DeeDee Jonrowe came out to greet Jim Lanier at the burled arch today. It gave me an opportunity to congratulate her on placing in the top ten again and ask her a couple of questions about her 31st Iditarod. In her bright pink kusbuk with the huge Shell logo on the back DeeDee is rather unmistakable. While we were talking, folks approached to shake her hand and have a picture taken with her. One fan said, “You are a remarkable role model for girls who need somebody to look up to for encouragement to try something new and hard.” Funny, I had just finished saying almost the same thing.

I asked DeeDee how her race was. She called it one of the toughest, “Tenth place this year was an awful lot harder than 10th place last year. It rained on the Yukon River. The trail was soggy and difficult to travel. Everybody and everything got wet. It was well more than a hundred miles before I could dry out in Unalakleet. More than one musher voiced the same feeling under the arch.

Since seeing the bright pink booties with the Shell logo in Unalakleet, I’d been curious about whose idea it was to logo the booties. This really gets down to the business end of being a professional dog musher. Sponsors may or may not be able to hand the green stuff over to the musher but products are also of critical importance. Think of all the supplies a musher goes through – booties, collars, harnesses, dog coats, sled bags, etc. In sponsoring Jonrowe, Shell Exploration saw the opportunity to become more visible to the public through branding DeeDee’s attire, the dog’s attire, the sled bag and the dog truck. Marketing people from Shell and DeeDee worked together to develop products that were high-quality and beneficial for the dogs, the musher and the sponsor. Take a look at the collars worn by Jonrowe’s dogs.

I had the pleasure of flying with Cheddar Jonrowe from Elim to Nome. Cheddar is one of the cheese litter. Maybe you can come up with some other names that DeeDee might have used when naming the cheesy pups. Clearly you can see how visible the collar is and how much identification information the collar provides.

Earlier this morning, I was reading the top ten finishers for this race off to a spectator who didn’t happen to have race stats available. I read nine names then stopped and asked who the tenth might be. The immediate answer was DeeDee, she’s always in the top ten. Indeed, it was DeeDee who rounded out the top ten of Iditarod XLI. Of her thirty-one Iditarod races, Jonrowe has been in the top ten 16 times and finished 2nd twice, both times behind Jeff King.