[Stateside Twins' Eyeshot]Lost Times in Memory

Libby Riddles.American dogsledder.

The 13th annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1985 was particularly grueling- "jinxed from the start by bad weather, bad trail and bad luck," according to Associated Press reports. Temperatures plunged to -50 degrees Farenheit and storms twice forced race officials to halt the competition, for a total of eighty-seven hours, and fly in emergency rations of dog food. So it looked like more of the same when, after two weeks of racing, an oncoming blizzard compelled dogsledders to hunker down on a Sunday night in Shaktoolik, an Eskimo village on the coast of northwest Alaska.
It wasn't more of the same for 28-year-old Libby Riddles, however. For Riddles, it was an opportunity to rise up and write a new page in Iditarod history.