Bone-chilling cold, a frozen landscape, hours of grueling work, it’s all part of a big dream. Jan Steves is holding on tightly, and isn’t about to let it go.
Her ultimate goal? She hopes to drive a team of sled dogs in Alaska’s legendary Iditarod race, p
erhaps in 2012.
Two winters ago, the 54-year-old Edmonds woman decided it was time to tell her father about that dream. She sat down with her dad, Richard Steves of Shoreline, at Claire’s Pantry in Edmonds.
“I thought, ‘OK, here goes,’ and I told him. He looked at me and said, ‘If anyo
ne can do it, you can,’ ” Jan Steves said last week.
She spoke by phone Thursday from Willow, Alaska, where she is training for a 20-day, 768-mile dog sled expedition that starts Feb. 20. The Norman Vaughan ’25 Serum Run from Nenana to Nome is not a race.
It’s an event, held every other winter, that commemorates the heroic mushers and dog teams who traveled by relay in 1925 to deliver lifesaving diphtheria antitoxin to Nome.
After that event captured worldwide attention, the sled dog Balto and the dog’s musher, Gunnar Kaasen, who lived in Everett and is buried here, became celebrities. And today’s more than 1,150-mile Iditarod is also a remembrance of the 1925 emergency run.
The Serum Run has two purposes, Steves said. It looks back at history and ahead to healthy futures for Alaska’s people as it calls attention to childhood inoculations and other health issues.
Along the Serum Run trail, mushers and dogs will stop in villages. “We will either stay at community centers or schools in a number of places,” said Steves, adding that the run will be done in daylight hours, rather than the punishing schedule of racing.
Participants will be sharing the message that every child needs immunizations, and will stress the importance of medical exams and cancer screenings, and awareness of the dangers of drugs, alcohol and smoking.
Steves, whose brother Rick Steves runs the Europe Through the Back Door travel business, loves the outdoors. She taught snow skiing with the Fiorini Ski School at Snoqualmie Summit. An avid hiker and biker, she is also involved with the Everett Mountaineers.
How in the world, though, did she decide to become a musher?
With her three children grown, she said the empty-nest syndrome pushed her to try more rigorous challenges.
She started with dog sledding over the winter of 2007-2008, when she trained and raced in the Cascade Quest Sled Dog Race out of Wenatchee. “I did a 75-mile stage race — three days, 25 miles each day. It was my very first race,” she said. “It was incredible.”
For that first race, she trained with Perry Solmonson, a veteran of the Iditarod, in Plain, Wash., near Leavenworth.
Steves has temporarily left Edmonds and her work in property management to stay the winter in Willow with Ted and Paula English. Ted English is another former Iditarod musher. Steves’ dog team is from English Kennel.
She has sponsorships, but even so Steves said “this is costing me a fortune.”
The day before we talked, Steves was out for a 55-mile sled run with the dogs. She travels between 10 and 12 miles per hour. The number of dogs on a team varies, she said. “In the Serum Run, it will be 12 dogs. Some races, it’s 10, some 14,” she said.
Most nights of the 20-day expedition will be spent in schools or community centers, but Steves also has a $1,600 Arctic Oven tent that has a heat source inside. “You burn Presto Logs,” she said. The dogs sleep outside on straw dropped at designated stops. They also wear booties during the run.
Mushers on the Serum Run are accompanied by escorts on snowmobiles — in Alaska they’re known as snow machines. There will be veterinarians checking on the dogs.
“Right now, my challenge is what is going to keep me warm? It gets to minus 40, minus 50. I have to properly care for the team. I have a real issues with cold hands and feet,” she said, explaining that she uses many liners and hand and foot warmers.
“My winters teaching (skiing) at Snoqualmie, I never had an issue staying warm,” she said.
She has run other races, several of which are qualifiers for the Iditarod — which remains the big goal.
Yet each time Steves takes off on a sled, a team of dogs running hard out front, there are prizes to be had.
“The first time I drove a dog team, it was almost spiritual, ” she said. “To look at the movement of the dogs, they were just fluid. And the silence of it — I was hooked.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Learn more
The Norman Vaughn ’25 Serum Run is a 768-mile dog sled expedition, from Nenana to Nome, Alaska. It commemorates the mushers and dog teams who relayed diphtheria serum to Nome in 1925. It also raises awareness of inoculations and health issues.
For more on the expedition, go to www.serumrun.org.
To find out about Jan Steves or to support her team, go to www.jansteves.com.
To read Jan Steves’ blog, go to http://livingmydream2.blogspot.com.
To learn about the Iditarod, go to www.iditarod.com.
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