What do the dogs eat?  What do the mushers eat?  These are great questions!

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The dogs eat high-performance dry dog food called kibble.  When mushers stop at a checkpoint or just along the

trail, they will melt snow in their cookpots.  To the hot water, they add kibble.  This gives additional hydration to

the dogs by adding the water.  Some mushers have different methods.  

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Ladles can be different as well.  Most mushers have the wide, shallow ladles.  Most mushers use a cooler in which to mix up the watery food.  Others use buckets.  The dog bowls vary as well.  Some are flat, rectangular containers, while others are round plastic bowls.  These are stacked after the dogs finish to be carried to the next stop.  

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Mushers will give the dogs snacks of meat, or even make a soup-like mixture of hot water with frozen meat tossed in.  In a cooler was a “soup” of warm water, salmon slices, and meat steaks.  There's usually bags of frozen snack meat along the trail of tripe (look up the meaning of this!), elk, turkey skins, chicken, belly meat, and golden fat.  The fat is a good way to add calories for the dogs.  Sometimes they roll it into balls and then roll it in kibble for a dog snack.  

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Ok.  That’s for the dogs.  What about the mushers?  They send their food ahead, frozen, in their drop bags to the checkpoints.  Their frozen food is in vacuum sealed plastic which can also be dropped into heated water to thaw.  Whatever they bring must be thin so it can thaw easily.   If mushers don’t need all their food, they often leave it in the villages for the volunteers or the villagers to use.  Mushers struggle with liquid for themselves as water and juices freeze so quickly on the trail.  Capri Suns are kept in inside coat pockets so they can at least be slushy and drinkable.  Musher Charley Bejna says he sometimes wraps his water bottles in shirts and then puts them into his beaver skin mittens.  The fur mittens are so warm that his drinks don’t freeze.