Libby Riddles

With her competition pinned down in Shaktoolik, Riddles and her thirteen dogs plunged boldly into the storm and onto the sea ice of Norton Sound. The daring move soon looked like a colossal miscalculation. After three hours running against the forty-knot winds, Riddles' team was exhausted. For the next twelve hours, the dogs slept on the snow and Riddles huddled in her sleeping bag. The blinding storm was still raging as the dogs awoke, but the team was rested and ready to run. They never relinquished the lead and, three days later, Riddles rode into Nome and across the finish line—the first woman to win the Iditarod. She covered the 1,135-mile trail in eighteen days, twenty minutes, and seventeen seconds—three hours faster than the second-place finisher. "When I started out across the Sound, it just really looked pathetic because you couldn't even tell one marker from another," Riddles said after the race. "But I figured if it does pan out, it might help me win the race. So I'm going to try it even if it's crazy…. I thought I had the team to do it. I didn't know if I could keep up my end of it."

Riddles had not distinguished herself in two previous Iditarod runs, finishing 18th and 20th. Unable to attract

Libby Riddles

sponsors for the 1985 race, she covered her costs by sewing and selling fur hats and giving sled dog exhibitions for tourists. Once the race began, her team ran away with her sled, she broke a sled brake, and some of her dogs succumbed to an energy-draining virus. Tough competition cemented Riddles' role as the quintessential underdog. Favorites to win the race included Rick Swenson, a four-time champion, and Susan Butcher, who had twice placed second and was widely expected to become the first woman to win the Iditarod. Butcher had to drop out of the race, however, when a moose killed two of her dogs and injured several others, and Swenson was pinned down in Shaktoolik with the rest of the field when Riddles drove into the blizzard on Norton Sound.