Howard Farley, legendary Iditarod musher, passes away at 91

Howard Farley Sr., a legend within the Iditarod community who helped found the Last Great Race, passed away last weekend.

Farley was born May 1, 1932, and after serving in the Coast Guard in 1953, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Agriculture from Washington State University, and soon after, became a journeyman butcher. In November 1959, Howard moved to Nome to work as a butcher for the Northern Commercial Company store, eventually making the town his home.

As he continued to work as a butcher in other places around Nome, Farley obtained a dog team and got involved in the tourism business, helping organize as well as run in the first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1973, which he recounted in a 2007 interview with Project Jukebox, a digital branch of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program after meeting Joe Redington, Sr.

“One year, we used to buy our fish from Unalakleet and I called up the Unalakleet Co-op over there and said I'd like to have some king salmon for the meat market. Well, the guy that answered the phone was a guy by the name of Joe Redington, Sr. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I've heard about you. You're that crazy guy up there who runs dogs out there with wheels.’" Farley had heard of Redington, Sr., who had referred to himself as ‘the crazy guy down here in Anchorage that has a dog team too, and got some ideas.’"

It was as the men talked about sending king salmon that Redington, Sr. pitched the idea of the Iditarod race in 1972 to Farley.

"You know, we're thinking of an Iditarod race," Farley recounted Redington Sr. This was in 1972. I says, "What's Iditarod?"

He went on to say that the men hashed out the plans over the next several months and months, finally confirming the idea in a letter.

“We'd finally worked it out that running the Iditarod from Anchorage to Nome would make more sense than running it to Iditarod and back. So you folks don't know how close we came to not having an Iditarod Race,” Farley said in the interview.

"Dear Howard. We are going to run the race and we are going to call it the Iditarod International Sled Dog Race, Anchorage to Nome, thousand and forty-nine miles." He said that the mileage came to be over a phone call, adding:

"A thousand miles because it's a nice round figure. And forty-nine to commemorate the 49th state."

The Iditarod began in 1973 as an event to test the best sled dog mushers and teams, evolving into the highly competitive race of today.

“He knew it as well as any of us,” Iditarod Race Director Mark Nordman said. “Even today, he was truly a history buff, and being a competitor and being from Nome, he will be dearly missed by all of us.”

There will be a memorial service on Saturday, Feb. 3, at 1 p.m. at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Nome.