Seth Barnes needed freedom, a change in life. So he got on his BMW motorcycle and (loosely) followed his parents’ RV on a trip out west.
It was the summer of 2010 and Barnes, a Mississippi State alum, was living in Washington, D.C. working for the U.S. Department of Commerce. Without a solid plan, he returned to his hometown of Stockton, Alabama, a small unincorporated community in northern Baldwin County, 60 miles due north of the coast. He arrived as his parents were going to Wyoming to visit his brother, Kiley, and he decided to tag along on the BMW.
When his parents returned home, though, he decided to continue his trip to see an old friend in Fairbanks, Alaska, who ran a kennel that trained sled dogs.
One day Seth got on a sled behind a team of dogs and took them on a run.
He was hooked.
With no plans for the following winter, he promised to return when snow was on the ground and dog racing season was in full swing.
“I came back in January and didn’t want to leave,” Barnes said. “One thing led to another and I met the right people doing the right things, bumped into the right racers and they started giving me the right opportunities.”
With a few years of experience and connections to some of the sport’s titans, Barnes has already raced in the sport’s pinnacle event, the Iditarod, twice. He now lives in Alaska year-round with only rare trips home and spends much more time on dog sleds than any other mode of transport.
Rising to the Iditarod
There’s no sugar-coating this about the dog racing world: as Barnes puts it, “it’s a money pit.”
“Making money and earning a living in the dog world, especially just racing, is very, very rare, if existent at all. Most kennels are trying to break even,” Barnes said. “The kennels that are actually making money are doing it outside of racing, doing it through talks, through speeches, through tours, giving rides and such.”
It was such a tour kennel that introduced Barnes to the sport. They also introduced him to the man who would become the most influential member of his racing Rolodex: Mitch Seavey, the reigning and three-time Iditarod champion. Between Mitch and his son, Dallas, a Seavey has won each of the last six Iditarods.
After working for other kennels, Barnes broke into the Seavey kennel as a handler.
Handlers begin in smaller roles, helping owners care for and train the dogs. As they get better and eventually grow to handling full teams and the sled, they graduate to actually competing in smaller races with younger dogs. These smaller races keep the handlers interested, plus it’s good training for the young dogs that could run the Iditarod in a few years. It was in this manner that Barnes became a competitive musher.
Barnes first raced in dog sledding’s Super Bowl — the Iditarod — in 2015.
The Iditarod is a multi-day race of approximately 1,000 miles, held each March in Alaska. The race typically lasts eight to 15 days, during which the wind chill can reach as low as -100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In that first race, Barnes ran a team of puppies owned by Seavey more for practice than to seriously compete. He got the thrill of running the Iditarod while the puppies got better trained for competition.
Some of the dogs from Barnes’ 2015 race went on to run on Mitch Seavey’s winning team this year.
The puppies were not the only ones that improved.
“I learned more in the 10 or 11 days of my first Iditarod than I did in the previous three or four years of running dogs,” Barnes said. “It’s an eye-opening thing to see how dogs change from the starting line to the finish line.
“Somewhere around 300 or 400 miles, a dog’s whole inner workings — from their metabolism to their stomach to their brains — everything changes. Dogs literally become superheroes, they’re superathletes.”
Through the days of the race, maintaining that superathlete becomes Barnes’ only job.
The amount of rest and length of runs depends on the racer’s strategy. Since he was running puppies, Barnes gave them shorter runs and longer rest than the elite teams with more mature dogs. This meant often running and resting in five- or six-hour cycles — but the rest time for dogs is always the active time for the human.
The first order of business, if the stop comes somewhere other than a checkpoint, is to melt snow in the cooker, getting water hot enough to defrost meat for the dogs to eat. Then comes the dog maintenance, sometimes including shoulder or wrist massages. If the human is lucky, they can sneak in a nap for an hour or two before getting back on the trail.
The dog life
If dog racing sounds hard, that’s because it is. The fact that Barnes loves it is no surprise to his father, Henry.
“He’s always been the type who has to be challenged to do anything,” Henry Barnes said. “He was voted class clown in high school because he was always goofing around, but he had an IQ of 165.”
In dog racing, Barnes found an adequate challenge, one that envelopes nearly his entire life.
He lives in Willow, somewhere he describes as “more of an area than a town.” Willow is almost 27 times larger than Starkville in terms of size, yet has a population of roughly 2,000. It gives Barnes the environment he wants: he lives off the grid with no television and no internet, just a generator for the bare minimum power he needs to prepare food and service his dogs.
He can travel to Mitch Seavey’s kennel for power, television, restaurants and other amenities if he so chooses. When he does, he straps on an MSU winter cap for the ride, likely by dog sled.
Iditarod Facts
■ ~1,000 miles
■ Takes place in March annually
■ Typically takes 8-15 days; slowest racer ever took 32 days
■ Begins in Anchorage and ends in Nome
■ First race was in 1973
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