Butcher, Susan H. (Mrs. Monson)
Sled dog racing
b. Dec. 26, 1954, Cambridge, MA
d. Aug. 5, 2006
As a child, Susan Butcher learned to love the outdoors during family trips to Maine. She moved to Alaska when she was 20 to begin training and racing sled dogs.
She first made headlines in 1979, when she and Joe Redington Sr. became the first mushers to drive a sled dog team to the top of Mount McKinley, North America's highest mountain at 20,320 feet.
Butcher drove the famous Iditarod Trail race for the first time in 1978. She was the fourth woman to enter and the first to finish in the money, placing 19th. The following year, she finished 9th, and she moved up to 5th place in 1980 and 1981. After coming within three minutes of victory in 1982, Butcher fell back to 9th place in 1983.
She finished second again in 1984, then got off to a great start the following year, setting a record for the fastest time between Anchorage and Eagle River and leading through the first three checkpoints. But then a moose attacked her team, killing two of her dogs and injuring 13 others, forcing her withdrawal.
Butcher finally won the big race in 1986. She was the second woman to win, after Libby Riddles, who had finished first the previous year.
By winning in 1987 and 1988, Butcher became the first musher to win three straight Iditarods. She won again in 1990, becoming the second driver, after Rick Swenson, to win the race four times.
The modest and soft-spoken Butcher tended to downplay her accomplishments by saying that the dogs did all the work, while she was merely the coach.
After the 1994 Iditarod, Butcher retired from competition because she and her husband, Davis Monson, wanted to have children. They subsequently had two daughters, Tekla and Chisana.
She was planning to come back to take part in a 300-mile race when she was diagnosed with leukemia in December of 2005. She died soon after having a stem-cell transplant.