Courtesy Amanda Otto - Driggs, Idaho 
Local dog sledder Amanda Otto chases down Iditarod dream
It was about 1 a.m. deep in the Alaskan wilderness and a rookie musher named Amanda Otto was driving her team of 12 sled dogs up a 4,500-foot mountain slope called, “The Hump,” pushing into the Gakona River Valley.
She was almost 41 miles out of the Chistochina checkpoint gliding along the tundra on one good sled runner. The other runner (or blade) was cobbled together with the help of a repair kit after it snapped in half on a difficult turn a few miles back.
“The dogs (were) sliding that sled in the dark and I looked up and thought, wow, that’s a bright star,” Otto said describing her feelings going up the mountain. “But then I realized that it wasn’t a star — that was a trail marker reflecting off my headlamp. And I think, well, what goes up must come down and the dogs took off down the mountain at full speed. They were having a hell of a lot of fun. Thank goodness it was dark and I couldn’t see how far down we were going.”
The Copper Basin 300 is one of the toughest dog sled races in Alaska. And it was one of the three races that Otto, 27, finished this season earning her first qualification to run in the Iditarod, the world-renowned, 1,049-mile race held in Alaska every March.
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