Susan Butcher

American dog sled racer, a four-time winner of the Iditarod Alaskan Dog Race, a grueling competitive event.

Butcher grew up in Cambridge, MA in an upper middle class neighborhood, not far from Harvard. At age 8 she wrote an essay entitled “I Hate the City.” Her father, Charlie, ran a chemical products company, and her mother Agnes was a psychiatric therapist; they divorced when Susan was 11. Dyslexia caused her some problems in her early school years. She learned best by doing rather than from books and was fidgety in school. A withdrawn child, she related best to her dog and was happiest facing athletic challenges, working with her dad on carpentry projects or being outdoors with her dog.

At age 16, she went to Nova Scotia and learned to farm and train horses. Two years later, on a visit to her dad’s in Boulder, CO, she connected with a woman who had 50 huskies. "Ten minutes later I had moved in,” Butcher said. I lived with her a couple years working as a veterinary tech and learning to mush." Realizing that becoming a veterinarian was not a good fit for her, and crazy about dogs, she moved to Alaska in 1975. At age 20, with only $600 in her pocket, Butcher moved into a cabin without electricity or running water. Living 40 miles from her closest neighbor, she worked a summer job on the coast at a fish processing plant, seven days a week, 18 hours a day, in order to earn some money. With few available food supplies, she and her companion lived off moose, caribou and ptarmigan and whatever else they could hunt. They hauled their own water. In 1977, she moved to Eureka, Alaska to start her 100-dog Trail Breaker Kennel on five acres of bush surrounding an 80-year-old log cabin that once belonged to a Gold Rush blacksmith. With a population of six people, Eureka was just a scatter of mining shacks among strands of silver birch at the end of 140 miles of dirt road, not far beneath the Arctic Circle. She lived alone or with handlers when she could afford them.