Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Well, he won that year,” Sue says, “and after that we couldn't let him go.” At this point,
Pat says, “We're not volunteers, we're just friends of Martin's.”
They didn't start out that way. Twenty years ago “We really disliked the interruption of
the Iditarod,” Pat says. “The only way to change that was to make ourselves a part of it.”
Nowadays, “We're known as the unofficial Iditarod headquarters.”
Sue, the head of Alaska Airline's Nome office, and Pat, who works for the City of
Nome, also house many of the extra employees Alaska Airlines brings up to handle the in-
creased Iditarod traffic. They've had as many as sixty people for dinner and as many as
twenty people stay the night. They order in a thousand pounds of groceries for every Idit-
arod. “We set the menu,” Pat says, “and the guests rotate the cooking and cleaning.”
“Iditarod goes off because of the volunteers,” four-time Iditarod champion Martin
Buser says flatly, “all the way down the trail, and Anchorage, too.”
He points out that mushers are volunteers, too. “We can't attend the winter events, obvi-
ously, but forty to sixty mushers turn out to support the summer events like the volunteer
picnic and the first day of sign-up.” Mushers also travel to towns along the trail to talk
about the race. “All the kids want to be mushers.” Buser was even invited to be the com-
mencement speaker in Shaktoolik a few years back.
“In Anchorage the Iditarod is over when the mushers pull out,” Dana Handeland says.
“In Nome the Iditarod lasts for two weeks.”
And for the volunteers, longer than that.
