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Home » Diets that Work » Gillette veterinarian treats hundreds of dogs along the Iditarod Trail – Gillette News Record

The first thing Brandi Hudson saw in the pitch black night was a small light that grew closer in the Arctic cold.

A GPS signal had alerted Hudson and her three colleagues to the approach. She stood in a frozen riverbed waiting, the distant light the only indication that the eerily silent and dark Alaskan wilderness was about to turn chaotic.

When the light finally made it to Hudsons group, the night suddenly became like a scene from a silent black-and-white movie.

Steam rose from the exhalations of the team of approaching sled dogs, their path illuminated by the beam of their mushers headlamp as it sliced through the condensation to the trail ahead.

It wasnt until the sled was nearly upon Hudson that the sound of their approach exploded around her.

The first action for the Gillette-raised veterinarian at the legendary Iditarod Sled Dog Race was about to begin.

On the bucket list

The first time Hudson set eyes on the Iditarod Trail was nearly a week prior from thousands of feet above the ground as she gazed from the window of a small aircraft at the snow-covered Alaska wilderness. The trail cut a clear ribbon through a sea of green treetops.

She was in disbelief, unable to fathom how dog-sled teams could possibly complete the daunting nearly 1,000-mile adventure through the elements and rugged Alaska frontier.

Hudson had said goodbye to her husband and two children March 2, but her journey to Alaska started almost two years earlier, precipitated by an ominous dream.

Hudson dreamed she had breast cancer. The next morning she checked and, sure enough, it was true, she said.

An early diagnosis saved crucial time for the veterinarian and treatment was effective. Her final radiation appointment was Feb. 28, 2019, nine months after the dream she now calls divine intervention.

Her battle with cancer was motivation to attempt and accomplish bucket-list things she wouldnt have otherwise. Included on that list was to start a Bible study and lead young women to Christ.

So, too, was traveling to Alaska and working with dogs during the Iditarod.

As a young girl, Hudson became enthralled with Susan Butcher, a four-time champion and the second woman to win the race. That was when the race was becoming heavily publicized in the 1980s.

Actually, one of the first things I wanted to be was a musher when I grew up, she said. Then it kind of evolved into being a veterinarian.

The dream of the Iditarod never left Hudsons mind. She wanted to at least see it once in her lifetime. Her chance came last June.

She applied to be a volunteer veterinarian for the 2020 Iditarod Sled Dog Race, thinking her chances of being accepted were slim to none. In September, the letter arrived.

When I opened it up and read that I was actually accepted, it was pretty exciting, Hudson said. I actually didnt believe it for a while.

It was about a week before she shared the news with her family, waiting until she was 100% sure she wanted to go. Her two kids were outraged not that she was going, but that she would even consider passing up the opportunity.

That she could actually be a part of the Iditarod adventure didnt hit until Hudson was looking out of the plane window at all the snow and ice surrounding the inlet near Anchorage.

That was four days after her one-year anniversary of being cancer free.

Through the darkness

Hudson spent many long days and late nights calving as a girl on the Nuselli Ranch south of Gillette. The 1995 Campbell County High School graduate also has many years of pregnancy testing livestock in the middle of the night as a veterinarian.

That still wasnt anything like being on the ground supporting the mushers and their teams during the Iditarod. She felt prepared as she stood in the minus-15-degree night with the dog sled team approaching.

She and the three other veterinarians were about to begin their first night of work in Skwentna, Alaska, 83 miles into the race and third of 22 checkpoints along the trail.

There was no barking. The dogs just lay down until a runner came to grab the leash of the lead dog and guide the team to an area where their musher had straw laid out.

Then Hudson and her colleagues set to work making sure every dog was fit to continue the race a tall order with all 57 teams still racing in a relatively tight pack at that point.

Starting at 11:30 p.m., Hudson and the three other vets in Skwentna examined more than 700 dogs that night.

Robert Redington, whose father Joe founded the Iditarod in 1973, was the first musher to arrive. It was the light from his headlamp that Hudson saw.

She and the other vets worked tirelessly until the final team pulled in at 7 a.m. the following morning.

It was a mad rush, Hudson said.

By the end of it, Hudson had been awake for nearly 40 hours, including the prep time before teams arrived. Not until the final dog had been examined did the vets retire to the cabin at the Skwentna checkpoint, a small, off-the-grid community of about 90 people.

After about eight hours of sleep, Hudson and one of the other vets hopped on a plane and flew to the eighth checkpoint, McGrath, 311 miles in.

Shed already experienced what many vets dream of, but there was no way to predict all the eye-popping things she would see as she stayed ahead of the 938-mile race for the next two weeks.

Down the trail

As a child, Hudson was constantly going to the mountains with her parents, Kelly and Georgia Rice. In summers, they rode motorcycles and four-wheelers. In the winters, it was snowmobiles.

But the playing didnt start until the work on the ranch was done. Hudson was a hand since age 5. She and her sister werent spared any of the hard work of ranch life. They helped with the branding, docking, shearing, fencing and haying.

After Hudson completed her undergraduate work at the University of Wyoming, she attended veterinarian school at Colorado State University, where she met her husband, Jay.

She and Jay spent many years on 24-hour call as cattle veterinarians. With that lifestyle, shes never been a stranger to freezing cold mornings and taking care of animals at all hours of the night.

But the first time Hudson experienced doing so at minus 50 degrees (without wind chill) was at the McGrath checkpoint. It was so cold that her stethoscopes tubing was almost stiff enough to break and she had to take special care to keep it warm.

Outfitted in her brother-in-laws rock-climbing gear, she managed to fight off the biting cold for the most part. But seeing a sled proceeded by 14 furry bodies was always a welcome and awesome sight.

Thats how we stayed warm, she said.

Born to race

Hudson marveled at the dogs she saw at the six checkpoints she worked. She had spent many hours working with ranch dogs growing up and as a vet, but it didnt take long to realize sled dogs are a different breed of animal.

Those teams of dogs were doing exactly what they had been bred and trained for. They ran more than 100 miles every day and Hudson couldnt help but notice how happy and ready to go they were each day.

Chow time at days end was a sight to behold. When racing, the dogs consume 12,000 calories a day because theyre burning so much energy, and Hudson said the mushers fed them almost pure protein and fat a diet that would kill a normal dog.

She even started to recognize individual dogs as they pulled into checkpoints.

One was the lead dog from Monica Zappas team, called Steel Eyes. The way it responded to Zappa was impressive, she said.

Whenever Zappas team pulled into a checkpoint, Steel Eyes dropped straight to the ground and curled up like it was sleeping. And then was always ready to go at the drop of a hat.

As soon as Monica would say, Are you ready? It would jump up on all fours and bark twice, wag its tail and it was ready to go, Hudson said.

The highly trained canines werent the only ones Hudson took care of along the trail. She remembers second-place finisher Mitch Seavey arriving at the Ruby checkpoint covered in his own blood.

He wasnt doing too well, she said of Seavey, a three-time Iditarod winner. He was kind of panicked, because he had a nosebleed that had happened for three hours and he couldnt stop it.

Hudson and the other vets treated him, cauterizing Seavers nose to stop the bleeding.

Near the finish line in Nome, more complications arose from overflow water that accumulates on top of the snow. Hudson and the other veterinarians switched roles again and joined rescue teams driving snowmobiles with trailers to retrieve teams stuck in the deep slush.

Hudson had been driving a snowmobile since she was 8 years old and knew what she was doing. Her Wyoming upbringing was coming in handy, and not for the first time along the trail.

One of the few times she became uncomfortable was when the head veterinarian asked for volunteers to drive vans on icy roads back to headquarters. Hudson waited for one of the Alaskan workers to volunteer, but nobody did.

Finally someone says, Well, shes from Wyoming, shell do it, Hudson said. They definitely view Wyomingites as people who can deal with the stuff in Alaska.

The finish line

Hudson used to envision being a musher to glide into Nome under the famed Burled Arch having completed the legendary Iditarod Trail at the end of a wild Alaska adventure.

The adventure she had was just as satisfying. Hudson was the only rookie Iditarod veterinarian to make it all the way to the the finish line in Nome this year.

When the final team crossed, a weight was lifted off her shoulders. The race was over and not a single dog had been lost.

Hudson now looks at her Iditarod experience and doesnt feel a sense of accomplishment as much as one of being blessed to be a part of something so special, something she had dreamed of most of her life.

The veterinarians had to monitor the dogs for 72 hours before they flew home. That was when Hudson said she got to know the mushers on a completely different level.

Once the race was over, they let their guard down and told their stories. They were different people after the stress of the race dissipated.

The day after the dogs boarded planes to go home, so did Hudson.

As her flight took off from the airport in Nome, her only thought was getting back to her family. Her bucket list was now one item shorter.

Hudson never became a musher like Susan Butcher. But she completed every checkpoint and challenge put in front of her at the 2020 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and finished in Nome, something not many rookie volunteers or mushers can say.

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Gillette veterinarian treats hundreds of dogs along the Iditarod Trail - Gillette News Record

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Home » Diets that Work » Gillette veterinarian treats hundreds of dogs along the Iditarod Trail – Gillette News Record