Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.
It’s 3:30 a.m. and a headlamp flickers like a firefly in the distance, growing in size. The voice of a volunteer cries out: “A team is coming!”
I can hear a chorus of dogs panting, of harness lines jangling. Then, from out of the darkness, a musher and team of twelve dogs emerge like ghostly figures. The musher steps on his sled’s drag mat, slowing the team, and stomps a “snow hook,” a fish-hook-like anchor that acts like a car brake, into the snow.
“Welcome to Quiet Lake!” a race official says, jotting down the team’s time of arrival into the remote checkpoint in southern Yukon.
I’m here in early February, bundled in a parka, snow pants and beaver-fur mitts, working as a race reporter for the Yukon Quest, an annual sled-dog race that has been running for 40 years. The race, a significant cultural event in the North, was created in 1984 to celebrate the history of sled dogs as a means of transportation in the Yukon and Alaska.
It’s so cold at Quiet Lake that you can hear it. As the musher tosses chunks of bacon to his dogs, the snow doesn’t crunch — it squeaks under the weight of his bulbous Arctic military boots, which are insulated with felt and thick rubber. Originally designed to be worn by American soldiers in the extreme cold, the boots are ubiquitous amongst mushers for their ability to keep your feet warm, even if you plunge into water.
It’s -40 C, the kind of cold that can damage exposed skin in a matter of minutes. Even the dogs — Alaskan huskies, a mix of husky and hound, bred to pull — are wearing down-filled jackets.
The deep, biting cold has come as something of a relief to mushers, however. Only a week ago, temperatures in southern Yukon hovered above 0 C. Normal temperatures in January in Whitehorse are a high of -14 C and a low of -22 C.
Anne Tayler, board president of the Yukon Quest, worried it would be a repeat of last year when a week of warm weather — 5 to 10 C — forced organizers to reroute the race in two places. The decision came as meltwater led to unsafe conditions, including nearly two kilometres of open water around McCabe Creek on the Yukon River. Mushers are no strangers to navigating their teams through extreme conditions like glare ice, blizzards, whiteouts and overflow (water that pools up over ice that’s been pushed down by the weight of snow), Tayler says, but when it comes to open water, “it’s just not an option.” In 2024, officials shortened the race by 241 kilometres.
For four decades, the historic Quest followed a 1,600-kilometre trail on the frozen Yukon River, a “deep, fast river,” Tayler says, that flows like a vein between Whitehorse, Yukon, and Fairbanks, Alaska. The cross-border race was considered one of the most gruelling sled dog races in the world for its technicality and the long distances between the checkpoints where mushers can rest and resupply. At its peak in the mid-2000s, the Quest once attracted a roster of 30 mushers and offered a prize of up to $35,000 to the winner. But a 1,600-kilometre race hasn’t happened since 2020. Disagreements between the Canadian and American organizers over mandatory rest times for dogs (the Canadians were in favour of increasing rest times) caused a fissure that resulted in both countries organizing separate, shorter races.
And now climate change is wreaking havoc, forcing long-distance sled dog races to “pivot,” Tayler says. In recent years, sudden warming events — dramatic swings in temperature in a matter of hours or days — are becoming far more frequent, creating major risks and uncertainty for mushers in the Yukon and across North America.
Last year, organizers made the tough call to abandon the historic route on the Yukon River. They began working with First Nations communities in southern Yukon, including Teslin Tlingit Council and the Ross River Dena Council, to map out a new 720-kilometre trail through their traditional territories that would avoid rivers — and the risk of open water — altogether. The longterm goal, Tayler says, is to find an overland route from Teslin to Dawson City that limits water crossings to small river systems only.
In addition to climate-related challenges, other obstacles, including the rising costs of feeding dozens of dogs, are causing many mushers to drop out altogether. Sixteen teams signed up for the race this year, nearly 50 per cent fewer than in previous decades. But the mushers who’ve come are here for the love of the dogs and the thrill of travelling for four to five days through the Yukon wilderness in the winter. And they’re here despite the challenges — and the uncertain future — they’re up against.
Ideal weather for a musher is very different than ideal weather for a dog, but “the dog is what counts,” Sebastian Schnuelle, a retired musher based in Whitehorse, says. Schnuelle won the Yukon Quest in 2009 and has placed second in the Iditarod, an annual 1,600-kilometre race that travels between Anchorage and Nome, Alaska.
“Physiologically, dogs do best at -20 C,” Schnuelle says. “That’s when they don’t overheat and they’re the happiest. It’s their optimum operating temperature.”
Temperature dictates many things in a musher’s world, including what kind of food they give their dogs, who get hydrating foods like fish on warm days and high-fat foods, like pork belly and lamb on cold days. It also determines trail conditions, which in turn helps them decide which type of interchangeable plastic runners they choose for their sleds. (Traditionally, sled runners were made of wood, but plastic versions were introduced in the 1980s.)
Mushers have learned to expect all forms of weather-related risks, Schnuelle says, especially over the course of long-distance races.
“Variable weather has always been a factor,” he says.
Schnuelle recalls hunkering down with his dogs to wait out monstrous storms, travelling through “ungodly overflow” at -55 C, or navigating “jumble ice” — rough ice that forms on the surface of a river due to warming temperatures and the force of the water flowing beneath.
Warming events have been occurring in the Yukon since the Quest’s inception in 1984, Schnuelle says. No one can forget the tragic loss of Bruce Johnson, a Yukon musher who was travelling with his team across Atlin Lake on Nov. 19, 1993, when they hit a weak spot on the ice and plunged to their deaths. It had been a late start to winter that year. Despite the ice being fifteen centimetres thick in most places on the lake, there were patches measuring four centimetres. The hole found by the recovery team measured 60 metres long.
“These super-warm states have always been there, but I do think that the extremes are getting more frequent and harder,” Schnuelle says. “It’s no longer the odd -2 C day, it warms up all of a sudden and you’re sitting at 8 C.”
In 2021, Schnuelle and three others were creating a trail near McCabe Creek on the Yukon River on snowmobiles for an upcoming sled dog race, when one of the machines fell through the ice. The driver survived, though the sled did not. For Schnuelle, it was a wake-up call as to the severity of change.
“I used to be one of those old rough and tough mushers, ‘Oh, I’m not taking an inReach, I can get my own ass out of the bush,’ ” he laughs, referring to the small satellite communication devices increasingly popular in the backcountry. “But heck yeah, I’m carrying one now. The chances are higher. The chances are definitely getting higher.”
Nathaniel Hamlyn grew up being pulled by his family’s Siberian huskies on the ice road in Yellowknife, NWT. But it wasn’t until he heard the stories of adventure from a Yellowknife-based musher named Marcel Marin, who raced in the Quest in 2005, that Hamlyn became “hooked” on sled dog racing.
In 2014, Hamlyn moved to Whitehorse to study environmental sciences at Yukon University and never left. He set up a small dog kennel (a word used by mushers to describe a team of dogs) in the Grizzly Valley, north of Whitehorse, and began training for long-distance races. In 2018, he finished his first 1600-kilometre Quest.
The following year, Hamlyn signed up again. But that winter was unseasonably warm and the ice on the Yukon River opened up as he was almost in Fairbanks.
“There were moments when I was running on an island of ice with water flowing on either side of me,” Hamlyn says. After he crossed, the race officials shut down that section of the trail, rerouting mushers.
Today, Hamlyn lives in Mendenhall Landing, west of Whitehorse, with his partner, Louve Tweddell, also a musher. Their combined kennels total 30 dogs, and he trained his team for a 280-kilometre race in the Yukon Quest this year.
Hamlyn has noticed changes on the Yukon landscape in the last decade. He says it’s not so much warming as it is about variability that’s disruptive, particularly an increasing frequency of freeze-and-thaw cycles.
“They come out of nowhere, which makes it hard to be out on the land and enjoying the snow,” Hamlyn says.
When the snow rapidly melts, ice crystals become compacted, “almost like concrete and really hard on the dogs’ joints and paws,” Hamlyn explains. In a sudden melting event, mushers often need to choose between putting cloth booties on dogs’ feet to protect them from abrasion, and making sure they don’t overheat.
Mushers rely on temperature stability for the best conditions to train and race.
“You need the layering, the many snow events to build up, and if it stays cold, you can build up that base — and the snow has give, which is better for the dogs’ joints,” Hamlyn says.
But regular snowfalls have become unreliable in Whitehorse, challenging mushers’ ability to even train their dogs for races.
Four years ago, Michael Burtnick and his partner Abby relocated their kennel from Teulon, a small town north of Winnipeg, Man., to Mendenhall Landing. They have 26 working dogs and run a tourism company, offering guided sled dog adventures on the land around their property. Burtnick’s passion, however, lies in racing. He and his team travelled on the historic Yukon Quest trail in 2023, competing in the 400-kilometre race. This year, they trained for the 720-kilometre race on the Quest’s new overland route from Teslin to Ross River and back.
“We’re going out training when it’s -40 C and then a week later we’re dealing with rain — that’s been new to us over the past five years,” Burtnick says, noting they began dealing with similar challenges in Manitoba, too. “It’s definitely not an isolated trend [in the Yukon]. You never know what you’re going to get, season to season.”
That unpredictability means mushers need to be constantly paying attention while travelling on the land, especially around water crossings, he says.
Benoit Turcotte, a senior researcher and hydrologist at Yukon University, encourages people travelling on the land to check for open water by looking at satellite imagery of lakes and rivers weeks before they depart.
“In a normal Yukon winter you’d take your dog, or snow machine or whatever mode of travel and cross a wetland or pond, and you’d have no problem,” Turcotte says.
But in a year like this one — where Whitehorse received heavy snowfall in mid-October, before the ground, or waterways could freeze solid — he says he’d steer clear of wetlands. Early snow, Turcotte says, insulates the ground, along with ponds and wetlands, preventing the formation of thick ice cover that’s safe enough for travel.
When Burtnick trains his team for races, some of their trails include crossing ice that has formed over running water. He admits close observation can only go so far, however.
“Even if it’s cold on the surface, underneath the ice could be melting and thinning. There’s no visual indication on top. We find the ice that was good last week, is not good this week. We have to be especially careful.”
In 2024, a musher and their team fell through the ice at Taye Lake, which drains into the Mendenhall River. They survived, but had to be treated for severe frostbite.
This winter, Burtnick began wearing a Mustang survival suit, a one-piece snow suit with built-in flotation, when he crosses larger bodies of water. It was “a gift” he says, from a concerned family member. “When you let that sink in for a bit, it makes you question what’s going on around us,” Burtnick says. “Because it wasn’t like this 10 years ago.”
Much has changed over the last decade in mushing communities in the Yukon and across North America, too. Even the dogs, themselves, have changed.
Fast disappearing from the scene are stocky, thick-coated huskies, as mushers opt to mix short-haired hounds and pointers that can better handle increasingly warm days into their kennel bloodlines.
“You can dress a dog up,” Hamlyn quips, “But you can’t dress a dog down.”
Another trend that’s impacting mushers in the Yukon, in part due to climate change and the increasing costs of food and gas, is that sled dog kennels’ are shrinking in size. Kennels of 50, 60 dogs are becoming a “thing of the past.”
Mushers are downsizing rapidly and it’s not a trend unique to the Yukon, Burtnick says.
Hamlyn agrees. He estimates it costs roughly $12,000 to feed his 13 dogs year round. One of his females is currently pregnant, but after raising her litter, he won’t breed again, he says. In 10 years, Hamlyn expects to phase out of the competitive racing game altogether.
As for the Yukon Quest, it’s not likely the historic 1,600-kilometre race that followed the Yukon River will ever make a comeback, Schnuelle says. Too much has drastically changed with weather being only one factor of many. People who once lived along the historic route have moved to larger centres. Fewer locals know how to read the intricacies of the land in localized places — and safely put in trails — than in decades past.
Even the world’s most famous race, the Iditarod, which takes place every March, is grappling with climate change. Over the past decade, mushers have faced increasing frequency of low-snowpack years and above-average temperatures. On Feb. 17, officials changed the start location from Willow to Fairbanks, Alaska, as a result of absolutely no snow — the ground is totally bare following an early melt — over 65 kilometres of trail between Rohn and Nikolai.
Iditarod officials called that section of trail impassable probably hoping to avoid a repeat of 2014, when mushers who passed that section under similar circumstances paid the price in broken sleds, and worse, broken bones. Four-time Quest winner Hans Gatt collided with a tree and endured a nasty wound to the head.
This is the third time in a decade that race officials have changed the start location due to no snow.
“I am not too certain anymore if we will be able to talk about these long-distance races in 15 years,” Schnuelle says. “Things have changed drastically and the races need to adapt.”
In February, both Hamlyn and Burtnick ran teams on the inaugural trail of the new Yukon Quest. Despite criticisms of the new trail being “less technical” than the historic one, rolling hills coupled with extreme cold created challenging conditions for teams.
Hamlyn sweated as he helped his team up and over the steep hills, running alongside the sled. At -40 C, the down insulating material in his parka froze. Meanwhile, Burtnick suffered frostbite to his nose and hands.
“Your care comes second to the dogs, so you make sure those dogs are fed before you start taking care of your own hands,” he says.
They both had mixed sentiments about the new trail: a sense of loss for the historic route along the Yukon River, and a gain because there’s still a race to train for, Hamlyn says.
Burtnick described the experience of travelling through the mountainous sections of the new trail, particularly between Quiet Lake and Ross River, as beautiful and humbling.
And for this new generation of mushers, despite the uncertain future of their sport, that’s what it’s all about.
“I’m still out there with my dogs,” Burtnick says. “I’m still mushing and that’s the spirit of the North.”
Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter. This story is a collaboration between The Narwhal...
Continue reading
As historic sled dog races face extreme freeze-thaw cycles that put mushers and their dogs...
As tariff talks increasingly focus on Canada’s giant potash supply and its role in U.S....
The 50,000-square-kilometre Seal River watershed in Manitoba is more than 99 per cent intact. Government...
