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A New Sled Dog Race in the Yukon Tries to Save a Fading Sport

The Yukon Odyssey offers a smaller, more sustainable model as long-distance contests struggle

A New Sled Dog Race in the Yukon Tries to Save a Fading Sport

The Yukon Odyssey offers a smaller, more sustainable model as long-distance contests struggle

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL COLE

Published 6:30, APRIL 2, 2026

My head is on a swivel. Ice clings to the dogs’ whiskers and snouts as they leap a metre off the ground, pulling against their anchored lines. Every fibre of their athletic bodies screams: LET’S GO! The dogs are long-legged Alaskan huskies, usually a specialized mix of Siberian husky, bred for endurance in harsh conditions, and greyhound, a high-intensity sprinter.

The mushers, ranging from thirteen years old to sixty-three, move incognito, bundled in parkas with fur-lined hoods that swallow their faces. They hurry to pack their sleds with mandatory survival gear, which includes extra harnesses, booties, a hand axe, and a knife. There are also two headlamps: the final eighty kilometres of the race will unfold in total darkness. Even for the fastest musher, it will take at least sixteen hours to reach the finish line.

Fourteen mushers from Yukon, Alaska, California, and Wyoming have traveled to Mendenhall Landing, Yukon, an hour west of Whitehorse, to run their eight-dog teams in the Yukon Odyssey, a new 100-mile sled dog race. The roster is a mix of 1,000-mile veterans with 100-mile rookies; for some, it’s their first race, regardless of distance.

“Five, four, three, two, one—GO!”

Snow hooks come free. The tension snaps. One by one, teams bolt forward at two-minute intervals, surging down the trail like fast-moving water.

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Sled dog races in North America are vanishing almost as quickly as the snow and ice that mushers rely on. Over the past five years, events have increasingly been shortened, rerouted, or cancelled due to inadequate snowpack or open water that makes trails dangerous. Climate change and rising costs—from housing to dog food to fuel—are all placing pressure on the sport. Kennels are downsizing as a result. Mushers say it’s getting more challenging to find the time and resources to train teams to compete in long-distance races—and it’s hard to find the races themselves.

Nowhere is this decline clearer than in the fate of the Yukon Quest. At its peak, the legendary 1,000-mile race—a gruelling route that followed the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Fairbanks, Alaska—attracted a roster of nearly fifty mushers. However, that halved into the 2000s. Since 2021, it’s completely unravelled. A dispute between Canadian and US race boards split the 2023 event into regional, shorter races. Then, warming winters forced organizers to shorten the race by 150 miles. The next year, it was rerouted inland between the Teslin and Ross rivers. By January 2026, former board members cancelled the competition altogether, citing volunteer burnout and mounting debt. In a Hail Mary attempt to save the organization, a new board of directors was recently appointed.

Seeing races “slowly drifting away,” Nathaniel Hamlyn and his partner Louve Tweddell—who manage a kennel of thirty-seven dogs in Mendenhall Landing—were inspired to create their own race. The Yukon Odyssey is a way to “give back to the mushing community,” Hamlyn says.

Hamlyn and Tweddell are thirty-one years old and twenty-five years old respectively, but they have forty years of mushing experience between them. Tweddell was practically born on the runners; her father, Luc Tweddell, finished the Quest multiple times. Hamlyn got hooked as a teen in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and after high school, moved to Whitehorse to train for the Quest. At twenty-three, he was one of the youngest mushers to finish the race in 2018 and 2019. Tweddell ran the 450-mile version in 2023. She recalls travelling without cell service for 200 miles at night. When she felt her phone vibrate, she thought, “Oh my god, I’m close to humans.”

But beyond the collapse of the Quest, long-distance sled dog racing has been trending away from slow, measured treks across vast distances. The pressure to win prize money to offset expenses has pushed the sport toward speed. Mushers began breeding “more hound than husky” into their dogs, says Hamlyn, favouring sprint over endurance. The winner of the first Yukon Quest in 1984 took twelve days to cross the finish line; in 2018, it took eight days—the fastest record to date. Mushers deemed too slow by organizers can be eliminated from contests.

Today, the Iditarod—the world’s last remaining 1,000-mile race between Willow and Nome, Alaska—can feel almost like NASCAR, with sleds outfitted with live trackers and round-the-clock livestreams. By encouraging new mushers from small kennels, the Yukon Odyssey seems to be something else entirely: a grassroots call to get back to the basics.

“You got this,” Jesika Reimer says encouragingly to a fellow musher, tucking a bag of sour peach candies into her sled. Reimer, who moonlights as a bat biologist, holds back the dogs as they explode with energy against the gangline.

The northern California-based musher had hoped to run her own team in the Yukon Odyssey. A few days before, Reimer decided to withdraw—her dogs just didn’t have the miles on them she’d hoped for, and she didn’t want to risk injury. Instead, she’s volunteering as a handler.

It’s becoming a winter ritual for Reimer to dial up musher friends and ask, “Who’s got snow?” Training is a major issue facing long-distance mushers in the United States. Recent cancellations include the Rocky Mountain Triple Crown, an annual series in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In January, organizers of the Idaho Sled Dog Challenge—a 300-mile qualifier for the Iditarod—announced they were cancelling the race for good after three consecutive years of unsafe trail conditions.

This past December, Reimer hit the road six weeks earlier than planned. She drove over 3,500 kilometres north to Mendenhall Landing to park her van at a local musher’s kennel and get ready for the season. She set her sights on two 100-mile races: the Percy de Wolfe Memorial Mail Race in Dawson City and, later, the Under Dog 100 in Yellowknife. The Odyssey, she says, represents a shift toward accessibility, where the barrier to entry—financial and logistic—is lower. She points to newer races, like T-Dog in Alaska, geared toward small kennels and hybrid formats like skijoring (being pulled by dogs on skis) or bikejoring (being pulled by dogs on a bike).

For Reimer, the goal has always been to keep her kennel small—no bigger than the size of her van and trailer, which are outfitted to sleep twelve dogs (and two humans). Fewer dogs means more care and resources directed to every animal. The nostalgia for long-distance forays is still there, says Reimer, but it’s not feasible for most mushers to train for the speed those races demand. “It’s created this huge divide,” she says.

What could create more sustainability is investing in races that help small kennels build experience and confidence. A two-dog skijoring race becomes a gateway for four dogs, and four dogs can lead to six, and so forth, she says. The future of long-distance racing may even require a co-operative approach with mushers pooling, or sharing, dogs.

In that way, the sport rebuilds itself the way it always has—team by team, dog by dog.

At 4:30 p.m., the frontrunners stream back into the Odyssey’s mid-race checkpoint to rest their teams for a minimum of five hours. Mushers lay down beds of straw, check paws, massage limbs, and boil “soup”—a mixture of kibble, raw meat, fat, and water—to feed the dogs. Volunteers and mushers gather around a campfire to roast hot dogs and thaw cans of frozen beer.

Michael Hamilton and his team pull back into the yard. The rookie musher is grinning widely after the first fifty-mile leg—this is his first race ever. Hamilton grew up in England, dreaming of frontier adventures after watching The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, a film and TV series from the late ’70s about a mountain man who tames a grizzly bear. Only six months ago, Hamilton and his wife bought a property in Marsh Lake, south of Whitehorse, acquiring a team of nine dogs from a local musher. This past November, when it snowed, he harnessed the team to the sled and thought, “Now this is serious.”

As Hamilton unhooks his dogs, a veteran musher pulls him into a congratulatory embrace. Normand Casavant, a sixty-three year old who lives in Mayo, Yukon, has been running dogs for forty years; he finished the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest five times.

“For me, what I love, it’s young mushers,” he says. “We have to encourage them. It’s not always easy.”

Another competitor, Greg Williamson, can attest. He and his partner—who have worked as handlers for dog sled tour companies—are in their inaugural year of running a racing kennel. “Last April we only had two dogs,” says Williamson. Today, they have fourteen, with the goal of expanding to thirty and building enough miles to qualify for the Iditarod by 2031.

This past October, the couple moved from Quesnel, British Columbia, to Whitehorse to train for the season. Williamson had hoped to run the 175-mile race in the Yukon Quest. “We built where we were going to be this winter around the Quest,” says Williamson. “So, it was a pretty wild thing for us when it dropped.”

As the sun slips below the mountains, the temperature plummets to negative forty degrees Celsius. Kyla Boivin and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Lyla-Jean Boivin-McHugh, take refuge in a heated mobile trailer, spooning down bowls of warm chilli.

Lyla-Jean has been behind the runners since she was six and is quick to point out that she’s younger than her mother was when she attempted her first mid-distance race at sixteen. Her mom, Boivin, grew up with working dogs in Dawson City—her own dad was a trapper. As a teenager, she became “pen pals” with Frank Turner, a well-known Whitehorse musher who won the Yukon Quest in 1995 and who gave Boivin tips on “cookers, booties, and training techniques.”

Boivin’s first race taught her she “had a long way to go” in her goal of running the Yukon Quest. She’d eventually succeed, however—attempting it seven times and finishing four. Now in her thirty-first year running her own team, Boivin is sharing the trail with her daughter.

“I love pretty much everything about it,” says Lyla-Jean. “I love being outdoors for long stretches. I love the exercise. I love the dogs. I’m not a fan of the ‘no sleep.’”

Has her mom given her any tips on how to stay awake on the sled?

“Coffee,” she laughs.

And would she ever want to pursue longer-distance racing?

“If the Yukon Quest was a thing like it used to be, I think that I would do it,” says Lyla-Jean.

It’s the question on everyone’s mind, says her mother. Will the historic race return? Boivin is among the mushers who recently stepped in as a board member to help steer it back on track.

At 11:08 p.m., Boivin and her team head back out to complete the remaining fifty miles of the Yukon Odyssey. Her daughter follows behind, the glow of the young musher’s headlamp flickering and fading into the night.

The last stretch of the Yukon Odyssey plays out in darkness. Local Mendenhall musher Michael Burtnick and his team cross the finish line at 3:02 a.m. Second and third place arrive just minutes later.

After 5 a.m., Williamson and his team arrive with a harrowing story to tell—a run-in with a moose. It’s a musher’s worst nightmare; there are cases of moose fatally trampling dog teams. “I thought I had hit a tree,” he says. Knocked to the ground, Williamson swiftly kicked his sled upright and hollered to Cello, one of his lead dogs, “Get up!” Signalling go, the team took off without their musher. Williamson’s quick thinking proves decisive: aside from a few minor scratches, the dogs are unharmed. Alone with the massive, long-legged creature, Williamson hollered and made himself big. Fortunately, the moose backed off.

The unsaddled musher began the long trudge back; thawing his frozen cellphone in his armpit to call for help. Tweddell rode out on a snowmobile to catch Williamson’s dogs and give the musher a ride back to his team, who slowly made their way to the finish line.

“We weren’t racing anymore. We were getting home,” says Williamson.

Mushing has always required grit—and a willingness to play the long game. The future of long-distance racing may be uncertain, but the Yukon Odyssey suggests the sport isn’t finished yet. “The dogs showed me exactly what our team is when things get hard,” says Williamson. “They don’t quit.”

With thanks to the Gordon Foundation for supporting the work of writers from Canada’s North.

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I’m Brett, a contributing writer with The Walrus. This winter, I reported from Nuuk, Greenland, the quiet capital transformed by the threat of an American invasion into an unlikely stage for a global showdown.

What struck me was how deeply the threats had unsettled residents. People were on edge. But I was also struck by their willingness to share their stories.

​​The Walrus knows you need to hear from people who live in these places, and from reporters who are actually there. When you support The Walrus, you’re supporting real journalism.

The Walrus is investing in on-the-ground reporting while other newsrooms are getting slashed by corporate owners. We need your help to send writers where they should be.

I’m Brett, a contributing writer with The Walrus. This winter, I reported from Nuuk, Greenland, the quiet capital transformed by the threat of an American invasion into an unlikely stage for a global showdown.

What struck me was how deeply the threats had unsettled residents. People were on edge. But I was also struck by their willingness to share their stories.

​​The Walrus knows you need to hear from people who live in these places, and from reporters who are actually there. When you support The Walrus, you’re supporting real journalism.

The Walrus is investing in on-the-ground reporting while other newsrooms are getting slashed by corporate owners. We need your help to send writers where they should be.

© The Walrus