It is all about tongues and tails!!
I recently watched Togo with Willem Dafoe. It is a heart warming story of the lead sled dog of Leonhard Seppala and his dog sled team in the 1925 serum run to Nome across central and northern Alaska. He ran over 300 miles (480 km), while Balto, along with other sled dogs, ran an average of around 31 miles (50 km).
Now I am a dog sled addict and watched more on the subject, particularly the Serum Run or The Great Race of Mercy they did to help the children of Nome who were dying of diptheria that killed numerous children.
Nome, Alaska lies approximately 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and while greatly diminished from its peak of 20,000 during the gold rush days at the turn of the 20th century, it was still the largest town in northern Alaska in 1925, with 455 Alaska Natives and 975 settlers of European descent.[1] From November to July, the port on the southern shore of the Seward Peninsula of the Bering Sea was icebound and inaccessible by steamship.
The only link to the rest of the world during the winter was the Iditarod Trail, which ran 938 miles (1,510 km) from the port of Seward in the south, across several mountain ranges and the vast Alaska Interior before reaching Nome. The primary source of mail and needed supplies in 1925 was the dog sled, but within a decade, bush pilots would become the dominant method of transportation during the winter months.