HUMAN
Name: David Wolfe
Age: 62
Residence: Anchorage & Point MacKenzie, Alaska
Occupation: Making it through life
First Year Ran Iditarod: 1983
Years involved with Iditarod: Involved in every decade: ‘70’s, ‘80’s, ‘90’s, 2000’s.
Iditarod Role: Musher, Nome dog lot coordinator, a little bit of everything
Current Location: Anchorage, Alaska
Date of Photo: March 3, 2026
Temperature: 68F Indoors
What is it about running sled dogs that you love so much?
What I love about running sled dogs is the harmony, the cohesion between the musher and the rest of the team, seeing how the various dogs in the team interact with each other when we’re out running on the trail, and just sort of the mysticism of being on the trail, particularly in a moonlight run and the interactions with the dog and the trail and keeping you on your toes. It’s just in harmony with nature, your surroundings and your fellow animals.
Question 2: What, who or how and when & why did you first get involved running the Iditarod?
I got involved running the Iditarod because we first got a couple of Huskies as pets in 1976. So I was tuned into everything sled dog. The Fur Rondy ran right behind our house in Anchorage when I was growing up. So we were very interested and aware of the race from the ’70s onward. My stepdad, Gayle Nienhauser, ran the Iditarod in 1979, and just dreaming about running the race is frankly what got me through high school. Just I knew I was going to run the Iditarod and so getting through high school was an important step in the way along the way.
I also was involved in developing the Junior Iditarod in 1977 and ran the first race in ’78. So all those things culminated in taking a year off between high school and college so that I could run the race. That’s the primary reasons.
Tell me about just one of your most memorable experiences running the Iditarod:
My most memorable experiences running the Iditarod are so many different, exciting opportunities, but one was having a pure white dog in the team and waking up sort of from sleeping on the runners and miscounting my dogs. I counted them three times before I turned on my headlight before I could see the white dog. So I thought I was missing a dog.
Then on the Yukon River, a black dog, again, I woke up from sleeping on the runners and saw a hole in the ice that I was just about to go in and turned on my headlamp and threw the sled over and the dogs all looked back at me curious and a black dog looks just like a hole in the ice. So both of those. Fortunately, I was running alone so I could just be embarrassed with the dogs.
But probably the primary, most memorable experience is because I’m a diabetic and insulin dependent and I was the first one to at least publicly run the Iditarod, I got done snacking the dogs and needed to give myself an insulin shot. So I was dosing up and the needle froze. So I had to grab a hold of the needle, even though I had just got my fingers all full of dog food and stuff. So I grabbed a hold of the needle and thawed it out and gave myself in the shot and didn’t have time to follow whether it got a little red and irritated or not, but it worked.
What in life do you know for sure?:
What I know for sure in life is that I ran the Iditarod right out of high school, basically. I had just turned 19 the night of the banquet, and I had planned to run it the year before that, but there was a thing that, I can’t remember his first name, but Proenneke out there in Lake Clark had said to my mother when she asked him a question related to this, knowing that I was about to go run the race, and he said that I should hold off and run it a little bit later.
I think through life, running the Iditarod, completing the Iditarod was such a big goal for me that he was probably absolutely right, that I should have gone a little further in life so that I would gain a broader perspective because once I completed the Iditarod, it has been a long time of not really knowing what direction to go.