WILLOW, ALASKA — The ground blizzard swept through at the worst possible moment.
Bitter cold wind scattered snow 20 feet in the air. Like a beast, the mass threatened to overwhelm musher Emily Ford and her team of Alaskan Husky sled dogs.
They were 15 miles from finishing Alaska’s Kobuk 440-mile race last April. But the dogs, wired for running, had quit — a musher’s nightmare. Had Ford misread them? Would they move another inch?
Ford scrambled to use her sled as a wind block, covered the dogs in their blankets and huddled on the snow to bond with them for an hour. A race official showed up on a snow machine and asked if she wanted to scratch.
Ford considered the question for a few moments. After years of adventures in extreme winter conditions — she was the first woman to winter thru-hike the 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail across Wisconsin and had solo skied across the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — she had an internal checklist she used to power through difficult situations like this:
Are we safe? Yes.
Do we have a way to make a meal? Yes.
What’s the energy of the dogs? Tired.
But are there dogs that want to keep going? Yes.
No, Ford told the official. She and her team weren’t finished.
Anchored in Alaska
It’s a cool January morning in the tiny community of Willow, Alaska, about 70 miles north of Anchorage, and Shameless Huskies Kennel is stirring to life.
The winter sun has only just appeared around 10:30 a.m. when Ford, 32, and three fellow mushers make quick work of breakfast. There are 40 other mouths to feed out in the yard, a clearing tucked among snow-clad spruce and hardwoods.
While daylight is weak and in short supply, the kennel to-do list isn’t. Not in the heart of sled dog racing season.
Ford and her partner, Anna Hennessy, 34, have just returned from running kennel teams in the Copper Basin 300 — a 300-mile race in southeast Alaska — and sleds loaded with cook kits, extra gear, sleeping bags and dog snacks need unpacking.
Hennessy, whose passion for sled dogs was forged at the Sawtooth Racing kennel near Grand Marais, is the connective tissue between Ford and Alaska.
The two met during Ford’s 28-day ski trek across the Boundary Waters in early 2022. Leaving from the western edge of the wilderness, Ford covered about 180 miles in 28 days. She met Hennessy at her final resupply stop, and the two kept in touch.
“What I knew is, this was a really cool girl I liked, and she was doing a really cool thing that I also had an interest in,” Ford recalled.
Love bloomed. Their spirits for adventure entwined, and Ford decided to spend half her year in Willow, where Hennessy had taken a job managing and racing for Shameless Huskies.
The two are in their third winter at the kennel and well into another racing season — though this one is unlike any other.
With her results from the 2023-24 race season, Ford qualified as a rookie musher for the 2025 Iditarod. Known as the Last Great Race at 1,000 miles, the start this year will be on March 3 in Fairbanks, with a ceremonial start March 1 in Anchorage. The trail typically winds over vast mountain passes and across dangerous sea ice. Mushers and their teams endure gale winds, subzero cold and fatigue capable of breaking even the toughest competitors.