Mushing News Weekly Round Up (Dec 8)

With the advent of social media, it's a whole lot easier for fans to immerse themselves into the mushing world. It's also easy to miss a lot of the interesting and newsworthy stuff as it seems to become overloaded in the weeks leading up to race season. Training reports begin as the leaves fall from the trees, and then almost over night the snow hits the rosters are finalized and we're in the middle of race season.

So a new feature here on Reitter's Block starting this week is a sort of weekly round up of news, and interesting stories from the mushing community. These will be selection that caught my eye, and in no way everything that happened within the week.



In response to the Iditarod Trail Committee's announcement on December 1 about their plan to come up with a standard of "Dog Care" for kennels to be eligible to compete, Iditarod Veteran Wade Marrs took to his website to share his thoughts. While, overall, Wade is supportive of the idea - he wanted to voice some concerns he had. It is equally a response to another kennel that has created a lot of drama since October when they decided to try and promote themselves as the kennel/people all mushers wish they could be like.

SP Kennel (Home of Aliy Zirkle and Allen Moore) shared an adorable update on their trio of pups. It's not really news worthy, but it's adorable, and there's video. What more does a mushing fan need than a puppy cam?!

Monday brought the amusing with the report that Jeff King was auctioned off during the Talkeetna Bachelor Auction, and brought in a whopping $4,600! King is thought to be the first Iditarod Champion (and certainly IS the only 4-time Champion) auctioned off at the event. Known as one of the larger than life mushers, it should come as no surprise that Jeff was up for something like this. But it was still amusing to read. Much better than the articles showing the mushing community up in arms.

And, just today, Monica Zappa took to Facebook to announce that the 2018 Iditarod will be her last "for a while" as she needs to go off on new adventures. Iditarod will be far less colorful without her neon colors out on the trail. So when you see her run down the trail this March, cheer extra hard for her!

Speaking of Facebook - my favorites on the social media round up: