Musher Jeff King has been racing the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race (K300) for a long time.
“And I was standing right there, and he goes, ‘Well, have you talked to Jeff King?'” King recalled about a pre-race musher meeting. “And she looked at me, and she goes, ‘I thought you were dead.’ And I went, ‘No, no, I'm not.’ And anyway, I've been coming out there long enough people can't believe I'm still alive."
King is the K300’s winningest musher. He’s been competing in the race since 1988, and holds nine first-place titles. There’s one race in particular that sticks out in his mind: the 1991 K300.
“I think the first race I won at [the K300] was dubbed the ‘Kusko-swim’ because we were in calf deep, knee deep water for miles at a time,” King remembered.
In KYUK’s archived coverage of the race’s finish, 1991's King looks tired and damp.
“I picked it up right there and thought I was gonna lose it when I almost drowned, when I got back out there on the river, knee-deep,” King said, surrounded by microphones in 1991. “It was wild.”
Footage from the trail showed dogs prancing through puddles on top of the icy Kuskokwim River.
The sport of dog mushing, once known for its postcard Alaska image of mushers with frozen beards and large Malamute huskies built for the cold, has melted into a different picture.
And in the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta, that’s especially true. The "Kusko-swim" phenomenon is less and less of an anomaly.
Brian Brettschneider is a climatologist with the National Weather Service. In the 1970s, Brettschnider said that there was a shift in some Pacific Ocean circulations. It combined with a dramatic reduction of sea ice in the 90s, which warmed temperatures on the Y-K Delta an average of 4.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the span of about 85 years.
“When people ask about what the future of dog mushing is, I generally say the dog mushing season is going to be squeezed,” Brettschnider said.
With an overall warming trend, Brettschnider said that the edges of the seasons will narrow. Less snow is predicted in late fall and early spring.
“There were tough years 75 years ago, but there were fewer tough years back then, and there's going to be more tough years now,” Brettsnider said.
Between 1900 and 2018, Alaska experienced nine of its 10 warmest years on record after 1980. Brettschnider said that this trend will likely cause the sport of mushing to eventually shift to Alaska’s cooler interior and one day, disappear from the Y-K Delta.
“They used to do dog mushing in, you know, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, and they really don't anymore because they're just, the season isn't suitable for it anymore,” Brettschnider said. “So dog mushing is moving, and the region is shrinking. And, you know, I think you'll have the ability to do dog mushing, say, around Fairbanks for a lot longer than you'll have it around Bethel.”
This winter on the Y-K Delta, December 2024 and January 2025 saw little snow and a lot of rain. The 2025 K300, originally slated for late January 2025, was postponed two weeks due to forecasted warm conditions that made trail marking along the river unsafe. And the compressed winter conditions have an impact far beyond race day. Paul Basile is the race manager for the K300.
“What I hear from mushers is that, yeah, it's really hard to train,” Basile said.
Basile said that most mushers in the region start training in late summer and early fall, hitching their teams to a four-wheeler, but come winter, the teams transition to sled runs. Warmer conditions have posed a challenge.
“I think most kennels are left doing nothing and waiting for things to improve, or doing really short runs with four-wheelers, which I think is probably better than nothing, but it's not going to get you ready for 150 or a 300 mile race,” Brettschider said.
With minimal or no snow to glide their sleds on, some mushers relocate their teams to Alaska’s interior for a handfull of weeks to run their dogs, which can be a financial drain. In 2022, Anchorage Daily News reported that Iditarod rosters were dominated by road-system mushers. The cost of the sport, including that of training relocation needed to stay competitive, can drive out village dog teams and has contributed to low registration numbers of mushers.
The Iditarod, once having as many as 88 competitors, is slated to have just 34 teams this year, the second smallest in its history. The Yukon Quest Alaska had only eight teams enrolled this year in its 550-mile course. And in the lower 48, where dog sledding scenes were once prevalent in Vermont, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania, the sport has been fading out. Last year, the longest sled dog race in the Cam-Am Crown in Maine was canceled due to insufficient snow coverage.
King said that the warmer temperatures can make the sport more comfortable for the humans involved, but it’s also tricker to cool dogs down than it is to warm them up.
“When you had a big, furry, more traditional husky, it's tough to cool them off, but I can put a coat on a dog with a shorter coat when it's cold, and have him deal with the warm weather a little more realistically,” King said.
In some cases, this difficulty has called for some unique solutions. King remembered visiting a grocery store one warmer year before he was to compete in the Iditarod.
“Without really looking for it, I saw the toy department,” King remembered.
He found what appeared to be a five gallon water jug you could wear as a backpack, Ghostbusters style.
“Kind of a bazooka thing connected to it that you could pump water and squirt,” King said. “I used that on the start of the Iditarod, and I could squirt my dogs, just squirt a big tower and water over them while they were running.”
He’d found a new way to cool the dogs down.
“I remember I passed one of my competitors, that was Doug Swingley, was also a past champion, and when I went by, just decked him with a blast of water,” King recalled, laughing. “It was pretty fun.”
Even through the warmer years Alaska mushing has persisted, albeit with a little help from water blasting technology. And the same is true of the Y-K Delta. In the K300’s 46 years, it’s faced postponements and reroutes. With the 2025 race facing predicted temperatures near or above freezing, it’s looking like it could be another Kusko-swim.
Whatever the weather conditions, the climate is still warming, but the race is still happening. This year, though some mushers have dropped out, 17 teams will still take to the start line and race upriver to Aniak and back.
