The Last Great Race

I love watching and following the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. It happens every year. The race begins on March 1st and usually the first finishers arrive in Nome around the 11th.-16th. The last musher in receives the Red Lantern award.
It started three-quarters of a century ago with a serum run from Anchorage to the coastal community of Nome in Northwest Alaska.
There were no roads then between the two communities more than 1,000 miles apart, and there are none today. A train took the serum as far as Nenana. It was carried for the last 674 miles by dogsled. A relay of 20 mushers responded to the medical emergency -- a diphtheria epidemic.
Today the race is over 1150 miles of the roughest, most beautiful terrain Mother Nature has to offer. She throws jagged mountain ranges, frozen river, dense forest, desolate tundra and miles of windswept coast at the mushers and their dog teams. Add to that temperatures far below zero, winds that can cause a complete loss of visibility, the hazards of overflow, long hours of darkness and treacherous climbs and side hills, and you have the Iditarod. A race extraordinaire, a race only possible in Alaska.