From Fairbanks, it's only a five-mile drive to see Mary Shields on a tour that carries her name. In 1973, Mary became the first woman to finish the 1,049-mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race. She lives in a modern log cabin that she and her former husband built. There, she tends to her garden and to her team of huskies. When the first snow blankets the ground in the fall, Mary still mushes her dog (no sled racer actually says "mush!" to start their dogs, Mary told us. The word comes from the French "marchez," which means "to advance." Mush is a verb that means to go on a journey with a dogsled, not a command to start the dogs.)
Mary told us she moved to Alaska more than 40 years ago, inspired by Henry David Thoreau's classic lines in his book, Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essentail facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."