I gather that the interest in Fur Rendezvous, which happens around the same time but which I had never heard of before we moved here, is decidedly local. Last year, I wrote a bit about it, regurgitating what I read in the newspaper before briefly mentioning that we made no attempt to actually go see any of it:
At the end of February there is a big event in Anchorage called Fur Rendezvous, or “Fur Rondy”, as everyone calls it, or “Frondee”, as I thought everyone was calling it for a while. It’s a ten-day outdoor festival thing that is quite obviously the culmination of a few hundred thousand people being trapped in their houses for three months and looking for some excuse to go out and do something ridiculous. We actually didn’t get out to see much of it; it’s a bunch of crazy stuff like the Running of the Reindeer, a costume party featuring a world-class beard competition, and a softball tournament played wearing snowshoes.So eloquent. A real local perspective. I think my favorite part is all of the details.
The two events' association with one another seems reluctant but logistically wise. The last few days of Fur Rondy and the ceremonial start of the Iditarod now occupy the same weekend in the same downtown location, with schedules coordinated to encourage attendance of both. But beyond this, the events seem to do almost nothing to officially acknowledge one another, each maintaining its own promotional materials and sponsors and commemorative merchandise. (Fur Rondy even hosts its own race earlier in the week - the World Championship Sled Dog Races, a three-day sprint-style race that is entirely separate from the Iditarod.) A few weeks used to separate the two until the they were overlapped 20 years ago to draw each others' attendees; this is indeed convenient, but it also reduces the number of discrete winter events warranting a trip downtown by maybe 25%.
Last year, we skipped going downtown to see anything from either event, instead only stopping by the park near our house to see the last few mushers reach the endpoint of the Iditarod's first leg. We had decided that this was a savvy way to avoid the crowds, a feat that I now acknowledge to be unremarkable, inasmuch as we live in a state with a population about 1/10th as dense as South Dakota's and a neighborhood that is immediately adjacent to several million uninhabited acres of mountains and forest. This year, we decided that we could either sit around the house for ten days and let everything pass us by again, or we could sit around the house for nine-and-a-half days and then go down to 4th Avenue just long enough to see how crowded it was and to take a few pictures for a lazy blog post. #yolo
This happened almost two months ago, proving that this online format capable of real-time documentation still affords the option of being operated with no more urgency than if I were to just mail each of you a handwritten letter with a stack of 4x6 prints.
The original Fur Rendezvous was a legitimate rendezvous of furriers: people meeting in town to buy and sell animal pelts. It started in the 1930s, and since the REI here didn't open until 1997, I suppose that kind of thing was probably useful. As a festival-defining element, the marketplace concept seems to have been largely supplanted by the aforementioned collection of silly distractions, predominantly the sort that might feature on a Travel Channel countdown of the Top X Craziest Something-Or-Other; in addition to the items noted above, there are outhouse races, a parade of vintage snowmobiles, the "Frostbite Footrace and Costume Fun Run", and a fur bikini contest. [We did not attend any of these, a decision based fully on a lack of interest in doing so and one that I do not regret despite its implications that I might sort of have a bad attitude about the whole thing.]
But tucked into a corner of a parking lot on the edge of all of this foolishness is the modern incarnation of some actual fur trading: The Alaska State Hide, Horn & Antler Auction, presented by the Alaska Trappers Association and affording opportunity for bidders to take home a fuzzy and/or pointy part of an animal that "(was) illegally poached, killed in self-defense/accidentally, or became a threat." We observed bidding on the chunk of bear pictured above, the sale price for which eventually escalated to $2,400. This was apparently a good one, because we watched others go for under $100. (Those appeared to have been killed both accidentally and, one might speculate, ungracefully.) As I do not understand the intricacies of live-auction etiquette, I nervously limited all photography-related motions to the slow, deliberate, below-the-shoulders sort, a precaution that was probably unnecessary and almost certainly looked a bit silly but did keep me out of any unfortunate accidental-bid pickles.
I was especially drawn to the gentleman on stage watching for bids, on the left side of the picture:
I think he might have just hollowed out a lion.
Most of the folks actively looking to procure something were already wearing some variety of extravagant-looking fur-based garment or accessory, leading me to hypothesize that there are probably very few people in the world that own one such item. As with cowboy hats and Phish albums and Toyotas: you might have zero, and you might have four, but you probably don't have one.
This currently stands as the picture we would show Megan if she ever questions whether she was actually born in Alaska. I think a picture of your six-month-old self wearing that hat while attending a live auction for dead bears basically counts as a birth certificate.
And this is what the rest of Fur Rondy looked like while we were there. All of the notable events are spread throughout the week, leaving gaps to be filled with this big outdoor carnival, which appears to be the exact same one they have at the state fair in August except that this time it was like 24 degrees outside. This picture captures the approximate moment where my aforementioned too-cool-for-schoolness about the whole thing overlapped with my working professional knowledge of steel's proclivity for brittle failure when exposed to low temperatures and I decided it best to not even cross the street.
Thus concludes this year's installment of "Indifferent Dispatches from Fur Rondy". Please join us next year, for which I will probably provide a cursory overview of another 1-3% of this largely beloved celebration that I do not understand because I am too stubborn to give it a fair chance.
***
Six days later we were back in the same place for the Iditarod festivities:
"Festivities" because a) this isn't really the start of it - the "restart" happens the next day in Willow, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Anchorage, at which point the stopwatches are actually clicked for the 987 mile trek to Nome, and b) the atmosphere is indeed quite festive. This first in-town leg is essentially the equivalent of an Olympic opening ceremonies, but about five hours shorter and with no creepy giant baby heads or whatever.
If I had been asked two years ago how old this race is, my likely answer would have been incorrect by about half a century. The first Iditarod was in 1973. My assumption that they have been doing it for like 100 years was probably skewed by fun old-timey photos and a well-branded Official Race Tagline, plus a general perception that dog sledding is a historically notable thing in this part of the world. It is; it just happens that the competitive version's preeminent race is a relatively modern one that features many competitors that are older than the race itself, including at least one guy that participated in the second one 40 years ago.
This probably makes it not so much the Rose Bowl or the World Series of its sport, as I had originally surmised, but more like the Super Bowl (b. 1967): a signature, ostentatious, bucket-listable event for which the rich history of the sport that it embodies obscures the fact that there are James Bond movies older than the event itself.
With little competition, this was the biggest and most unified gathering of people that I have witnessed here. Thousands of spectators line the path for an afternoon of well-wishing and picture-taking and WOOOOing. There are homemade signs to show support for one's favorite musher, which one might choose with the help of the extensive musher biographies provided on the official race website. There is live radio coverage of race progress, interspersed with advertisements for race-inspired sale events at furniture stores and car dealerships, many featuring past race winners as pitchmen. It is a big deal.
And wading through a crowd this huge, here, was remarkably strange. I found it to be the most notable thing about the afternoon. I am not an accomplished estimator of large numbers of things, but surely we are talking about tens of thousands of people wandering around within a few blocks of one another. While this is probably the same number of people with which I spent three years making daily inadvertent physical contact during rush hour in the Farragut North Metro station, I could probably name only three or four places where I have seen more than a few thousand Alaskans in one place during the last two years - Alyeska, the state fair, and maybe an Aces game, with acknowledgments that we have not attended a Great Alaska Sportsman Show nor a Mayor's Marathon. (Note that there are many summer events that draw more than a few thousand people, but I am attempting to filter out the tourist-heavy ones.) People here seem to value their separation from other humans, and find it easily.
I suppose this is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of deal wherein one could question whether Alaska draws a disproportionate share of people content to usher a dogsled 1000 miles by themselves or to float down a river for a week with two other guys and a bucket of ammunition, or whether the (relative) dearth of neighbors in a crazy-huge neighborhood encourages these sorts of things.
Regardless, I did not expect "Stand uncomfortably close to strangers for an opportunity to look at a thing" to be the incentive that would draw the single largest crowd I have seen in two years (I would have guessed "Somebody found gold over there" or "Free boat"). Most here would not seem to regard this kind of thing as the makings of a fun Saturday. 30,000 locals do not gather here for arts fairs or baseball games or any sort of jazz in-a-sculpture-garden nonsense. This is an outlier.
As for the actual dog sledding, the pace is a barely-controlled jog, covering eleven miles over paved streets and an airstrip and at least one pedestrian bridge. Each team tows an extra sled with at least two extra people, added cargo that affords some donor-types ("Iditariders", they call them) a fun way to spend an afternoon but which primarily serves as a handy way to slow the dogs down while they are around so many people.
A young fan with an objectively adorable homemade sign, the top left corner of which appears to have been autographed. Context clues and semi-informed Googling suggest that it is the signature of 1984 race winner Dean Osmar, although it could also be celebrity physician Dean Ornish, or maybe Milwaukee sports talk radio personality Drew Olson. Regardless: probably a good idea to get home and double check the valuable papers insurance policy.
The downtown start requires a partial closure of 4th Avenue, an often-used but expendable-for-an-afternoon road lined with a lot of especially touristy places (mostly the sorts of gift shops where one can find "I Can See Russia From My House" refrigerator magnets and candy that is meant to resemble animal droppings). The traffic reroute is accompanied by the ironic task of trucking in thousands of cubic feet of snow - necessary for proper use of a sled, it turns out - and dumping it onto the street from which the same trucks have spent months removing it.
The course covers several blocks on 4th before turning south onto a secondary street and proceeding to cross 5th and 6th, two heavily-trafficked one-way roads comprising the primary east/west artery of the area. These stay open to traffic, but are blocked briefly to let each team cross. This means that a similar snow path is laid across them as well, but every time a group of cars and buses cross the path, the snow gets mashed and dispersed in ways that I gather to be non-optimal for sled runners. The chosen solution is that every time a musher is about to cross - every two minutes, for over two hours - a team of volunteers runs out to stop traffic and frantically shovel and rake a pile of dirty snow into something sled-passable. It is quite silly.
The Anchorage-to-Nome route of the race is not arbitrary. It is inspired by the 1925 emergency run between the same two towns, undertaken to deliver a diphtheria antitoxin serum and diffuse the threat of an outbreak. Railroads were available from Anchorage to Nenana (the first 300 miles or so), but the only options for the Nenana to Nome leg, in -50°F temperatures, were apparently a) a vintage (in 1925!), dismantled-for-winter, open-cockpit biplane, known to be unreliable in cold temperatures and manned by Just Some Guy because the two capable pilots happened to be back in the Lower 48 because their plane was dismantled for the winter, or b) dog sled relay, so they picked the sled. This was probably covered in all necessary animated detail in the 1995 movie Balto (never saw it), named for the dog that led the team that ran the last 53 miles of the route and made the delivery to Nome.
As a nod to all of that, children's vaccination has become a cause for which the race aims to raise awareness, primarily via bibs on some of the actual dogs and this Izzy The Immunization Dog mascot, which I assume to be a unlicensed offshoot of and/or apprentice to Izzy The Immunization Bear, which appears to be a California-based entity that posts on his blog even less frequently than I do.
The point is: this guy was there, dressed in a dog costume, which - and this is more notable than it should be - did not appear to be made of actual dog fur.
Megan does not understand what all of the fuss is about.
As is the case for most things that draw a horde of observers, a significant chunk of the entertainment comes from just observing the observers. Things I learned:
- People with zany hair/beard combos love a good ceremonial dog sled race start
- In certain specific surroundings, examples of which I have difficulty imagining beyond those covered in this post, it is considered acceptable behavior to place a dead animal on your head and call it a hat despite no discernible evidence of haberdashery beyond, like, taking the bones out
- They make fur boots in a women's size 28
And let's go ahead and wrap this up with at least one picture of Megan where her expression reads as something other than "Please take me back inside, you maniacs."
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