Evolution of Gear Makes Iditarod Faster

Ten years have passed since Jeff King last poured white gas over his two-burner stove and set it on fire to make it functional. Like other mushers competing in the Iditarod Trail sled dog race, King has taken advantage of the new technology that has emerged in the three decades since the first Iditarod.

King, a three-time Iditarod champion and 1989 Yukon Quest winner, remembers using a two-burner Coleman stove to heat water for his dogs in the early days of his racing career. During extreme cold weather, he sometimes needed to preheat the stove's components by setting the stove ablaze, then moving back in to light the burners after the inferno died down.

" It was heavy and cumbersome and tremendous trouble," King said recently from his home in Denali Park. "Once the alcohol cooker came on the scene in the early 90s, the white gas stove was obsolete in 12 months," King said.

Alcohol cookers now favored by mushers consist of no moving parts and a predictable flame. King loves his alcohol cooker for its simple design, but some mushers used even more basic technology during the first few Iditarods.

" In 1975 we went out and cut down trees, made a fire, and put a five gallon bucket on it," said Emmitt Peters of Ruby, who won the race as a rookie that year. He ran the race 13 other times, most recently in 2000.

Peters is known as the Yukon Fox "because I'd sneak away from all my competitors and have five or six teams chasing me." From his home in Ruby, an Iditarod race checkpoint in 2003, he said another big change in the Iditarod is the diet of racing dogs.

" We used to feed them dried silver salmon, whitefish, sheefish, rice, and any tallow I could get my hands on," he said. "Nowadays they got all their high-tech dog food-dry (commercial) food and lamb meat."

Dave Monson won the 1988 Yukon Quest and is entered in this year's Iditarod. The Fairbanks musher is grateful for an invention that has saved him time while securing dog booties.

" Velcro," Monson said. "We used to put booties on with electrical tape, and when it was real cold we had to hold the tape under our armpits to warm it . . . What took an hour then takes 20 minutes now."

King remembers buying polyester socks meant for human toddlers and using them as dog booties, which he would attach with white medical tape.

" After about five miles, they were gone," King said.

King now orders booties in bunches of 3,000. Many of them are made of thin nylon that doesn't absorb water. He said today's booties allow him to run dogs born with tender feet.

" Dogs that would never have been sled dogs are now running because of (modern) booties," he said.

Bud Smyth of Big Lake competed in six early versions of the Iditarod. The last time he raced to Nome was in 1983, but this year his sons Ramey and Cim are signed up for the race. He said a major advantage for his sons is the plastic "quick-change" runners used to reduce friction between the sled and the snow. Quick-change runners allow mushers to change their runner coatings soon after traveling over rocks and gravel.

" In the first year of the race, everybody had p-tex (plastic), wood or iron runners," Smyth said. "By the second year, I was using a white plastic that all broke off by the time I got to Farewell. Now you have plastic that the guys can change at will."

Emmitt Peters agreed that the sacrificial plastic runner has helped speed up the race. Older styles of plastic runner attached to the sled with many screws, which could be difficult to remove and replace in the cold.

" Now one screw holds (the plastic runner) up front," Peters said. "In