Meet 4 of the Iditarod rookies hoping to reach Nome this year

For Erin Altemus, it was now or never.

In Isaac Teaford’s case, his time had finally come.

Lauro Eklund hopes this will be the first run of many.

Each of the 16 rookies running the 2024 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has different motivations for completing their first trip to Nome in the world’s preeminent long-distance sled dog race.

The class includes 14 first-timers and a pair of mushers who have made previous attempts but were unable to finish. That means rookies make up more than 40% of this year’s field, which encompasses 38 mushers total.

While a rookie challenging to win the race is unlikely, each team is taking its mission seriously.

Altemus, who mushes out of Grand Marais, Minnesota, was at a pivot point with her team. She and her husband, Matt Schmidt, have been mushing for more than a dozen years with successful runs on a number of the big Midwestern races like the Beargrease and the UP200.

“We’ve thought about coming up for Iditarod certainly for a long time,” Altemus said. ”I guess what maybe finally pushed us to do it now is feeling both that we had a team that was ready, and that we also might age out if we didn’t do it now.”

The final push came when her friend and fellow rookie Anna Hennessy signed up to run the race. The two trained and ran dogs together in Altemus and Schmidt’s Sawtooth Racing until 2022, when Hennessy moved to Alaska to work with Willow-based Shameless Kennels.

“I felt like, OK, I have this opportunity to do it with a friend and have that connection in Alaska with someone who would be here and doing it, and that just made it seem a little bit more feasible,” said Altemus, who munches on Twix bars while mushing on the trail.

Teaford has worked with five-time Iditarod champ Dallas Seavey for the past three years at his Talkeetna kennel, plus another pair of summers prior to that. A trumpet player who grew up around Salt Lake City, Utah, Teaford met the accomplished musher through Dallas’ brother, Las Vegas-based musician and former Junior Iditarod champ Conway Seavey.

Over the last couple winters, Teaford has completed the races necessary for qualification, and in the Iditarod, he’s racing a team of mostly 2- to 3-year-old dogs from the Seavey kennel. His team includes some dogs from a “cheese litter” as well as a “water litter,” with names like Fjord, Bog, Puddle, Bay and Loch.

“I’ve raised a number of young dogs and raced a number of Dallas’ kennel, and this is by far the most talented group of athletes I’ve ever worked with,” he said.

[An angry moose and bare ground mark a brutal first quarter for Iditarod teams]

Teaford, like Altemus, isn’t letting rookie status blunt big ambitions. At Saturday’s ceremonial start, he said he believes a top 10 finish is possible. He plans to run conservatively for the first half of the race and, if all goes well, push the team for the second half.

“To be honest, I have a feeling they’re going to be crushing it,” he said. “And so I think at that point, we can sort of begin to get a little bit more competitive.”

Eklund too has learned the ropes from some experienced mushers. His father, Neil, ran a pair of Iditarods in the 1980s, and Eklund hopes to make multiple runs as well.

“We’re hoping to be somewhat professional and competitive, to learn to trail and prepare but also enjoy it too,” he said. “Hope to make this multiple times, but you just never know. Life throws us curveballs.”

The father-son duo runs Skookum Expeditions out of Two Rivers, a longtime haven for mushers, and Eklund said that’s allowed him to have “some good folks to bug about dogs and everything.” He views himself and others as the tradition-bearers for maintaining that way of life.

“We had Aliy (Zirkle) and Rick (Swenson),” he said. “A lot of those (mushers) retired. Some guys like myself, Matt (Hall), Will Rhodes, Jeff Reid, we’re kind of taking over the mantle and keeping those trails going and keep mushing life going in that community. There’s 20-25 kennels out there, so it’s a good bit of people out that way.”

When Severin Cathry made his first trip to Alaska more than a dozen years ago, the Swiss musher was hooked.

“I’ve had a dream of mushing dogs here in Alaska,” he said. “It wasn’t to begin with, because I didn’t know much about it when I got here at first, and then I ran some big distance races and got qualified and then I was like, ‘What the hell?’ "

He’s running a team of Seward musher Travis Beals’ dogs in his inaugural trip to Nome. Cathry said he has been working with the team all winter and that preparation has been almost eerily without issue.

“The last two training runs were almost too good,” he said. “I’m almost a little scared. So smooth and nothing to complain about.”

Cathry, who enjoys skiing, said the mountainous portions of the trail, like going through the Alaska Range, were what he’d most looked forward to.

He described how a local race near his home in Switzerland is no longer run, as they’ve had a hard time finding volunteers. The community support for the Iditarod was impressive, Cathry said Saturday.

“I’d like to thank all the volunteers that make this happen,” he said. “Big shoutout to them.”

As of Tuesday evening, all four mushers were in the back half of the competitive field, driving their teams from Rohn to the checkpoint in Nikolai, about 250 miles into the race. No rookies have scratched so far in this year’s Iditarod.