HUMAN
Name: Andy Moderow
Age: 43
Residence: Anchorage, Alaska
Occupation: Sr. Director of Policy at Alaska Wilderness League
First Year Ran Iditarod: 2001
Iditarod Role: Musher, Volunteer
Current Location: Anchorage, Alaska
Date of Photo: December 27, 2025
Temperature: 68F inside
What is/was your first and continuing motivation to run sled dogs?
My first motivation to run sled dogs was really my earliest memories. It was about the dogs. It was about the family pet. It was about trails that got longer and longer. I started racing as a junior musher. I was about six, seven years old and the trails got longer and more and more dogs came into our lives as a result, but it was centered on the dogs. Getting to know them as individuals, getting to know how they work together as a team, what makes each one tick. And really that drove my love for mushing.
The trails got longer and I continued to run dogs through when I was 18. I took a year off from school through on Iditarod and I lived and worked at Martin Buser’s kennel for the year. And then it was a combination of all the dogs. It was great spending a year going all in on dogs, but also the trails and the places that the dogs would go, where places we would go together and that really drove my love for the sport.
Question 2: What, who or how and when & why did you first get involved running the Iditarod?
I first got involved running the Iditarod because it was a natural progression from a two-mile trail as a young kid to a thousand-mile trail as an 18-year-old. It just seemed like one step after the other got me to that start line. And looking back on it’s pretty absurd to take off and do a thousand miles with a dog team. And I remember the starting line thinking, “Wow. What have I gotten myself into?” But it shows that when you take on big projects, you can end up really far from where you started with just putting one foot in front of another. And that was one of the many lessons Iditarod taught me.
Tell me about just one of your most memorable experiences running the Iditarod:
My most memorable experience from that 2001 Iditarod, I have to say between Ophir and Iditarod, two checkpoints in the middle of the race. Sun was going down, beautiful pink light, pretty rough trail. That year there wasn’t much snow through the Farewell Burn and a lot of the area, even around that halfway point was pretty light on snow. But I was listening to Led Zeppelin, pulled my headphones out when I saw a team parked off to the side, and Mike Williams, a long time Iditarod pro was camped off to the side, somebody I looked up to definitely watching the race over the years.
And we both just kind of smiled and took in the spot and he said something to the effect of, “Isn’t it just incredible out here?” And the sunset, the dogs were just humming along. We were off our 24, everything felt good. It was a really, really special moment on the trail.
What in life do you know for sure?:
What I know for sure in life I think that Iditarod taught me is that it’s real easy to think that the present will always be there. And I think back to when I was thinking about running the race and I wished I could have run dogs back in the Coleman Lantern days and mushers camping out by a campfire and sharing stories at night, going a little slower than they did in 2001.
25 years later, left state for college. I’ve come to see Alaska’s changing and the sport’s changing. I mean, I’m happy I got to run the race on a good old-fashioned hickory dog sled without one of those tail dragger contraptions that the newfangled mushers use. That’s kind of a lighthearted response to how things change.
I think watching the race move to Fairbanks because of climate change, watching the trails get more unreliable for training, watching the economics of the sport change as well, I think we got to be really intentional and thoughtful as Alaskans about how we keep this tradition alive and how we keep our state and our winters in a form where a sport like Iditarod can continue. So that’s, I think, my perspective over the last 25 years watching what’s changed since I ran the race.