29/10/2026
Jody Potts-Joseph Was Raised in a Dog Sled. So Why Did She Wait 40 Years to Start the Iditarod?
Jody Potts-Joseph sometimes says she was “raised in the basket of a dog sled.” That isn’t much of an exaggeration.
Growing up Hän Gwich’in in Alaska’s Upper Yukon country, dogs were not originally a sport to her family. They were transportation. Her parents trapped and hunted, her older brother had a race team, and Jody began running dogs herself when she was only eight or nine.
The Iditarod was already in her mind that young. When her village school principal ran the race, eight-year-old Jody became fascinated by it.
Yet her own Iditarod start would not come until 2026, at age 48.
What happened during those four decades is probably more revealing than the race itself.
Jody returned to Alaska in 2009 as a single mother of three young children and built a small dog team. But in 2013, after taking a demanding job in Fairbanks, she made a difficult calculation: career, children and a serious dog team could not all receive what they required.
She later explained it simply: she knew she could not “fail my kids or my job.”
So she stepped away from owning a team and even gave her dogs to Jessie Holmes. But she never completely left mushing. In her spare time she guided and helped train another musher’s dogs, describing those years almost as a period of waiting—because being on the trail was still where her heart was.
Eventually her children grew up, she returned to Eagle Village and began rebuilding that part of her life.
Then one conversation changed the scale of the dream.
Jody jokingly asked her husband Jamey what he would say if she decided to run the Iditarod. Instead of laughing it off, he immediately began talking about training camps and wall tents for long-distance runs.
That was when she realized they might actually do it.
As Jody later put it, running the Iditarod was something she had thought about since childhood; she had simply needed to wait for “the right time” in her life.
And even when that time finally came, the goal had changed.
At 48, she was no longer simply the little girl fascinated by a race. She wanted younger Native people to see mushing as something still alive in their culture. Before the start she said representing her people and inspiring “the next generation of mushers from the village” mattered to her.
Her first attempt did not end in Nome. After approximately 658 miles, illness began spreading through her dog team, and Jody scratched rather than continue at their expense.
That almost makes the forty-year wait more meaningful.
Jody Potts-Joseph spent much of adulthood putting children, work and responsibility ahead of a childhood ambition. When she finally returned to it, the dream was no longer only about proving she could finish a thousand-mile race.
It had become about coming back to the dogs, the land and a part of herself she had never really left behind.
