Jessie Holmes, a 43-year-old who came to Alaska from Alabama more than 20 years ago, earned his first victory in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race early Friday.
As the Anchorage Daily News reports, Holmes crossed under the burled arch in Nome around 2:55 a.m. Friday with 10 dogs on the line. He was pulled down Front Street by leaders Hercules and Polar. “It’s hard to put into words, but it’s a magical feeling. It’s not about this moment now, it’s about all the moments along the trail,” he said after reaching the finish line.
Holmes arrived to shouts and applause from a sizable crowd for 3 a.m. in subzero cold. He walked up and down the race chute giving high-fives and hugs to cheering spectators, wandering past the metal barricades to greet fans and take a few selfies. At 1,128 miles, this year’s course is the longest in the race’s 53-year history. The route began in Fairbanks on March 3 after too much of the traditional route was determined to be snowless.
In an interview after his finish, Holmes said he tried during the race to detach himself from thinking too much about the possibility of a victory. “I don’t know if it’s sinking in. I’m just so full of emotion from the journey,” Holmes said. “It was a really long race, a really tough race, but I really had to nurture (the dog team) mentally.”
Holmes completed his journey in a preliminary time of 10 days, 14 hours, 55 minutes and 41 seconds, longer than most recent first-place finishes by two to three days. At the finish line, he was presented with an oversized check for $57,200 in honor of his winning run.
His victory is a capstone in a short but remarkably successful Iditarod career. His rookie run was in 2018, which he finished seventh, earning him the rookie of the year award. He’s raced in every Iditarod since, finishing in the top 10 now six times, previously as high as third place.
Holmes spent much of this year’s race in front. He gave his dogs ample rest early on but put off taking the longer mandatory 24- and 8-hour stops until long after most of his closest competitors had, which he credited with helping keep up the dogs’ speeds later in this year’s longer-than-normal race.
“I think the combination of those things, having the discipline to let the race go away from me early on,” Holmes told an interviewer from Iditarod Insider in White Mountain on Thursday. “At (one) point I was like, ‘I’m probably too far behind.’ And honestly I even had some thoughts about withdrawing from the race around Galena.”
In Nome, he described his journey as “an amazing 10 days.” “I soaked in every part of it, the lows, the highs, the in-betweens. I’m really proud of these dogs,” he said. “I love them, and they did it — they deserve all the credit.”
Two other mushers stayed within striking distance, occasionally leapfrogging Holmes during rest breaks. Matt Hall of Two Rivers, whom Holmes has known for years going back to their days in remote parts of the Interior, told Iditarod Insider that he’d been trying to overtake Holmes until midway across the southern Seward Peninsula on Wednesday. “I was done chasing. Couldn’t catch him,” Hall said, explaining that after reaching that conclusion, he relaxed and gave his team more rest in the Elim checkpoint. “I’m stress-free now. So it’s nice.”
Holmes left White Mountain with a three-hour lead over Hall, looking relaxed and unhurried as he praised his dogs before pulling his snow hook and heading over the frozen Fish River. Hall arrived in Nome just before 6 a.m. Friday in second place, his second consecutive runner-up finish. Cantwell musher Paige Drobny arrived at the finish line at 8:38 a.m.
Hall said the route and extra mileage made for an incredibly tough race, despite his familiarity with mushing along the Yukon. “That was part of the problem,” he joked. “Oh no, more Yukon and more and more and then this part we’ve got to go back on it again.”
Drobny’s third-place finish is the best of her career, joining five other women who have earned top-three finishes in the race. It was also her fourth top-10 finish in her 10 Iditarod runs. “It doesn’t feel like 10 times,” she said. “It feels like I just started.”
Holmes describes himself as a professional dog musher and a carpenter, and he starred on the reality TV show “Life Below Zero,” which profiles Alaskans living subsistence lifestyles. For many years he lived in the Interior Alaska town of Nenana and grew close to elders who had decades of mushing experience. More recently, he’s made a home by the Brushkana River off the Denali Highway.
Holmes moved to Alaska in 2004, working a range of jobs before his reality TV work afforded him enough income to get serious about mushing and building a kennel. Partly as a result of his profile on the show, Holmes has a large fan base outside Alaska. His Facebook page has 24,000 followers. He stopped filming a few years ago and said that he’d gained more time to focus on mushing without the seasonal commitments that were part of his reality TV schedule. “I had to prioritize that over my mushing career because that’s how I paid for my mushing career,” he said.
Holmes has struggled with his health the last couple years. In 2022, after the remnants of Typhoon Merbok shattered some of the same communities that are part of the Iditarod, he was helping repair buildings in Golovin when part of a house fell on him. He was flown to Nome with a broken wrist and several broken ribs. That winter, he had to train and mush dogs with one arm.
One of Holmes’ mentors in Alaska was longtime Interior musher Bill Cotter, who got into dogs in the early 1970s because of his neighbor Joe Redington Sr., father of the Iditarod. Cotter said he met Holmes 15 years ago when the two passed one another on dogsleds along the Yukon River. Eventually Holmes moved to Nenana, worked for Cotter and learned about mushing from him. “He always listened, used what I said,” Cotter said. “”He has a rapport with dogs I’ve never seen in anyone else.”
Cotter said that each year after Holmes was done with the Iditarod, they’d get together and go over what he did and ought to have done differently. Even as he’s watched Holmes improve and grow more competitive in recent years, Cotter praised him for running “a brilliant race” this year. “Since this was the longest Iditarod ever, he saw right away he’d have to have more rest, and he started doing it right on the first day, and it’s paying off now,” he said.
Not until he was cresting Cape Nome did Holmes begin to allow himself to think that he would win. And it wasn’t until after he finished that he looked back on some of those moments on the trail he could now savor as an Iditarod champion. “Being up in the Blueberry Hills and the most amazing sunset you could ever imagine, the moon shimmering on the glazed snow and the northern lights, and thinking about Jerry (Riley), Rick (Mackey) and Lance (Mackey), all the great legends for me, looking down on me, telling me I could do it.”
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