(100 points {No link answers} brainiest to whoever meats the standards) Write an informative essay on the Iditarod dogsled race. Your essay will use research to describe the Iditarod’s history, including the event that inspired the first race. (2 paragraph minimum)

Since 1973, mushers have challenged themselves in a race nicknamed The Last Great Race on Earth®, racing each March from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. Nearly a thousand miles in length, mushers and teams travel over mountain ranges, through monotonous, flat tundra, to the western Alaskan coast and finally to the town of Nome, established when gold was discovered there in 1898. By 1899, Nome’s population numbered 10,000.

The route that most of the race follows is a trail that was created long before the race became a race. Used by Native Alaskans for hunting and travel to various villages, the Iditarod Trail was cleared in 1908 by government employees, but it wasn’t until the 1910 gold discoveries in Iditarod which is a ghost town now, Ruby, Ophir, Flat, Nome, Elim, and other villages, that it became regularly used as a means of supplying miners and settlements with mail and supplies, delivered by dog team. It also provided the route for gold to be sent out of Alaska when the Bering Sea was frozen, preventing ships from reaching Nome for months at a time. Dog sled teams carried gold to the ice-free bay at Seward to be loaded on ships there.