Had he done nothing else, Lance Mackey would be a legend for that accomplishment, but he ended up winning both races four times and taking the Iditarod an unprecedented four years in a row, from 2007 to 2010. Winning them in the same year was considered impossible-until Mackey did it in 2007. These brutal, 1,000-mile slogs happen only a month apart, in early February and early March, and it used to be that few mushers would dare to tackle both in a single season. Which is also good, since Mackey will have to cut up nearly 6,000 pounds just to provision the two big races he was planning to enter when I visited him in January of 2013: the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod. Mackey usually wears a baseball cap-even when he's mushing, when he tucks it under a fur-trimmed hood-and he keeps his long, infrequently washed hair in a ponytail that stretches down to his spiky shoulder blades.īecause of the frigid winters in the hills north of Fairbanks, where Lance Mackey's Comeback Kennel sits on five scruffy acres, the massive quantities of bulk meat stacked around the saw require no special storage.
#Lance maccy skin#
The right side of his face and neck are sunken, the result of numerous cancer surgeries that scooped out most of the tissue between skin and bone. He has a windburned face with ice blue eyes that are often bloodshot, half-moon creases on either side of his mouth, and a brown goatee that's surprisingly trim and tame. He is thin and resolute, like a chew toy made of jerky. “Even a stubborn dog can't resist it,” Mackey said.Īs he sawed away, the 43-year-old Mackey certainly looked like a guy who'd spent thousands of hours standing upright on a sled pointed into blasts of Arctic wind. Some stop eating for various reasons, and that's when you dish up the beaver. One of the great challenges of the sport is shoveling enough calories into your dogs, incredible endurance athletes that need to consume between 10,000 and 14,000 calories a day when they're running. Which is fortunate, since beaver, a pungent dark meat loaded with oil, is a musher's secret weapon. Half-buried in icy, urine-stained snow, it is tasked daily with slicing up whole skinned beavers, along with halal-certified lamb chunks, 50-pound blocks of ground chicken and beef, and big king salmon-all of it frozen as solid as the rolling countryside near Fairbanks, Alaska, where any wintertime temperature above minus 20 degrees, Mackey told me, is tropical.īeaver isn't the kind of meat you can buy over the counter, but Mackey's mom has a good connection, a trapper down around Anchorage.
#Lance maccy tv#
If the Hobart Corporation, maker of fine commercial kitchen appliances, ever shoots a TV ad for its band saws, it should definitely feature the one Lance Mackey uses in his dog yard. It takes a sharp blade to cut a frozen beaver into easily digestible strips.
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