Jessie Holmes took off Sunday with 33 other competitive mushers to begin the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Willow, aiming to defend the championship he won last year. A day into the trek, he was in the lead, with the winner expected to arrive in Nome around March 17 after crossing two mountain ranges and running stretches that include the frozen Yukon River and sea ice off Alaska’s western coast.
Holmes’s profile has included TV exposure, but his routine since his Iditarod win has remained rooted in his backcountry life. He is a carpenter and a former cast member of National Geographic’s “Life Below Zero,” and he said in an interview before this year’s race that he did not chase the kind of fame and deals that sometimes follow an Iditarod title.
“There’s a lot of things that can happen in your life once you win the Iditarod,” Holmes told The Associated Press. “You could become a real big deal, or you could just go back out in the bush and get right back to work, you know? And that’s what I did.”
Holmes’s backcountry world is built around his hand-built homestead near the continent’s tallest mountain, with neighboring communities roughly 30 miles (50 kilometers) away. The Iditarod, he has suggested, aligns with that approach: mushing is a hard, solitary effort, and his post-win life reflects the work it takes to get ready for it.
His path to the Iditarod began far from Alaska. Holmes said mushing was unfamiliar to him growing up in Odenville, Alabama, though he had a habit of bringing home dogs and feeding them out of the fridge after finding them. He later said his interest was shaped by watching the 1972 Robert Redford film “Jeremiah Johnson,” which drew from the legend of a real 19th-century mountain man.
After that inspiration, Holmes set out north at 18, riding passing freight trains before settling in Montana. He eventually attached his hound dog to a sled to help pull equipment during winter, and he described how he only discovered the competitive side of mushing after moving farther north to Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
Holmes moved to Alaska two years later and said he lived off the land in a village on the Yukon River near the Canada border, using his dogs to haul wood and water and to support hunting, fishing and trapping. He described an early racing setback in Fairbanks in 2006, when he finished last in a 200-mile competition and later decided he needed faster dogs—leading him to regroup in a cabin without running water or electricity with nearly 40 dogs, then return to racing in 2012.
After joining “Life Below Zero,” Holmes appeared in 132 episodes across eight seasons, which he said helped him buy better dog food and equipment, and he later bought the land near Denali National Park where he homesteaded. He credited the work behind mushing in the backcountry for his entry into his first Iditarod in 2018, when he finished seventh, earned rookie of the year honors and received a $26,000 check.
He has since competed in every Iditarod, placing in the top 10 in all but two years. Last year’s title came with a check of just over $57,000, and he described the win as “magical,” saying he credited his dogs—his “family.”
This year’s field and prize structure come with added financial context. The Iditarod’s heyday featured major sponsorships for winning mushers, and Holmes said that waning financial support has shrunk the purse while inflation makes it harder for younger mushers to compete. He also noted that a Norwegian billionaire, Kjell Rokke, has provided additional backing as he mushes in a new amateur or “expedition” category.
Holmes said he has a sponsor—a local auto-repair chain—but he has not done paid appearances or events, and he said his income now primarily comes from race winnings and breeding dogs. He also said he was not in favor of amateurs being on the trail, telling The Associated Press, “I don’t really feel like it aligns with the spirt of the race,” and adding, “I just really don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to dig a hole for myself, but I don’t mind saying that I’m not a fan of it.”
In training for the race, Holmes logged distance with his dogs and wrote about conditions in a social media post. He described “Deep snow. Ferocious winds. 40 below and colder,” and said, “Instead of letting it break us, we let it sharpen us.”
The pressure of defending a championship is also part of Holmes’s storyline as he runs this year’s edition. He said the race is the most important of his career, and he pointed to how few mushers have won a second Iditarod title right after their first—Susan Butcher and Lance Mackey. “That’s hard to put that on yourself because you got to live with that pressure every day,” Holmes told The Associated Press. “And if I do not make it, it is going to absolutely crush me.”