HUMAN

Name: Carolyn Muegge-Vaughan

Occupation: I currently work with Doctors Without Borders.

Years involved with Iditarod: I got involved with the Iditarod in 1986 when I met Norman Vaughan, and I was in the ’87, ’89 and ’92 races.

Current Location: Settler’s Bay Lodge in Wasilla, Alaska
Date of Photo: March 1, 2022

Temperature: 68 F Indoors

What, who or how and when did you first get involved with the Iditarod?

I first got involved with the Iditarod. Libby Riddles had just won the race, had put Iditarod on the map in 1985. And I was living in Atlanta, Georgia so I’d heard about the race. And a friend of mine who worked with me in my company, which was executive expeditions, had just reconnected with a friend of hers who was a doctor and who had just been to Alaska to go dog driving. And he said, “I’ve done everything but die, and that’s the best thing yet.” So it was like, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could take a corporate group, maybe like AT&T up to Alaska to go dog driving. So this was way before the internet like we have it now. And so I got in touch with Bill Davidson, who had been the person who had been taking this doctor out. And he said, “But there’s another doctor who’s come up here three times and he can tell you how to outfit everything.” His name is Al Mokel. So I agreed to go meet Al Mokel one Friday afternoon after work at a pub, and he brought a stack of pictures that were like four or five inches thick. And as he was going through these pictures, in the middle of it were some pictures of this man named Norman Vaughan. And he told me a little bit about him and I thought, “Wow, that’s just fascinating.” And that was sort of it except he was so fascinating, I happened to tell a friend of mine who had actually met Norman, because he had been coming to Atlanta because to the Greenland expedition and she had met him at the fixed base operation. So it just so happened that the next week I called her up and I said, “Boy, it’s been a hectic week at work. Let’s go have a beer at The Downwind, this new little restaurant at this airport. So when I got there to meet her, she said, “Guess who’s here.” I said, “Who?” She said, “Norman.” It’s like, what? This man that I saw pictures of a week ago is here. And so it’s like, I don’t know EFS (sic) Aviation, but I have to go meet him because it was the 20th anniversary for EFS Aviation. I went downstairs to the hangar, I asked somebody if they knew Norman, they said, “Sure, he is over there carving a pig. I’ll come back. Let me go get him and he’ll come over.” So he went to get Norm and he came over and he said, “Oh”… I said, “I just wanted to meet you.” And he said, “Oh no, you have to stay, you have to have some food.” “No, no, no. I just wanted to meet you. No.” So he insisted. And he went and he got a huge, big plate of food. We talked for about 10 minutes and he said, “God, I need a dog handler for the winter. Can you come?” So that was the start of the change of my life because, never in a million years what I have dreamed that I would go to Alaska and to the Antarctic. So I came up for three weeks at the start of the ’86 race. I wound up in those three weeks, falling in love with the Iditarod, Alaska and Norman. And now I’ve been here 33 years later.

What was one of your most memorable Iditarod experiences?

So there are lots of memories out on the trail. I guess maybe one of my most memorable was in… Two memorable ones in ’89, but was when I was out on the Yukon River. And so I was between the two checkpoints, 40 from one, 20 from the other and flat Yukon. But I hit some kind of little berm of ice and I got tipped off my sled. I lunged for it to grab my handlebar and I just missed it, and I tried to grab a runner and it just went right out of my hand. And my dog team was gone. And I thought, “Oh my God.” I mean, all of my emergency gear, my water, everything was on the sled. And it was midnight, dark, cold, alone. And it was like, “What am I going to do?” I can’t walk fast because I can’t sweat. I was immediately thirsty. I had no water. The only thing that any female will do, I cried. And then all I could do was just start walking. I thought, “I’ve got 20 miles to walk.” There were two other mushers in front of me. One was Joe Lafave, and we had agreed that we were going to take a- snack our dogs further down the trail. So about 45 minutes later, I see a light way off in the distance. And then it’s like, “Is that somebody? Is that somebody?” And then I think, “It’s not getting any closer. It’s not getting any closer.” But then finally, and I started yelling, but it wasn’t doing any good. Finally, Joe showed up with my team. My dogs had caught up with him, they’ve been right on his heels and he had thought, “Boy, Carolyn’s doing really great. She’s like right behind me.” And then he turned around to say something to me, and no Carolyn on the back of the sled. So he tied off his dogs and then came to get me. So that was one of my most memorable experiences that year.

What does the 50th running of the Iditarod mean to you?

This is the 50th running of the race. It’s just amazing. I cannot believe that it has been 50 years, and Norman was here the first time he ran, it was in ’72. He helped out on the trail that year. And so it’s just really amazing and it’s so much fun to be here and to see old friends and old faces. It’s just really incredible.

What do you know for sure?:

What do I know in life for sure, and that is that life is an adventure. And I just keep on having adventures in the spirit of Norman because he was the epitome of living a life of adventure. And so for me that is a sure thing, and I am doing it now and I continue to do it until the last day.