As the relay progressed, newspapers provided their readership accounts of heroism and adventure. The relay teams faced whiteout conditions as they traveled through blizzards in temperatures well below negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Mushers finished stretches of the run with faces and hands blackened from frostbite, and newspapers reported the death of multiple dogs. Seppala, in a risky bid to save time, diverged from the shoreline to travel across the Norton Sound; thirty Eskimo runners lined the riverside waiting for a glance of his team in order to alert the next musher of the hand-off location. Just three hours after Seppala's passage across the frozen river, storms disrupted the waters and broke through the ice. All the while, the count of infected residents slowly rose. As the relay reached its last stretches, weather conditions had worsened to the point that officials ordered the run halted. Fearing the storm would only worsen, Gunnar Kaasan decided to proceed with his leg of the journey. Having overrun his hand-off point by two miles due to poor visibility, the musher continued forward. When reaching the final stop before Nome ahead of schedule, Kaasan found the final team's musher asleep and his dogs unprepared to complete the last 25-mile stretch of the run. After a short rest to warm the serum, Kaasan - led by Balto - completed the final stretch of the relay. The 674-mile relay to save the city was finished in record time, 127 hours and 30 minutes. | Source: Library of CongressDownload Original File
