An Unspoken Bond

Olivia Bee began watching the Iditarod on TV with her parents when she was a first-grader. “We would pick a musher, and make a little sled out of popsicle sticks, and hope that the musher we picked would win,” says Bee, who lives in eastern Oregon. The 28-year-old photographer largely forgot about her childhood love for dogsled racing until an unexpected backcountry escapade with her husky mix in early 2020: she was wrapping up a day of cross-country skiing when the puppy bolted, and she held on to the leash as he pulled for what felt like miles through the snow. The episode got her thinking about mushing again. “I know what it’s like to get through extreme weather with an animal,” says Bee, who herds cattle on horseback at an Oregon ranch between photo assignments. “It feels magical when you’re connected to another being that can’t talk.” Last winter she traveled to western Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, and Alaska to document women mushers, who are outnumbered in the male-dominated sport. Originally, Bee set out to photograph teams practicing for the Iditarod, but those plans were shelved by the mushers’ intense training schedules. Instead, she connected with a group of racers who are perhaps less competitive but just as dedicated. Some of them participate in amateur events, while others just run with their dogs on their own. Each time she hopped on a motor sled to capture the teams’ dashes through the snow, she struggled to keep up in freezing, blustery conditions. “Sled-dog racing is hard. You can’t do it if you don’t love it with all of your heart,” Bee says. She managed to grab plenty of action shots, but her images revel in quieter moments, too. “Most of the coverage I’ve seen has been about competitions,” she says. “I wanted to bring in the human experience of this crazy sport.”