Canadian customs demand passports from Alaskan dog sled racers

The 1,000 Yukon Quest dog sled race is longer and more difficult than the more famous Iditarod and now competitors face a new bureaucratic hurdle

 

For the first time in its 33-year history, dog mushers competing in a gruelling 1,000-mile dog sled race from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon, have been asked to present travel documents to Canadian border officials.
Earlier this week, Brent Sass, a 36-year-old musher from Eureka, Alaska, became the first of 22 competitors in the 2016 Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race to reach Canada, gliding into a checkpoint at Dawson City, Yukon, on Wednesday.
There, he presented his passport to a Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) official.
Asked if he had anything to declare, Sass, the defending champion, replied: “Fourteen dogs.”

Few points along any of North America’s international borders are as remote, wild or forbidding as this, and few travellers are intrepid enough to reach it by dog sled. Yet passports must now be checked.
In previous years, Canadian immigration officials were more relaxed about the Yukon Quest dog-sledders, and did little beyond pre-screening competitors. This year, like all other dog-sled enthusiasts in the city, CBSA personnel in Dawson tracked the progress of the dog teams along the trail via GPS to time their arrival at the checkpoint, said race manager Alex Olesen.
“That’s the first year they’ve actually checked us here,” said the victorious Sass. “We were warned of that, and that’s why we were told to bring our passports with us.”
CBSA officials said in a statement that the agency’s approach to the event has not changed.
“If you cross the border you need a passport, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” said Ed Hopkins, a 51-year-old resident of Forty Mile, Yukon, the fifth musher to reach Dawson. “It all changed since 9/11.”
Yet the US has traditionally taken a soft attitude toward Yukon Quest mushers. When in alternate years competitors start the race in Whitehorse, heading for a Fairbanks finish, they may or may not see a US border guard in the flyspeck hamlet of Eagle, Alaska, the first stop on the US side of the border.
By the time that mushers cross the US-Canada border and reach the famed Klondike gold-rush hub of Dawson, the event’s halfway point, great beards of frost hang from their cheeks. They are sleep-deprived, and frequently suffer hallucinations.
“They hear marching bands in the bush, and see little old men sitting on the front of their sled blowing smoke rings at them,” said John Firth, a Whitehorse-based author who has written two books on the race, which he says is longer and more difficult than the better-known Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska.
The international border complicates the job of mounting the race. Since the early 2000s, when a mad-cow scare prompted the US to tighten its border against Canadian beef imports, Yukon Quest organisers have had to seek special dispensation from the US Department of Agriculture to distribute thousands of kilograms of dogfood along the route. The process is especially fraught because mushers often prepare much of their dog food at home.

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Mushers, such as Matt Hall, pictured, are often sleep-deprived by the time they complete the race and frequently suffer hallucinations. Photograph: Marcel Vander Wier/AP

“There’s no label on blocks of meat that says, ‘these are all chicken skins,’” Olesen said. “We tell the USDA we’re doing a dog race that involves moving meat across the border, and we assure them everything the Yukon Quest moves will get consumed during the course of the event.”
Much else can go wrong. One year, Canadian immigration objected to an American musher over a drink-driving conviction; Yukon Quest organisers were still negotiating with the Canadians when the man quit the race, defeated by a 1,123-metre (3,684ft) summit on the trail.
As the first musher to reach Dawson, Sass will be eligible to claim as his reward four ounces of Dawson City placer gold if he completes the race (last year he did so in nine days, 12 hours and 49 minutes).
He would want to spend it on the Canadian side – the prize is equivalent to US$4,955, which is $6,865 in Canadian currency.