Serum Run to Nome: Balto's Heroic Antitoxin Dash

Twenty dog sled teams ran a 674-mile relay across frozen Alaska in a blizzard to deliver 300,000 units of diphtheria antitoxin to the isolated town of Nome, arriving on February 2, 1925 — five and a half days after the serum left Nenana. The temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees. Visibility was zero in whiteout conditions. The final leg was run by a Norwegian musher named Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, a black Siberian husky named Balto, who found the trail by scent when his driver could not see his own hands. Nome in January 1925 was icebound and unreachable by ship or airplane. When Dr. Curtis Welch diagnosed diphtheria in several children and realized the town’s antitoxin supply had expired, he faced a nightmare: a highly contagious disease in a remote community of 1,400 people with 455 children, the nearest serum supply 1,000 miles away in Anchorage, and no way to get it there except by dogsled along the Iditarod Trail. The territorial governor organized a relay of the best mushers in Alaska. A train carried the serum from Anchorage to Nenana, the end of the rail line. From there, twenty mushers and their teams carried the 20-pound cylinder of serum in stages through some of the harshest conditions on earth. Wind chill temperatures reached minus 85 degrees. Several mushers suffered frostbite. One team crossed Norton Sound on sea ice in a gale, with the dogs running blind. Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo covered the most dangerous stretch, 91 miles across the exposed ice of Norton Sound. Kaasen and Balto completed the final 53 miles, arriving in Nome at 5:30 AM on February 2. The serum was frozen but still viable. Dr. Welch administered it immediately, and the outbreak was contained. Five children had already died, but the epidemic was prevented. Balto became the most famous dog in America, immortalized in a statue in New York’s Central Park, though mushers who knew the trail always argued that Seppala’s Togo was the real hero of the run.