Ketil Reitan, 55, is confident on the trail. He's been running dogs since he was a teenager, growing up in Trondheim, Norway.
"I got my first dog when I was 17 years old. I was in a dog mushing club. I got a dog team and I ran long distance races in Norway," he reminisced over the phone before the start of the 2016 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
Reitan now lives in Kaktovik, where he operates a tour business specializing in "polar bear safaris" and sightseeing excursions with his son, Vebjorn, who turned 20 recently.
Vebjorn has spent the last year since his high school graduation hunting, working on his father's tour boats, and mushing. He plans on joining the Norwegian military this summer, but first, he and his father are taking on a grand adventure.
He'll follow his father along the length of the Iditarod on a snowmachine. Then, the two will branch off in Nome and retrace the journey Ketil made almost 30 years ago when he first came to Alaska as a young man.
The trip will take them from Nome up through the Northwest Arctic and North Slope. They'll stop in villages like Anaktuvuk Pass and Nuiqsut as they make their way back to Kaktovik.
They'll take turns using the sled and the snowmachine after the race is finished, but until then, Vebjorn is stuck with the motorized form of transportation.
"I'm more comfortable with the dog team," he said, lamenting all the parts of a snowmachine that can break and need to be repaired on the trail.
The upside is, he won't stray far from the pack to Nome.
"I'll be following the race, going to the checkpoints," he said. "I'll probably stay kind of close, towards where my dad is. Maybe I'll go towards the front a little bit."
He's not familiar with this trail, which is one of the reasons his father wanted to bring him along.
"It will be interesting to see it from a snowmachine," Vebjorn said. "I would like to do it with a dog team maybe later sometime. But, now I get to see parts of the trail and know it a little bit if I want to run the race later."
Ketil has run the race several times before. He ran every year from 1991 to 1994, though a few things have changed since then, including the members of his team.
"I don't really know what to expect because many of these dogs have never run the Iditarod before. So I think, if everything goes well, we can place fairly good, but I don't know. It's very hard to predict, but I'm going to do my very best to place as good as I can. I'll try to run the dogs as sensible as possible," said Ketil.
He's running with 16 experienced dogs who have run other challenging races, including the Yukon Quest, and some long-distance events in Norway. He owns the dogs with breeder Torsten Kohnert, and they trade off running different trails with the same team.
"They are used to traveling out on the tundra, so I hope they will do well, especially at the end of the race," he said.
The one element he's concerned about is the weather. His team is made up of cold-weather dogs that may not be able to handle well the warmer weather that's marked the Iditarod over the last few years.
"Since our dogs have been living up in Kaktovik, they have lots of fur, so they can easily get problems with the heat of the day. So we have to make sure we stay on a good schedule so the dogs can run in the early morning and rest in the heat of the day, and run in the evening," he said.
"We have to make sure we make this as good as possible for the dogs so they can live up to their potential."
As for Ketil, although he's an experienced musher and traveler, there's always more to learn, he said.
"I always try to learn some new things, like a new way for camping and staying comfortable on the trail," he said.
Those are skills he'll put to use when he and his son tackle the second part of their trip, alone in the country.
While Reitan is excited about completing the Iditarod again, it's easy to tell that in some ways, the real adventure will begin at the end.
This story first appeared in The Arctic Sounder and is republished here with permission.