HUMAN
Name: Eric Buetow
Age: 73
Residence: Fairbanks, Alaska
Occupation: Dentist
First Year Ran Iditarod: 1982
How Many Years Involved With Iditarod: 3
Iditarod Role: Musher
Current Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Date of Photo: June 21, 2026
Temperature: 68F outdoors
Question 1: What is it about running sled dogs that you love so much?
What I love about running sled dogs was the team aspect of, however many dogs you happen to have hooked up, be it six, be it 10, be it 16, of how this cohesive unit for the most part seemed to go in the right direction most of the time, and willingly, and provided just such a totally unique way to see the countryside, be it a training run or being racing on the Iditarod trail, and just … Some of the things that stand out are just the silence of just runners and dogs panting. Then, I endlessly told people that my favorite times of out on a sled was under full moons, that dogs would just, they’d sense that, and just have some of my most electric runs in those sorts of conditions.
Question 2: What, who or how and when & why did you first get involved running the Iditarod?
I got involved running Iditarod because I had had an interest in sled dogs from my brother-in-law in Minnesota. It’s a bit convoluted, here. He was in Minnesota. I was living in Barrow, was the first place I moved to work in the public health service when I came to Alaska, and partway through that brought three dogs from him. Talk about bringing coals to Newcastle, but, three dogs from Minnesota, and then a fellow I was living with had a few mutts, shall we say, and we had the first dog team in Barrow for years and years and years, and people would just love seeing us running around town, saying, “I’ve not seen dog team in a long time.” I have this distinct memory of listening to the finish of the 1981 Iditarod on the radio, KBRW, and I had a few dogs and went, and then when I left Barrow, I knew I was going to … I needed a place to practice dentistry, and you need some place that has snow, and you don’t make too many decisions about where you’re not going to be and where you are going to be, in Alaska, so I wound up in …
Now, this will be a kind of longer answer, but Harvey Drake and George Atla were regular competitors in the Ely sled dog races in Ely, Minnesota. They were from North Pole, Alaska, and so I thought, “Let’s see if there’s a dentist in North Pole.” Then, lo and behold, there was, and I started working for him and my first season of ever owning dogs, I just thought it was a prudent thing to do, to sign up for Iditarod, in my first full year of having dogs in 1982.
Question 3: Tell me about just one of your most memorable Iditarod experiences running the Iditarod.
My most memorable experience running Iditarod … I’m going to kind of morph into a series of experiences. I was just telling Jeff about my very first, how I got started, but on my first race, really not knowing what I was doing. For example, I was only moderately well-prepared, putting my … I hadn’t even had a sled bag on my training sled, so I’m putting my sled bag on my sled the night before the race, so there’s a little bit of last minute nature there, but we’ll go on ahead to the race itself, where in a pack of, I don’t know, there were eight or nine of us, that there’s tons of snow that we wound up getting slowed down by in Ruby, and we probably spent two days there waiting for the snow to stop and for a trail to be put in from there to Galena. Wound up making it to Galena finally, kept snowing. Made it part way out of Galena, turned back, went back to Galena, so right there, there was three different 24-hour layovers that I had.
Then, a unique, somewhat unfortunate experience, I got deathly sick going into Shaktoolik and spent two days in the checker’s house and the kind couple that I remembered their name for a long time, but no more, but they took good care of me, fed my dogs. She made stinkweed tea for me to,o “Here, have some stinkweed tea. It’ll make you feel better.” Maybe the penicillin helped, too, but then after two days of recovering, then that’s just Eric and his dogs going across the rest of the race, which turned out to be just fortunately a great … Weather-wise, was terrific and everything, but just solo the rest of the race, and got there in three weeks’ time, which, now you think, “Oh my God, that’s really a long time.” Long before the day and age of, “You have to get here by such-and-such time,” but times were different then, and winning times then were red lantern times now.
Question 4: What in life do you know for sure?:
What I know for sure in life is, and I’m going to do a little paraphrasing since I just finished rereading Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, and his last paragraph says something to the effect of, “In the end, all things wind up being one, and a river runs through it.” Those are his words, and I can just look and say, in the end, things turn into one and the trail runs through it, and we’ve run through multiple trails on the Iditarod, and that then lead us to trails in our lives. My particular trail led to meeting my wife, and here we are almost 40-some years, 41 years married, but that’s how our start, how we started, was through dogs and those trails, and knowing that some of the, really, the difficult times, of which there always are on something like an Iditarod, be it when things are okay and then things are not okay, then you go, “Well, you just have to get through it.” Nobody’s there to help you, and we do well having that background, knowing that, “Well, this really isn’t that big a deal, because I remember back then when it was a really big deal having to go through that weather, and this and that and the other thing.” There’s a lot of that, that I’ve carried with me through my life.