Far North Science

The SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge attracts
engineering students with the goal of designing
a snowmobile with lower environmental impact.
Credit: National Park Service

Thousands of Alaskans drive snowmachines for transportation, sport and pure fun. Despite any northern mythology and nostalgia about sled dogs, snowmobiles long ago replaced mushing as the most practical method for hauling gear and people through the Bush in winter. Anywhere in the Cryosphere, the snow vehicles tow cargo, connect villages. They’re used by Natives on winter subsistence hunts. They supply research camps across Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska’s North Slope.

Case in point: When the seven-man BarrenLands Traverse leaves March 15 on a 1,800-mile expedition between Fairbanks and Baker Lake in the Canadian Arctic, they will drive snowmachines and tow sleds.

But snowmachines can be messy polluters that generate noxious fumes and pump carbon into the atmosphere. They’re fingernail-across-the-blackboard noisy– the nasal whine of snowmobile carries in the frigid night air like some monstrous mosquito under load.

No one, not even avid snowmobilers, enjoy the racket.

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It’s 1978. Two windburned mushers paused on the Iditarod Trail just outside Nome, their beards crusted with ice, their bodies aching from 1,000 miles of trail. Both had reputations as tough mushers, ruthlessly competitive men capable of seizing any advantage. As they squinted through the predawn darkness, mutual distrust hung between them as thick as the blowing snow.

One was Rick Swenson, who would go on to win the race five times, still unmatched to this day. The other was wily Dick Mackey, one of the race’s founding fathers.

As he urged his dogs forward, Swenson shouted back at Mackey: “We’ve got first and second sewn up. Just stay right where you are!”

Mackey thought to himself: “Like hell.”

Another Mackey has made history. In a feat most considered impossible to achieve and foolhardy to try, Lance Mackey just drove a team of dogs to the championship of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race only 12 days after the same animals won the Yukon Quest.

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