Reenacting the 1925 Alaskan Serum Run: Dora resident endured harrowing challenges, sweet successes during his years of dogmushing

Sometimes, in the midst of an ordinary moment in an ordinary day, some little thing can happen, some random words can be said, and the next thing you know, your life is careening off in a direction you never could have expected. That's how Dora resident Von Martin's life went to the dogs some 30-plus years ago and led him into a thrilling, historic experience in some of the earth's most brutal conditions.

Back then, Von and his former wife, Judith, lived south of Seattle in Tacoma, Washington. Responding to a friend's dinner invitation one evening, they headed up the driveway to the host's front door, admiring the next-door neighbor's three dogs as they walked. The large Alaskan Malamutes watched them carefully from the fenceline. Later, in a book he wrote about the direction his life took after that night, Von called them, "the most magnificent dogs I had ever seen."

The neighbor who owned the dogs came to the dinner – and said the words that sparked everything that followed. When Von complimented the neighbor on her beautiful dogs, she answered, "We have new puppies born just last month. Would you like to see them?"

Renaissance Man 

Von, now 73, was born in Camp Pendleton, California, while his dad, Eldon Meril Martin, served overseas with the Navy during the Korean War. He spent much of his growing-up years in Southern California but actually considers himself a "fifth-generation Washingtonian" through his dad's family, who went there by wagon train in the 1800s. 

Along with his deep roots in Washington, Von also traces his family history to Missouri, where his maternal grandfather, a World War I veteran, lived in Hannibal. 

Von's maternal great-great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran and teacher, married one of his former pupils then, like Von's paternal ancestors, they traveled west from Missouri by wagon. While his paternal ancestors went on to Oregon, his maternal ancestors settled in Colorado and started a horse ranch. One of Von's most cherished treasures is the family Bible they carried on that journey. It's his personal Bible today. 

Von graduated from high school in California in 1970; beneath each senior's photo in the high school yearbook was a tagline. Von's was Renaissance Man. "When I was 17, I wanted to do everything," he said. "I had this one life, and I wanted to squeeze everything I could into it."

And, indeed, he has packed a lot into it.

He attended Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo for two years. Next, he studied at Grossmont College in El Cajon then ended up studying anthropology at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, where he earned his bachelor's degree in education in 1980. He taught anthropology at the university, then he taught social sciences at a high school.

During his 17 years in Hawaii, and later in his decades on America's West Coast, Von enjoyed adventures in a wide variety of occupations and avocations. He was a site interpreter at a museum, and for several years he worked with musical show groups, playing flute, piano and singing and sometimes opening for major acts, including Waylon Jennings.

He worked as a journeyman carpenter in his dad's construction company, and he was a licensed and bonded chauffeur for Hollywood celebrities and international figures. A highlight he enjoys recalling is picking up actor Harrison Ford and his family at an airport and driving them to their hideaway at Diamond Head, near Honolulu, and then chauffeuring them around to do some Christmas shopping. Another time, he drove a Rolls Royce to chauffeur the king of Oman. 

In his later years in the Pacific Northwest, he molded his lifelong love of animals into occupations that encompassed several ways of working with them. He became a trained veterinary assistant and a nationally certified and Washington State-licensed animal massage therapist, specializing in rehabilitation therapy for horses and dogs. And during his last years in Washington, before moving to Dora, he was the general manager of a large veterinary facility.

It's clear that Von had already lived quite a full life by the time he accepted his friend's dinner invitation that night in January 1993 and then stepped next door to see the neighbor's family of month-old Malamutes. But none of those past adventures and experiences could match the amazing future that was set in motion when, as he describes in his book A Long Way to Nome, one of the woolie little fuzzballs, "a chubby, sable-colored pup, waddled straight up to me and gazed into my face. . . . It was my Wolfie." 

The makings of a musher

A few weeks later, Von bought the pup who would be named Wolfie (after she howled like a wolf all the way home while nestled in his arms – and then most of the night as well). As Wolfie grew up, she became Von's constant companion. "And, like anything involving animals, you get that animal, and you meet people in that same environment," he said. "You make friends and join groups. With Wolfie, a Malamute, I met dogmushing communities."

He was describing the sport built around teams of dogs that pull sleds – usually over snow but sometimes training by pulling wheeled sleds over bare, non-snowy trails. Once he started meeting other dogmushers, Von also started acquiring other sled dogs. 

"Before I knew it, I had 20-some dogs," he said. Except for Wolfie, they were all Huskies, and they were all adopted – some from pounds, some from people who wanted to give them up."

His home was in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington, the heart of an area where sled dog enthusiasts abounded. He joined groups that sponsored events and competitions. "It's kind of like rodeos," he said. "You get your horse, and you go around earning points. It's that way with the dogmushing community."

In racing competitions, most of the dog teams consisted of "high-bred" dogs with impressive pedigrees and high monetary value. That made winning races with his "ragtag team of dogs" all the sweeter for Von as he competed in – and won – events throughout Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Wyoming and even as far away as British Columbia, Canada. The secret to his success may have been that his dogs were exceptionally well cared for. In fact, Von even won awards for having the best-cared-for sled dogs. 

He and his team traveled to events in a professionally modified truck that could haul 20 dogs. "It had all these little dog boxes," he said. "Each one had straw and hay with a window. There was a big bay in middle of the back for the sled and tack. I would camp with the dogs, and we would run these events."

Also like rodeos and other horse-focused events, dogsledding races have different classes of competition, usually based on how many dogs or what type of sleds are involved: four-dog, six-dog and 12-dog teams, for instance, as well as "skijoring," a Norwegian sport where a person on skis is pulled by one or more dogs – or a horse. 

"We ran them all," said Von, "from skijoring with one or two dogs to my largest team of 12 dogs," he said.

At a typical weekend event, he and his sled-pulling dogs might run as far as 35 miles in three hours. They won seven regional championships and a world title in 2005. Then they were invited to run with Team USA in the World Cup race on Mount Bachelor near Bend, Oregon. 

Von and his sled dogs did more than compete. They also participated in service projects in Alaska where dog sleds traveled to remote villages as part of health initiatives that presented programs on important medical topics to the most rural of Alaska residents. Snowmobile-riding doctors, nurses and other medical professionals accompanied the attention-getting dog sleds. 

Von participated in one of these programs in 2009, when his dog sled was part of a run that stopped in 13 remote villages where the medical pros presented a program on stroke prevention. He did it again in 2011 for presentations on suicide prevention. At each stop, the mushers would spend the night and get to know the villagers. Supplies, including food for the mushers and the dogs, had been drop-shipped by bush plane along their route, which took them 23 days to complete. Distances between villages averaged 20 miles or more, and the temperature was "way below zero," he said. Sometimes he and his dogs might camp near a village in a tent on a frozen river. "Sometimes there was a little cabin with no power," he said. "Some villages had schools, and we might camp out on a gym floor." 

While several dog sled teams participated in the program, each dog team was "pretty much on its own" as they ran between villages. 

"A lot of the dogs on the 2011 run were between 10 and 12 years old. One dog, Chewbacca, turned 13 on that trip, and he was running 30 to 40 miles a day," he said, adding again that his dogs' impressive abilities were due, in great part, to the fact that they were very well cared for. 

Huskies' tremendous power

Sled dogs are usually Malamutes, Siberian Huskies or Alaskan Huskies. The Malamute is "a big, heavy freighting dog. It's like a Clydesdale and may weigh up to 120 pounds," Von said.

Continuing the comparison with horse breeds, Von said the Siberian Huskie is like a Freisian, a horse breed known for its strength, intelligence and poise. They can weigh as much as 80 pounds, he said.

The Alaskan Husky is not a purebred dog but is bred for performance. "It is the world's greatest athlete," Von said. Females can weigh in the 40s and males up to 60 pounds. "They're smaller, but they can literally run up to 90 miles a day in harness. No other animal on the planet can perform like that," he said.

The weight of the dogs helps estimate their strength, Von said; generally, each dog can pull its own weight. That means, working together, a 12-dog team has tremendous power, able to pull as much 700 pounds or more.

Von weighs 150 pounds; the sled he used in the health-initiative runs weighed 80 pounds, and it was loaded with as much as 200 pounds of supplies, for a total of around 430 pounds. But he quips that "unless they're pulling 350 pounds or more, a typical 12-dog team doesn't even know you're back there."

Being a good musher means recognizing each dog's "special talents and skills," Von said. "Lead dogs want to be out front. They're like that horse that likes to be the trail leader. The lead dog is the navigator and knows to stay right on that trail and get the team moving, no matter how bad the conditions are," Von said,

"Swing dogs" set the pace, and team dogs are the workhorses behind them. The "wheel dogs" are the biggest, Von said. "They're responsible for swinging the sled around a tree or rock or some other obstacle."

Sled dogs are traditionally noisy – unless they're working. "Huskies sing in their kennel. One dog will start, and another will chime in, and then they're howling in chorus," Von said. "It's ethereal." 

They bark at feeding time, "and they bark like crazy when I bring out the harnesses; they're jumping up and down," he said. "But on the trail, they're completely quiet."

Sled dogs are strong, smart and eager to work, but Von has also experienced how easily distracted they can be – and how a distraction can lead to accidents. 

Once when he was training in the Cascades with an eight-dog team, the dogs were jumping up and down, eager to hit the trail "when a little dog ran across the park." The dogs "ended up dragging the sled underneath my truck. Completely destroyed it," he said.

Another time, another little dog ran across a trail in front of his dogs when they were training with a wheeled sled. The little dog disappeared into some bushes alongside the path, and Von's team went after it. The dogs and the sled ended up plunging over a 20-foot ledge into a river. "I couldn't stop those dogs. It was like a slow-motion video," Von said. "I jumped off just before it went off the ledge. I heard the crash. The dogs were in the water, tangled in the harness."

All the dogs survived, including the little canine troublemaker. But it was a terrifying experience.

Reenacting history's desperate dogsled run

Today, dogsledding is mostly an activity that's enjoyed as a competition or a challenging pastime or hobby. But for thousands of years before it became a popular sport, it was a crucial means of transport, Von said. "Native people in Siberia were doing it before recorded history," Von said, adding that, in many parts of North America, native peoples drove sled dogs.

"They would braid dog lines from woven leather," Von said. Some of the earliest sleds were simple wooden platforms. "They would stack everything on it, and the musher would run along next to the team."

Modern sleds can be high tech, he said. The lightest ones, made for sprint racing, may be made of composite carbon and weigh 25 pounds. The sled Von used most often in his treks across the Alaskan frontier was a long-distance freighting sled that weighed 60 to 70 pounds and had brakes and emergency lights. 

Probably the best-known annual dogsledding event is the classic Iditarod Race that's been held each March since 1973, with mushers and teams traveling more than 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome. 

The Iditarod was inspired by a daring, historic rescue in 1925 when dogsled teams delivered emergency, lifesaving diphtheria serum from Nenana (as far as the train could get from Anchorage) to the remote frontier town of Nome, some 800 miles away. Twenty-one dogsled teams, working in relays like the old Pony Express during one of the worst winter storms in Alaskan history, did what no one and no other means of transportation could do.

Books and movies have been made about the treacherous rescue run, especially focusing on the last two legs of the relay traveled by a single team. It was led by musher Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, Balto, who guided the team of exhausted, frost-bitten dogs through a blizzard-like storm with extreme-sub-zero temperatures and poor visibility made worse by thick snow blown by raging winds. Overcoming impossible conditions, they delivered the diphtheria serum in time to save the villagers.

Beginning nearly 50 years later, the annual, 1,000-mile Iditarod race was inspired by the 1925 Serum Run but did not replicate it. Von was part of a 2011 expedition that did reenact it. (This year, another expedition marked the 100th anniversary of the Serum Run.) The commemorative runs were launched by the late Col. Norman D. Vaughan, who had accompanied Admiral Richard Byrd in his 1928-1930 exploration of Antarctica.

Von's book describes the months of arduous training and amazingly detailed planning that went into the reenactment experience that Von helped organize and lead. The commemorative run began on Feb. 22, 2009. On that day, an Alaskan Railroad official delivered a ceremonial "serum package" to expedition trail boss Kent Kantowski at the Nenana train depot, marking the place where the 1925 train carrying the serum was stopped by heavy snow that closed the tracks.  

Instead of the event being a relay, as the 1925 rescue run was, in the 2011 reenactment, several dogsled teams were set to run the entire 800 miles over the frozen Alaskan frontier, described by online sources as "unforgiving wilderness." Another difference in the commemorative event was that shipments of food and supplies had been dropped by aircraft at waypoints along the route, and a team of snowmobile transports accompanying the mushers carried support personnel and additional supplies. The 1925 mushers relied on supplies provided by the villages where each leg of the relay stopped and started.

Von made the run on a wooden sled pulled by a team of 12 dogs that stretched more than 60 feet ahead of him. 

In his book, and in presentations he makes to school groups and civic organizations, Von describes the harrowing setbacks and enormous challenges he encountered on the grueling run that traversed steep, ice- and snow-covered landmarks and frozen rivers amid sub-zero temperatures and winds as strong as 40 miles per hour. He also shares the sweet successes and heartbreaking failures. On some days, the teams traveled 50 miles or more during exhausting, 11-hour days. 

Not wanting to spoil the story for Ozark County Times readers, we won't say here how the enactment ended. The rest of the story is revealed in Von's book and in the live presentations he makes. His story held listeners' rapt attention when he spoke at the Historium in August. (To inquire about asking him to speak to school, church or social groups, contact him at northwestmusher@aol.com.) 

Retiring to Dora

Von managed teams of dogs and competed in dogsled events for around 25 years. He retired from mushing in 2015 after winning first place in a race on Mount Hood in Oregon. He moved here in 2021, seeking a place with lower taxes and more affordable land prices than they had known in the Pacific Northwest. In 2023 he met and married his current wife Barbara, a retired nurse from Texas who was up here visiting the area with her horses. 

They brought along their remaining, now-geriatric dogs, who, like their owners, are enjoying their Ozarkian retirement. "We have a fenced property here, and the dogs go out with the horses."

Von and Barbara own horses, including Missouri Foxtrotters, and they enjoy trail rides through the nearby national forest and social gatherings with local trail-riding groups. 

Despite his years of loving dogsledding events, Von now avoids snow whenever he can. He and Barbara have become Texas snowbirds, spending winters on Barbara's property near Nacogdoches. As the temperatures begin dropping at their Ozark County home, the animal-loving Martins each drive a truck pulling a large horse trailer loaded with their traveling menagerie: five horses, 15 dogs, four cats and a goat. And, as Von likes to joke, "a partridge in a pear tree."