This story was produced by KYUK and Northern Journal.
Charlie Chingliak is a budding high school basketball player in the Western Alaska village of Akiachak, and he looks the part — sporting two stud earrings in each ear and a stylish hoodie during a recent school day.
But a few nights a week you can find the 16-year-old not on the basketball court, not hanging with friends or studying at home, but on a sled.
Specifically, one being pulled along a trail by his dog team, as a headlamp-sporting Chingliak soaks in the night air and takes in the dulcet tones of Kendrick Lamar through his ear buds.
Chingliak is not even the fastest teen musher in Akiachak. Schouviller Wassillie Jr. won the 2024 Akiak Dash, a high-profile short-distance race along the Kuskokwim River, and he used his winnings to buy high pedigree sled dogs for $2,000 each from a pair of Iditarod mushers.
High school boys in Akiachak can “forget the muscle cars,” said Barron Sample, principal of the village’s school. “You get the muscle dogs,” he said.
Welcome to the mushing-crazed Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta — the one region of Alaska where the sport of mushing seems to be thriving, not just surviving.
Elsewhere in the state, grim headlines about dog sled racing warn of diminishing participation and sponsors fleeing the sport.
On the Kuskokwim River last weekend, teams from villages up and down the river vied for huge cash prizes in a pair of races that highlighted how the region has become a stronghold of competitive dog mushing.
Casual fans of sled dog racing might have noticed that the winner of the weekend’s marquee Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race (K300), was local hero Pete Kaiser from the Y-K Delta’s regional hub of Bethel. But 11 teams from Akiachak alone contested the lower-profile, 65-mile Akiak Dash race from Bethel to the nearby village of Akiak and back.
“This seems to be the only growing mushing community in the state,” said Lev Shvarts, an Iditarod veteran from Willow, north of Anchorage, who competed in the 2025 K300. He added, “I don’t know how to explain it. I just see it and I like being a part of it.”
Locals agree that a driving force behind mushing’s persistence in the region is the Kuskokwim 300 Race Committee, a nonprofit that organizes other mushing events like the Akiak Dash and the Bogus Creek 150, which is set for later this month.
Each of those races pays out substantial cash prizes not just to podium finishers, but to teams much farther down in the standings, in amounts that have risen with growing sponsorship in recent years. The payments serve as powerful motivators to mushers and also are essential supports for kennels in an area where dog food must be shipped in at steep prices.
Of the 16 mushers who competed in the 2024 Akiak Dash — all of whom were Kuskokwim locals, including a 15-year-old from the village of Napaskiak — just one finished out of the money. The 15th-place finisher earned a $2,200 paycheck, while winner Raymond Alexie of Kwethluk took home $7,000.
“Seems like every year we get one more sponsor to make a pretty substantial increase or join the fold,” said Paul Basile, Kuskokwim 300 Race Manager and the nonprofit’s sole full-time employee. “They’re mostly Alaskan companies that have a presence in the region. And associating themselves with a popular event is just good marketing for them.”
2025 was the 46th annual running of the 300-mile race. Its founding, in 1980, came at a moment when old-timers say that mushing was waning in the Y-K Delta as snowmachines were replacing the dog teams that locals had long relied upon.
Mo Napoka, a 71-year-old retired Indigenous language teacher in the Kuskokwim River village of Tuluksak, said that he learned how to mush from his father, who ran dogs for his whole life.
“We’d use ’em to go spring camping. We’d use ’em for getting wood for the houses and racing too,” Napoka said.
The original K300 was the brainchild of Myron Angstman, an attorney who had moved from Minnesota to Bethel to work as the community’s first public defender and developed a mushing side habit. He’d raced the 1,000-mile Iditarod but thought it took a little too long “if a guy had a job,” so he went home and announced that the Y-K Delta should put on its own race.
“Everybody jumped in and it was a complete community, volunteer event,” Angstman said in an interview at the Feb. 11 musher’s banquet in Bethel. “And most of that community event has survived.”
Volunteers still power the K300, with local doctors, nurses, and even a local superior court judge and his kids pitching in to run checkpoints, live streams, and a complex dropped dog delivery system for the races.
Veteran mushers from races like the Iditarod fly in with their dogs from the road system to compete for the $30,000 first prize in the 300-mile event, which paid at least $5,000 to each of the 17 teams that finished the 2025 race.
Shvarts said that the race is far cheaper than the Iditarod, which commands a $4,000 entry fee. The entry fee for the K300 fee costs $500, with all but $100 refunded to mushers who actually show up to the start line.
“I can run a K300 with a smaller kennel, which means less hours training, which means less dog food,” Shvarts said. “And the paycheck is still very sizeable.”
It’s not just the visiting mushers who compete in the 300-mile race, though.
Kaiser, this year’s winner, now has nine K300 titles. Mike Williams Jr., who lives in the Kuskokwim village of Akiak, was fourth, just a few minutes off the podium. Another musher from higher up along the river, Isaac Underwood, put his dogs in boxes in his home village of Crooked Creek and towed them 200 miles by snowmachine down the Kuskokwim River to the starting line — a journey that took 17 hours.
Williams Jr., 39, said that he’s been inspired by some of the younger mushers who he now encounters on training runs — including Chingliak, the 16-year-old who also happens to be Williams Jr.’s nephew.
“It lifts me up. I’m not one of the young guys any more,” Williams Jr. said. “I used to be one of the young guys. Now I’m one of the old guys.”
Chingliak said that he got a couple of dogs from Williams Jr. and started his own small team when he was 14. He now has 10 dogs and placed 12th in in the 2025 Akiak Dash.
In an interview on Feb. 11 at the Akiachak school principal’s office, Chingliak said that he does it for the feeling.
“I love mushing. It just makes me fulfilled — the nature out there, beautiful, calm,” Chingliak said. Between basketball, running his dog team, and school, “my whole days are, like, busy,” he added. But, he said, “I get my work done.”
Mushers like Chingliak appear set to sustain the sport along the Kuskokwim River for years to come — though there is one source of anxiety in the region’s warming weather. Warmth and poor snow conditions forced multiple local mushers to abandon plans to compete in this year’s 300-mile race, and long-term climatic predictions are grim.
“This zone has always been subject to mid-winter rains. And it’s becoming way more prevalent,” said Angstman. “It discourages people.”
Still, the mushers visiting the Kuskokwim for the first time last weekend seemed delighted to experience the region’s enthusiasm for their craft. Especially Emily Robinson, a 17-year-old from Alaska’s Interior who’s won three junior editions of the Iditarod.
Robinson, who finished sixth in the 300-mile race and won the Rookie of the Year Award, acknowledged that her sport’s future feels a little shaky along the road system.
But along the Kuskokwim, Robinson added, it’s “on a completely different level.” There are young racers and veterans, she said, plus a huge community of volunteers supporting them.
“There’s just going to be this pocket of Alaska, no matter what happens in the rest of the state with dog mushing — the [K300]'s just going to continue to happen every single year,” Robinson said. “It’s just going to stay alive forever, I think.”