Susan Butcher, RIP
Iditarod champion, animal lover, professional woman, wife, mother and all-round achiever Susan Butcher died this weekend, aged 51, after a well-fought battle with leukemia.
Her story was the making of outdoor adventure novels: leaving behind an upper middle-class upbringing in Cambridge, Mass., to live in Alaska in a shack without electricity or running water so she could train champions… In an interview before her final Iditarod in 1994, she talked about her dedication to dogs: “When I was in the first grade, I wrote an essay that said ‘I hate cities.’ Do you know why I hate cities? Because my dog hates cities.”The second woman to win the Iditarod dogsled race, Butcher was a four-time Iditarod champion. In 1979, she became one of the first two people to take a dog team to the summit of Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America, at 20,300 feet.When she was 20, she and a friend took three huskies to the Wrangell Mountains in Alaska’s interior. “We didn’t see anyone for six months,” she said. “The place was complete wilderness. We saw wildlife around every bend. It was a great place to mush. I depended on those dogs for everything. They saved my life constantly. They were my whole life.”
“I do not know the word ‘quit.’ Either I never did it, or I have abolished it.” - Susan Butcher
