We made it safely back to Anchorage, in time for the last weekend festivities of the Rondy winter celebration. It was a lovely Saturday - this year the thermometer set at 35oF.; last year at this time it was 15 below zero (quite a different feeling!)
The culmination of Rondy's focus for this weekend is the World Championship
Sled Dog Races.
And what a race it is - three 25-mile sprints around
Anchorage's mushing backcountry trails! Starting at noon on Friday, Saturday
and Sunday, the mushers sprint around these Anchorage paths and return to the
4th Avenue starting /finish line in under 2 hours. Much of the race is viewable
in town - and those parts that aren't, are covered by a helicopter for the
TV station.
Made famous in the late 1960's by Dr. Roland Lombard's repeated victories, and
featuring other famous names in the mushing lore like George Attla, of Ruby and
the Reddingtons, it is the precursor to that Stamina Run- the Iditarod -
which will begin the first weekend in March this year.
One of the real difficulties mushers have with the people watching the races
comes from those humans who bring their dogs downtown.
Even though leashed and working, racing dogs know when there are others of
their kind in the crowd and in a split--second the lead dogs of this team
scented another and wheeled into the watching crowd to investigate.
Precious seconds were lost as the musher - and a few handlers who raced to
help him - controlled his dogs.
Brakes don't hold on pavement - the snow is
imported from the mountains for the occasion. It took two men to hang on to
the sled while the dogs were sorted out and restarted before the next team
came out of the "chute" and down Fourth Avenue, right on their heels. The
teams are sent out 2 minutes apart.
After the excitement of the start, we wandered to the
5th Avenue Mall. The races were on the widescreen TVs in the store windows...
We could watch the race which the helicopters video-ed, indoors.
At the Rondy's Purrfect Cat Show in the lowest level of the Mall, four judges awarded ribbons to many prize felines, from the different catteries in Alaska and British Columbia here for the Show. Beautiful and appealing animals, every one of them. There were some Maine Coon cats who reminded me of the wild Alaskan Lynx...
But my favorite part of that show is the Alaska Humane Society's selection of
instantly adoptable felines.
They operate Adopt-a-cat shelter here, a
no-kill place of last resort for 140 cats here in Anchorage.
The Anchorage Animal Control (Pound) unfortunately cannot keep all the strays
it picks up and has to euthanize many animals every year. Friends of Pets,
another local organization, regularly goes to the pound to rescue as many
adoptable animals as it can find foster or permanent homes for....
Oh, and February 29th has been declared Spay Day 2000 USA ...
Help keep the animal population under control...
Anchorage's next Really Big Winter Activity is the Iditarod Sled Dog classic, which starts in early March and ends when the last musher crosses the finish line in Nome. We'll probably need more imported snow for the ceremonial start here in Anchorage, though. I think we've entered Breakup - This would be a good subject for next week's diary page.
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