Alaskan town's answer to the GAA

First time in Alaska and it's like stepping back in time. In Anchorage it's hard to get a plain burger and chips without them offering you some fur and antlers on the side. It's one of the few places in the world where women don't just wear the fur of dead animals but retain the scooped-out head as well. They risk the social embarrassment of running into the family of the deceased but hey, they don't get goosepimples.

It's a tough politically incorrect town where nobody hugs trees and the architecture does nothing to filch the glory from the surrounding landscape. There's something desperate and resourceful about the place, a resilience that seems central to the spirit of America's largest and coldest State.

They get things done. Last Friday there was no snow, so once it got dark on 4th Avenue the trucks moved in and put it there and hey presto by 10.0 on Saturday morning the main street in Anchorage was a winter wonderland and they were ready to do some sled racing.

"Ah Anchorage", said the woman from Valdez at the hotel desk. "So damn mild here they have to bring in their own snow. In Valdez we got 300 inches this winter. No complaints. If they got 300 inches here they'd be cryin' till spring."

Only in Alaska could somebody cast a baleful eye over the rough-edged town that is Anchorage and accuse the natives of being softies. Anchorage is like Limerick with wind chill and moose.

There is a wonderful poignant book called Johnny's Girl by Kim Rich which is all about growing up in Anchorage in its crime-pocked heyday. Through the 1960s and 70s, as the old gold digger desperado days faded into memory and oil workers and military men flooded the town, it was a place of cheap nightclubs, gimlet-eyed hookers, short scam merchants, crooked crap games and a general lawlessness which made Anchorage the last real outpost of the wild west.

Back then spreading snow over 4th Avenue even for an 1,100-mile dog sled race across the Alaskan wilderness would have seemed pointlessly trivial. No percentage, no action. Today the Iditarod is a major Alaskan cultural event. Back then an Alaskan cultural event would have been a contradiction in terms.

The crazy idea to revive dog mushing and establish a race which would necklace gloriously through both the geography and history, linking the dreams and traditions of the native Alaskan tribes with the hunger for challenge and adventure of the newcomers, belonged to a guy called Joe Redington Snr.

He died last summer having ushered his race through a fragile infancy and a troubled teenage time but in Anchorage this week they could speak of nobody else. They wrote about him, released a documentary about him and when the race went off on Saturday they sent his ghost away down the trail as sled number one.

Redington knew what it must have been like to have invented the GAA. He took a long dead art and breathed life back into it so it became a sport which gives the pulse to the community in which it exists. Dog sled racing has become part of the culture of Alaska once again. When the great race set out from Anchorage on Saturday it brought people, colour and money back into places the world had forgotten and it gave an excuse for pride and passion to little villages who otherwise would just struggle to survive.

They appreciate Redington and his legacy. One thing came across to the outsider last week amid all the reminiscing. This was no boring old man. His best finish in the crazy epic race through the worst terrain on earth was fifth. He was 71 at the time. He last competed two years before he died, making it all the way from Anchorage to Nome at the age of 80.

He came to Alaska from Oklahoma after the Second World War and he stayed and gave Alaska its equivalent of the GAA in the final quarter of an epic life.

They told stories about him all week. About crashing airplanes in the interior and walking away time and again shaking his head, rubbing his chin and talking about the "Redington luck", about how he hitched up 200 dogs to pull a bus about the place to mark the US bicentennial in 1976, how he went to Lillehammer for the 1994 Winter Olympics and had to use a Swedish dog team who didn't understand commands given in English. So Redington would try to learn the words in Swedish but whenever he needed them on the trail he couldn't summon them. Eventually he had to get a friend to write the key terms on the back of his snow mitts.

He was the Barnum of the wilderness selling the idea of the crazy race to enough sponsors to get the meagre prize-money and organisation together for the first Iditarod race. Well, almost. He had to ask the third place finisher to lend his prize back to the race.

He knew the value of the hustle. He became nationally famous in America for a TV advertisement which slowly enumerated the scant requirements of the long-distance sled musher. Some chocolate, some rice, some light, non-heavy items. And, of course, his favourite soft drink TANG and the advert would then cut to a long shot of old man Redington mushing across the wilderness with an eight-foot high vat of TANG being pulled along behind him. When he found a husky with an orange gold coat nothing would do him but to call it TANG.

He had the sort of overwhelming personality it takes to get things done, the sort of instincts which usually got things right but sometimes got things badly wrong. When animal rights people correctly took an interest in the rough and ready early form of the Iditarod he decided to take them on head to head. He nearly sunk his race without trace.

Wiser counsel prevailed. Now the race is accompanied by a litter of vets and provides facilities for taking jaded dogs out of the race immediately. Nobody gets near the race without a certain standard of animal care. It ain't perfect but neither is the outdoors.

Cancer got Joe Redington in the end. They buried him on a sled in his snow boots and his gear with a lamp on his head. He left behind 500 huskies and a sprawling family who are the royalty of dog mushing.

More than that. In a world of mega mergers and commercially imposed homogeneity he gave Alaska back something indigenous and unique. Michael Cusack in a parka.