Hello everyone! February 8-9 was one of the premier junior distance dog mushing events, the Willow Jr 100, starting and finishing at Vern Halter’s Dream A Dream Dog Farm in Willow, Alaska. The race is for kids aged 12-18 (18 year old’s allowed to race if they are still in high school!), and covers approximately 100 miles of Alaskan wilderness. The race is very well put on, with checkpoints approximately every ten miles where someone on a snowmachine was watching the kids and making sure that they were going the right way and doing okay out there. There was one small hiccup when some recreational snowmachiners took down a bunch of trail markers right outside the halfway point last night, and a couple kids got lost, but both were eventually reunited with their teams and all musher finished the race – even more impressive, all nine kids finished with all the dogs they started with, nobody had to return dogs from their team to their handlers! It speaks to the depth of their dog care that all were able to finish with all their dogs, and I’m sure the race vets had a hard time choosing which musher to give the humanitarian award for best dog care to (it went to Jace C!). 

Other special awards were given to Sierra for sportsmanship, Johanna won the Skeeter award for perseverance, and the honorary musher this year was Art Church who recently passed away and is greatly missed by the mushing community (he was the race marshal for the Willow Jr 100 the year I ran this race, and was on the trail crew for several other years). 

It’s always such a joy to watch the next generation of dog mushers learning how to be mushers, and hearing stories from the checkpoint and the trail of how they all bonded together and helped care for each other! I made friends when I was racing that are still my friends 10+ years later, and I hope these kids will someday start mentoring the future generations the way myself and other mushers are passing on our knowledge (growing up I raced against Jessica Klejka and Wade Marrs who both had juniors running in the race this weekend too!). 

Full results and more

photos from the race are available on the Willow Jr 100 Facebook page, be sure to check them out! And keep your eye out for the next big junior mid distance race, the Junior Iditarod that starts February 23rd on Knik Lake!