A sled dog in the team of North Pole musher Jeff Holt died between the checkpoints of Rainy Pass and Rohn in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, according to race officials.

Holt is a 48-year-old former teacher who entered The Last Great Race not for the competition but for the adventure. He was about the 50th of the 67 teams on the trail when 6-year-old Victor went down and died.

The cause of death is unknown. A necropsy is being performed.

It is the first dog death in the 2009 Iditarod, which usually sees one or two dogs die unexpectedly.

Holt and his wife, Gaynel, runs North Dogs & Dreams Kennel, which they started when one of their children brought home a bunch of puppies no one else wanted. The kennel, according to the Holts, is largely a collection of family pets they started raising to teach their seven children responsibility.

This is Holt's third Iditarod. He finished 59th in 2005 and scratched in 2007. He is being allowed to continue the 2009 race while an investigation into the circumstances of the dog's death is conducted.

Update 3/10/09:  Down in the Happy River Gorge 20 miles south of here, a rescue was being organized for a rookie musher reported to be stuck with a broken sled on the notorious "steps" that lead the Iditarod Trail over a cliff to a frozen river.

  (Photo courtesy of Mark Lester/Anchorage Daily News)  Nancy Yoshida, 58, has been stalled on the middle tier of the sharp switchbacks between big trees that cling to the gorge walls. Mushers arriving here reported she can't make it all the way down because she has lost both of the runners on her sled. Her dogs are reportedly tangled in trees or tied off there while she awaits help.

Other mushers added that her sled and team are also blocking the narrow trail, causing all sorts of wrecks behind. The North Dakota musher is not injured, they said. But checkpoint volunteers here asked race judge John Anderson to try to get help sent from the Finger Lake checkpoint to clear the roadblock.   Finger Lake is about 11 miles from the Steps.

The plan is for someone from Finger Lake to haul a replacement sled to Yoshida with a snowmobile. A sled became available in Finger after Anchorage musher Bob Hickel decided to quit there. He became the first musher to scratch from the 1,000-mile Iditarod this year.

  (Photo courtesy of Phil Morgan/Iditarod Air Force)  Nancy Yoshida's dog Nigel was found after being missing for two days Friday March 13, 2009 and reunited with the musher and the rest of the team.

First word of Yoshida's problems arrived at this checkpoint with musher Trent Herbst.  The Idaho dog driver told a checkpoint volunteer he had waited for Yoshida at the bottom of the steps to make sure she made it down OK. When she wasn't there in an hour, Herbst decided to push on for the checkpoint to report a problem. He knew other mushers were close behind and Yoshida was in no real danger.

By the time Colorado rookie Kurt Reich arrived, however, checkpoint officials were getting a little nervous. A volunteer asked him for an update on Yoshida.

"We were waiting for you to arrive," she said. "We didn't know if people were helping her fix her sled or what."

"Somebody was supposed to (meet her) down at the river," Reich said. "But (the musher) didn't exit. She's messing up a lot of stuff right now."

It was unclear what happened to Reich on his way down the steps. But from his stone-faced expression it didn't look like the 47-year-old had a very good run from Finger Lake to Perrins Rainy Pass Lodge here at Puntilla Lake.

If a team blocks the trail at the Happy, there is almost no room for other teams to get around. Getting to the bottom becomes a nightmare. Reich appeared to have endured that nightmare early this morning.

Update 3/16/09:  Earlier today (at approximately 2pm Alaska Time) Iditarod Race officials deployed an Iditarod Air Force (IAF) aircraft to check on the whereabouts of Iditarod Rookies Lou Packer (bib #43), Kim Darst (bib #52) and Blake Matray (bib #9).  All 3 mushers were overdue on their run to Shageluk.   Packer was located approximately 22 miles past Iditarod.  He signaled that he was in distress.  The (IAF) pilot landed and found that 2 of Packer's 15 dogs were deceased.  A plane load of dogs were immediately flown out and a second flight is underway to airlift Packer and the remainder of the team.

A group of local residents from Shageluk are on the trail to assess and assist Darst and Matray.

A necropsy will be conducted by a board certified pathologist to make every attempt to determine the cause of death of the two dogs.

Update 3/17/09:  With the temperature near 45 degrees below and two dogs already dead from the cold, 55-year-old Lou Packer huddled all alone beside a meager fire in one of the most remote areas left in North America and wondered if he would be next.

Already he had spent one night zipped in the bag on his dog sled wrapped in a sleeping bag listening to the winds howl across an exposed ridge on one of the rolling hills in the Innoko River country. On waking that morning, he knew he had to find better shelter for himself and his dogs or all would perish.

So Packer went to the front of his team to try to lead them through the storm to safety. It was a staggeringly difficult task.  The wind was blowing so hard, Packer could barely stand up. And blowing snow had buried the Iditarod Trail, leaving nothing to follow across the vast emptiness except an occasional piece of wood stuck in the ground with a piece of surveyor's tape tied to the top.

Sometimes, Packer said, he would stand for minutes peering into the brutal wind before he would spot one of these markers and start walking the dogs toward it.  "Then,'' he said, "if you went off the trail, you'd fall in up to your chest.  "It was a very, very bad situation.''

Packer put coats on his dogs, got them in the lee of the sled and some bushes as best he could, then he emptied out his sled bag, crawled in, got into his sleeping bag and zipped everything shut. He was in pure survival mode.  "All night the sled was just like rocking,'' he said.

But in the morning, at least he could see. The trail was gone, lost beneath the new-blown snow, and the wind was still blowing, but with the sunshine coming from the east Packer could now see trail markers heading off to the west. He went to the front of the team and started walking them toward the village of Shageluk, marker by marker.

It did not go well. The team would go a few yards. Some dogs would get tangled. Packer would go back to untangle them. They'd go a few more yards. The same thing would happen.  "The dogs were pretty well freaked out at this point,'' Packer said, and some didn't look good. Packer decided to turn them around and try to retreat to the woods he had passed through the day before. He thought it would be easier.

"I had already broken trail behind me,'' he said, "but that trail was all gone. The wind was (so strong it) was picking up pieces of ice and throwing them.''

Packer assessed distances, recalculated and decided he and the dogs had a better chance of making the woods ahead than the woods behind, so he turned the team around again. That's when he noticed one of his dogs -- Grasshopper -- really struggling. He unhooked the dog from the gangline and put it in the sled and started forward again.  "The sled just kept falling over and he looked really bad, and then he died,'' Packer said. "I sat there and held him. Horrible.''

There was, however, nothing to do but keep going or everyone was going to die. Packer pressed on. Then Dizzy started to falter.  "I felt his shoulder for hydration, and ice crystals in the skin is what I felt. I think those two guys probably froze to death in the high winds,'' Packer said. "I didn't think it possible.  "Then Dizzy, he died. It was horrible.''

Both of the dogs had been wearing coats to protect them, and one of the dogs was a thick-coated husky of old, not one of the thin-coated animals that have become common as mushers contend with warm winters. Necropsies conducted by veterinary pathologists have found no obvious causes for the deaths, but hypothermia has not been ruled out.

With Grasshopper and Dizzy dead and packed aboard the sled, Packer feared for losing the whole team and his own life as well. The father of three children age 10 and under, he knew he and the dogs had to get out of the wind.

"I held it all together,'' he said. "I had to, you start losing your cool, you're going to die. We got in the lee of this little hill where the wind was probably blowing 15 or so,'' he said. "It wasn't the 30 or 40 up there on top.''

Thankful for a sharp ax, something Iditarod rules require all mushers to carry in the sled, Packer cut down some trees, used some of the precious fuel that remained for his dog-food cooker to start a big fire, and began melting water to feed the dogs. They had to eat to survive, and if the dogs weren't cared for, his predicament would only grow.

"I was in big trouble at that point,'' Packer said. "I was worried I was going to freeze to death. I really was, but I was doing OK.''

The dogs had been fed twice, he said. He had his sleeping bag, his sled and some heat packs to put inside the sleeping bag. They would be OK, he thought, even at a bone-numbing 50 degrees below. But he decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to start trying to signal for help anyway. So he began trying to block the transmission from his GPS transmitter.

By then, Ellen was starting to get seriously concerned, and demanding the Iditarod check on her husband. Iditarod officials were also starting to have their own worries not only for Packer but for two other rookies behind him at the very end of the Iditarod rope -- Kim Darst from New Jersey and Blake Matray from Two Rivers.

Volunteers from the village of Shageluk were asked to head back down the trail on snowmachines to look for them, and the all-volunteer Iditarod Air Force put a couple planes aloft. One of its pilots spotted Packer.  Packer was surprised to see the aircraft circle and then land atop a dome nearby.

The two struggled toward each other until the pilot could help Packer maneuver his team back to the airplane.  "He took most of the team (out),'' Packer said. The musher waited with the rest, thinking he might still have to spend another night out. But just before dark, the plane was back to rescue Packer and the rest of the dogs. The snowmachines came through about the same time. Packer gave them his sleeping bag to take to Darst.  "She was in tough shape, too,'' Packer said.

The snowmachiners from Shageluk, fortunately, reached her and Matray in time to grab a hypothermic dog and get it back to the plane before the pilot took off, Packer said. That dog is expected to be fine.

So is Packer. His hands are beaten up, though not really frostbitten, and he thinks he might have frostnipped a cornea. He is now back in the warmth of civilization, even if it was the limited civilization of this village, trying to sort out what happened and grieving. There was pain in his voice when he talked about Dizzy and Grasshopper, and how he felt like he'd let the rest of the team down.

"Numb, just numb'' was how he described his feelings. "I feel like I should be out on the trail. I kind of feel like I failed my dogs. (This was) not how I expected my Iditarod to end.''

The same could be said for Darst and Matray. With the help of the volunteers from Shageluk, they reached the rugged village on the Innoko River and quit the race -- disappointed to be out, but happy to be alive.

  (Photo courtesy of Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News)  His bandaged fingers a symbol of his ordeal, Lou Packer tells his story.

Update 3/20/09:  A 5-year-old male named Maynard in the team of Warren Palfrey (Yellowknife NWT, Canada) died on the trail between Safety and Nome late last evening.  The incident occurred about an hour before Palfrey's arrival.  A necropsy will be conducted by a board certified pathologist to make every attempt to determine the cause of death.

      (Photo's courtesy of the Anchorage Daily News)  Also an 8-year-old dog in the team of Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race musher Rick Larson died, bringing to five the number of dogs dead so far in this year's race.

Not since 1997 has the Iditarod witnessed so many deaths. All along the trail, veterinarians who worked checkpoints and examined the dogs on a regular basis are scratching their heads trying to figure out what they might have done to prevent it.

A possible explanation is available for the death of only two of the dogs. Rookie Lou Packer, a physician from Wasilla, believes his dogs died of hypothermia after his team was trapped out in 45-below temperatures and howling wind in the Innoko River country. Conditions were so extreme, Packer worried for his own life as he huddled with the rest of the dogs awaiting help to break open a trail buried deep in drifted snow.

He could feel ice begin to form under the skin of one of the dogs before its death, he said, but there was nothing he could do to help the animal.

Stuart Nelson Jr., the Iditarod chief veterinarian, said he suspects Packer is right about those dogs dying from hypothermia.  "It's highly likely,'' Nelson said, "but hard to prove until we get more information.''

A gross necropsy -- the canine version of an autopsy -- found no obvious and immediate cause of death for Packer's dogs. Necropsies have yet to be completed on Larson's dog and another that died later near Nome, while a necropsy and other tests performed on a dog that died on the second day of the race have still not found a cause of death.

"I don't know what to think,'' Nelson said. "I don't have all the answers this year.''  Last year, three dogs died. That is near the average for the Iditarod, and the causes of two of the 2008 deaths were quickly obvious. One dog was struck and killed by a snowmachine. The other had at some point during the race spit up intestinal fluids and then inhaled them. It was dropped at a checkpoint along the trail and flown back to Anchorage only to die here of what is called "aspiration induced pneumonia."

Race veterinarians say those are the sorts of deaths that happen to dogs almost anywhere on a daily basis, although the motor vehicle most likely to hit and kill dogs elsewhere is a car or truck, not a snowmobile. Illnesses, however, kill dogs the same way they do people, only more often given the relatively short life spans of canines.

What's really troubling, Nelson said, is when a dog dies and no one can figure out why.  "They say no death should be in vain,'' he said. "I've dedicated many years to finding answers and solutions. (And) right now, I'm a little stumped.''

The first dog to die this year was 6-year-old Victor in the team of North Pole musher Jeff Holt. A former teacher, the 48-year-old Holt was not pushing his team but was approaching the outing more like taking a team of family pets on a 1,000-mile camping trip to Nome. The dogs were fresh and well rested when he left the Rainy Pass checkpoint in the Alaska Range. A veterinarian there had just looked the team over and said they looked great. A few miles on down the trail, Victor fell over and died.

Nelson said the death is baffling. The timing of the latest two deaths at least seems to make more sense.

5-year-old Maynard died about an hour out of Nome. A dog in the team of veteran musher Warren Palfrey from Yellowknife, NWT, Canada, Maynard had been on the trail working hard for about 11 days. The stress of that has been known to cause some dogs to develop deadly stomach ulcers. It is not known if Palfrey's dog had such problems, but it is one of the things for which a veterinary pathologist will look.

Maynard and his teammates took a race dictated eight-hour mandatory rest in White Mountain and were examined by a veterinarian who cleared them to proceed. They went on up the trail and through the Safety checkpoint about 20 miles from Nome. Maynard reportedly looked fine there. Ten miles farther on, with the finish nearly in sight, he died.

"It's hard,'' Nelson said. "It hurts everybody.''  The veterinarian was once hopeful an Iditarod could be staged without a single dog death, although most vets have always been skeptical of that happening. They contend that if they rounded up any 800 dogs and watched them for two weeks, several would be sure to die.

The Iditarod did, however, make it through the 1994 and 1996 races with only one death in each. The latter would have been death-free, except for an unfortunate tangle of a team in overflow water on the Yentna River ice on the first night of competition. A dog in the team of five-time champ Rick Swenson from Two Rivers died in that accident. It was the only dog Swenson has lost in more than 30 trips up the Iditarod Trail behind a dog team.

Veterinarians have for years looked for patterns in Iditarod deaths, but found none. Dogs die in back-of-the-pack Iditarod teams staging a long, camping trip to Nome about as often as dogs die in hard-charging, race teams at the front. Some dogs die early in the race, some in the middle and some near the end.

This year, one died in the first third; two died in the middle third; and so far two have died in the final third.

Palfrey was on his way to a 19th-place finish when Maynard died. Larson, from Sand Coulee, Mont., lost 8-year-old Omen on Friday between Elim and White Mountain. Larson now appears headed toward a finish near 40th. Both Packer and Holt were running near the very end of the Iditarod when their dogs died; both men eventually abandoned the race.

"It's been a very, very tough year with severe wind and cold,'' Nelson said, but aside from the death of Packer's two dogs, veterinarians are not sure what influence the weather really had on the dogs. Many mushers observed that soft snow and slow trail actually made travel easier for their animals.

Race winner Lance Mackey arrived in Nome with 15 dogs still pulling strong in harness. He had to drop only one that got tired over the entire course of the race. Palfrey was on the way to finishing with 14 of his 16 starters when Maynard died.

Animal rights groups say the distance the dogs run and the weather in which the race takes place make the Iditarod inherently inhumane. A blogger for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed Holt's dog had "been run to death in this year's edition of the cruel and pointless Iditarod dogsled race.

"Can we finally put to rest the myth that dogsled racing is OK because the 'dogs love to run'? Dogs don't love to run until they collapse. ...''

Update 3/23/09:  The necropsy of Omen has found that the dog died from Pulmonary edema, which likely developed as the result of a cardiac abnormality.  The necropsy of Maynard has found that the dog also died from Pulmonary edema, which likely developed as the result of a cardiac abnormality. 

Update 3/25/09:  A sixth dog in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race has died.

Race officials say the dog on Alan Peck's team died during a flight from Shaktoolik to Nome.

The musher had scratched in Shaktoolik, and officials were picking up the dog team. Race spokesman Chas St. George says the airplane encountered significant turbulence during the flight. The pilot was forced to land in Golovin, where it was discovered that one of the dogs, a 2-year-old female name Cirque, had died.

St. George says the dogs were in good condition when loaded onto the plane. A necropsy has been scheduled.

To see a listing of all the dogs injured or killed related to the Iditarod click on the following link  Iditarod .

Reference:

Hampton Roads

The Associated Press

Anchorage Daily News

Reuters