HUMAN
Name: Alex Buetow
Age: 38
Residence: Denali, Alaska
Occupation: Wilderness Guide
First Year Ran Iditarod: 2014
How Many Years Involved With Iditarod: 5
Iditarod Role: Musher, Trail Sweep
Current Location: Two Rivers, Alaska
Date of Photo: June 21, 2026
Temperature: 70F outdoors
Question 1: What is it about running sled dogs that you love so much?
What I love about running sled dogs is how it gets me outside in the winter. It’s hard to find reasons to be out when it’s cold, and for people who like exploring the state and being outdoors is a priority for them, dogs are a great avenue to fulfill those selfish goals in life. Dogs really help doing that. And on the dogs themselves, it’s hard to even put into words working with dogs if you are not a dog person. It might not even make sense, but it’s impossible to imagine a life without dogs, and again, running dogs gives you the opportunity to work with them full time and invest as many hours in the day as you have awake into working with those dogs, and the connection that you get with them through a whole training season, through their whole life and through participating in races is not something that you can … It’s not a relationship you can get with a dog any other way than through long distance mushing.
Question 2: What, who or how and when & why did you first get involved running the Iditarod?
I got involved running the Iditarod because mushing was in my family. My dad ran Iditarod in ’82, ’83, and ’84. My uncle ran the race in ’89, ’90 and ’91, and I have other family that lives outside of Alaska that still has sled dogs. And so the dogs were gone from my life when I was a young kid. It was a family or dog’s choice that was put on the table between my parents, and they chose family. The dogs eventually moved on and I never got a chance to be on a dog sled really that I could remember. There were plenty of photos of me as a young kid tucked into a dog sled, but I didn’t remember much of that. So when I got out of college and wanted to move back to Alaska, I figured a good opportunity to take a year off from school would be, or my first year not in school would be to go commit myself to seeing what mushing was all about because I had never done it before. And I had just gotten done for six years living out of state, having people ask me if I was a dog musher and ran Iditarod and lived in an igloo and all this stuff, and I was like, “No, of course not.” And I set about making sure the next time somebody asked me, I could say yes to all three of those things. Obviously, the igloo part’s a little farfetched, but I just thought it would be a one winter thing and it has now been 15 years later that I’ve been either actively involved in training and racing or just involved in volunteering for different races. So how did I get involved? It was family.
Question 3: Tell me about just one of your most memorable Iditarod experiences running the Iditarod.
My most memorable experience running the Iditarod is from 2014, and I was running a puppy team and there were a lot of teams in the race that year, 80-some would be my guess, and the back of the pack was quite robust. I was traveling with Lisbeth Norris and Monica Zappa, and we were leaving Cripple heading to Ruby around the same time and we planned to camp together. So we mushed halfway, we camped right as the sun was going down. I think we were probably going to stay for eight hours or so. I was living my dream. I was about halfway through with the race, I was traveling with two beautiful women and I thought I had totally made it, and I decided to make a fire for everyone. So I built a big bonfire up and we were hanging out. Lisbeth eventually went off and went to sleep with her dogs, and Monica and I laid down on either side of the fire and fell asleep. And I woke up some unknown amount of time later completely engulfed in flames, and I frantically rolled around in the snow and got the fire put out, and I looked over and Monica was also on fire, and I ran over there and like was putting the fire out on her sleeping bag, and it was a down sleeping bag and so there were little like flaming feathers shooting out into the air, and she didn’t even wake up. She just groaned and rolled over and slept right through it, and I tried to piece myself together and went back to sleep myself. It was completely dark and the fire had burnt my headlamp cable and so I didn’t have any light. And then in the morning, it was probably three or four. I know it was really dark and we got going, and Lisbeth had an extra headlamp because of course, I had already lost my extra headlamp in Rohn long ago, and so I got an extra headlamp that was horrible from Lisbeth and I followed them into Ruby, and as the sun came up as we were rolling into town, I was able to take stock of things and I had a massive hole burned in the chest of my parka. I had singed my hat, my knits, obviously my headlamp, and we pulled into Ruby and one of either a volunteer or somebody who was just out there watching the race. His name was Al, I believe, he immediately took my headlamp and just disappeared with it. And then Monica, by luck, had sent out one of her textbook like banana yellow with holographic lightning bolts and pink trim, an extra parka. And so I got Monica’s brightly colored parka. Al returned with my headlamp functioning again. He’d patched the wire back together, and I was able to continue down the trail. And what ended up happening, and I hate to say this, but I’m quite convinced that Monica had a space blanket over her sleeping bag, one of those flimsy plastic silver blankets, and it blew in the night, it blew over the fire and then acted as a wick and burned both directions, and lit us both on fire. But we both finished the race and it’s just a fun, super wild little story that not many people I think have ever really heard.
So at what point did you tell her she had been on fire? Was it the next day?
Yeah, it was the next day, but we were so in the zone of just focusing on the race and being a bit sleepy, that the fact that she never saw the fire and I was on my feet and we were all on our feet talking, and really, the only thing that she cared about was that I didn’t have a headlamp and we needed a way for me to see to get to the next checkpoint. Obviously when we got to the checkpoint, she realized I needed a parka and she was able to help me out with that, but she wasn’t really concerned or surprised that she was on fire and didn’t wake up. She was like, “Oh, wow, that’s crazy. We should get going.” We ran all of our qualifiers together, and so Monica and Lisbeth and I, as well as probably a dozen other people. Back then, it seemed like there were these groups of 10 to 20 younger or newer up and coming mushers that were all qualifying together and then running their rookie race together, and so by the time we were camped out there and traveling the trail together, we were buds. We totally had a rapport. We were a support team for each other way more than we were competitors against each other. The back of the pack is so much better. There’s so much more camaraderie. There’s time to have a fire and talk to the people you’re traveling the trail with. But I love looking back on those relationships that I had with the other mushers out there, and I don’t see them at all anymore, but I just saw my dad introduce himself to somebody here that they obviously haven’t seen each other in 30 or 40 years, who knows? And you have this shared connection over these couple minutes here, couple minutes there that you spent with someone on the trail, a relationship built over a whole bunch of very short interactions. And you build enough of those super short interactions and you have enough of those 30 second to five minute long chit-chats throughout the winter, and then a couple years later, you actually feel comfortable around the person.
Question 4: What in life do you know for sure?:
What I know for sure in life is that there is no predicting what will come next. I certainly never saw myself getting into dogs, and after I had spent one winter working with sled dogs, I certainly never thought I would do it for 15 years, and I never thought that that would lead me to meeting my wife. And when I met her, I was sure I was never going to have kids, and we’re going to have a baby in a week maybe. And all of my entire life, at this point, the path that I’m on is because I got involved with sled dogs, and that it completely changed the trajectory for me in the best ways. Plenty of challenges along the way, but yeah, what I know for sure in life is that there’s no predicting what will happen tomorrow or what different doors will open for you.