Iron Dog Alaska Snow Machine Race

"The Frozen Race" - Iron Dog Alaska
Groove Life

The Iron Dog is an annual, 2,500 mile, snow machine race across Alaska. This year's race will he held in a couple of weeks. Another motor sport event I had never heard of before.

Iron Dog Race Map

My nephew Nick came to lunch on Tuesday. He's been up in Dutch Harbor for the last month, but their fishing season got cut short. IAman wanted to hear a snow machine story so Nick obliged us with a tale from a year ago. There is a snow mobile race called the Iron Dog that covers like 800 miles of tundra. The ground is dead flat and the guys run their hopped up snow machines a hundred miles an hour over the frozen tundra. He was hanging out with some friends who had some of these hopped up snow machines (Ferrari's he calls them). They are out riding around and one of the machines develops a problem with the throttle. Intermittently the throttle would stick wide open. The driver got it under control and brought it back. The day goes on, some girls come over and they all start drinking and everyone forgets about the problem with the throttle. Well, nothing is more fun than hopping onto a hot rod snow mobile after you've had a couple of beers, and that's just what a couple of the girls did. Unfortunately, they got on the one with the throttle problem. The took off and Nick took off in hot pursuit because you never go out in the wilderness alone. You can go ten miles in a heartbeat and if something goes wrong you might never be found. Nick has the good sense to go after them and sees their lights head across a frozen lake. They're going lickety split and then the sound suddenly goes up, the snow machine rockets ahead and into the trees on the far side of the lake and then suddenly goes vertical. Nick follows up and when he gets there he finds the snow machine upside down, ten feet up in a tree, engine still running with the throttle wide open, screaming like a banshee. He shuts off the motor but when he does that, the lights go out. So now he's looking around in the dark for bits and pieces of the girls (arms? legs? heads?) but he's not finding anything. The girls show up laughing and giggling a couple of minutes later. They jumped off the machine when they realized the throttle was stuck while it was still out on the lake.

Here's a couple of videos that might give you some idea of what the Iron Dog race is like. This one is a little long and repetitive, but notice that the snow machines are keeping pace with an airplane.

Iron Dog Team 8 Aklestad/Johnson 2019
Tyson Johnson

This one gives you a different perspective on cross country traveling.


Iron Dog 2021 Poorman Fuel Haul (Remote Checkpoint)
Josh Norum