Dan Seavey, who helped organize the first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and whose son and grandson have each won the famous Alaska race multiple times, has died. He was 87.
The Minnesota native, who competed in the first two Iditarod races in 1973 and 1974, was out helping tend to his dogs shortly before he died last Thursday, his son Mitch Seavey said. Dan Seavey had been adamant in his later years about remaining at the south-central Alaska home in Seward he had moved his family to decades earlier, the younger Seavey said.
“It’s hard, and everybody will miss him. But he lived a great life and passed away in his own fashion,” Mitch Seavey said.
The Iditarod race organization called Dan Seavey a “true pioneer and cherished figure” in the race’s 53-year history and said he was instrumental in the establishment of the Iditarod Trail as a National Historic Trail in 1978. He also wrote a book, “The First Great Race,” which his son said drew on notes Seavey recorded during the first edition of the Iditarod.
Dan Seavey in total ran the Iditarod five times. His last, in 2012, was aimed at celebrating and drawing attention to the trail’s history.
That year featured three generations of Seaveys, with Mitch’s son Dallas winning the first of his record-breaking six titles. Mitch, a three-time Iditarod champ, that year finished seventh.
Dan Seavey moved with his family to Alaska in 1963 to teach in Seward, a community about 125 miles (201 kilometers) south of Anchorage. In an interview for Project Jukebox, a University of Alaska Fairbanks oral history project, he recalled being inspired as a kid by a radio program centered on a character who was with a Canadian mounted police force and his trusty sled dog, Yukon King, who took on bad guys during the Gold Rush era.
Seavey said finding time to train to race was difficult.
“Having to make a living, it kind of interfered with my dog mushing,” Seavey, a longtime history teacher, said. He trained on nights and weekends, and around the first two years of the Iditarod he petitioned the school board for time off, he said.
Seavey didn’t have competitive aspirations past those first two Iditarod races, his son said, but he continued to mush recreationally. Seavey at one point thought about letting Mitch have his dogs but couldn’t bear the thought of not having dogs around, Mitch Seavey said.
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Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska.
