Jessie Royer, 46, was born in Idaho. She grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana where she lived for 21 years. She worked on ranches as a horse wrangler and horse teamster. She says she got her first sled dogs when she was 15. She started learning about dogs from Doug Swingley whom she worked with for a couple of years. She had dogs in Montana seven years before moving to Alaska in the spring on 1998. She won Montana’s Race to the Sky when she was only 17, and she was the winner of the invitational La Grande Odyssée in France in 2005. She says her hobbies are horses, hunting and mounted shooting.