Martha Dobson, Finalist, Target® Iditarod 2011 Teacher on the Trail™, North Carolina
Dogs and mushers run the Iditarod Trail, but it’s the one thousand and more volunteers who run the race to make it happen for them. There are the high visibility volunteers like the vets, the dog handlers, and the pilots, but a huge group of people mans the phone room, the computer room, communications, food drop, and more. Ann Dimond of Philadelphia is one of those volunteers.
Now a retired teacher, Ann first volunteered in 2008 during a sabbatical from her school. Ann had long used Iditarod in her classroom, calling Iditarod headquarters each day to get the race updates on the phone since this was before the time of Internet. Ann says the race is rich material for teaching. “The more I learned, the more I wanted to be part of it,” Ann says.
During her first stint of volunteerism, Ann worked almost everywhere—restart, comms (communications), phone room, computer room, and working with the dogs that were flown back to Anchorage. In Nome she worked at the information desk and answered the phone. Most shifts were 4 hours long, and her favorite volunteer job was working with the dropped dogs that were flown back to Anchorage. These dogs landed in Cessna-size airplanes on Lake Hood behind the Millennium Hotel and stayed just out the hotel’s back door.
One clear, starry, crackling night, lit by a full moon, the dogs started to sing, heads thrown back like a Jon Van Zyle illustration. Ann worked with a dog that was missing his team and sat on the fence near him. The dog came to her and rested his head on her knee while Ann calmed him. She did such a good job that the dog didn’t want to move so Ann could leave!
In 2010, Ann is volunteering in Anchorage and Nome again, staying about 25 days. She’ll have new experiences to add to her first-time collection—sharing the waiting time with the families of mushers near the back of the pack in Nome, food and recipe swaps with other volunteers, the approachability and availability of the dogs and mushers, emotional mushers hugging and thanking each dog at the finish, dogs who look ready to keep going at the finish.
“Most volunteers are from Outside,” Ann reports. (“Outside” is the Alaskan word for places not in Alaska.) She remembers a volunteer from Australia and others from all sorts of places in the lower 48, a term which refers to the rest of the United States, not including Hawaii. (Look at a map to see Alaska’s location in relation to the rest of the USA.) The race is the common denominator for volunteers, and Ann says this group becomes like family, picking up where their relationships paused two years ago.
What makes Ann volunteer? “The shared interests and shared desire to keep it going—the wilderness survival, the camaraderie—the race couldn’t make it without volunteers, and I want to help in some small way to keep it going.”
