sled to carry and switch out dogs (potentially up to six at a time), but abandoned the plan early in the race because it was too much weight for the dogs.
Anderson speaks of mushing calculus—when you don’t carry dogs, you might ride the break more to maintain speed; when dogs are in tow, that weight can be enough to manage energy usage. “It makes sense. Why waste all that energy?” he asks. “But, you hit this tipping point where it doesn’t quite work that way.”
Meanwhile, in Huslia, Anderson used George Attla’s cooker to boil water for his team—a moment of pause to appreciate the history and the mushing greats who came before.
