The snow was blowing sideways as the blizzard engulfed Rosebud Summit. Alone with her dog team more than 3,500ft up in Alaska’s forbidding White Mountains, then 21-year-old musher Apayauq Reitan struggled to find the trail during the 2019 Yukon Quest.
“The only way for me to tell where it was was by walking in front of the team and sinking into the snow up to my hips,” said Reitan.
This month, as she returns to the world of long-distance mushing, Reitan is poised to make history as the first out trans woman to compete in the Iditarod. But circumstances were very different when she faced Rosebud Summit three years ago.
The exposed mountain summit is one of the hardest sections of the Quest, the 1,000-mile sled dog race through the wilderness of Alaska and Canada. Blizzards, plunging temperatures, dangerous animal encounters and sleepless nights are only a few of the obstacles competitors can face in one of the world’s toughest long-distance races.
She was competing using her deadname and gender assigned at birth. Although she’d already come out to a few close friends, she hadn’t told her family yet. She grew up traveling between Narjordet, Norway, and the tiny Arctic coast village of Kaktovik, Alaska, which is home to about 250 people, and she was worried about how community members, mushers, and others would react. But she realized in her heart the time had come.
“I knew that I couldn’t keep living in the closet,” she said. “I had to start living as my true self.”
Back on the mountain, the trail had disappeared in the whiteout. Many of the reflective markers that lined the way had blown over as the wind gusted up to 60 mph.
“I was really wet from the snow blowing, and from sweat from all the exertion and trying to find the trail,” said Reitan. “I would help [the dogs] pull the sled to get it moving, but then they would run faster than me and I would get tangled and fall in the line.”
Her mother, Anguyak, was keeping a close eye on the online race tracker, which records the movements of the teams in real time.
“I knew she was having a really hard time up there because I’d seen that little, tiny dog team moving this way and that way, and staying in one spot for a very long time,” Anguyak said.
Reitan was exhausted. The dogs were tired. She knew she had to make a decision: quit or push on.
“I was really considering pressing the button that would contact emergency services,” she said. “You have to be OK with quitting in terms of safety. But I was thinking, ‘I’ve come all this way.’”
With the majority of the trail behind her, she had just 70 miles to go to reach the finish line, if she could only make it over the summit.
She pulled her team off the trail and found a stand of willow trees which she hoped would offer protection. But the conditions were too severe for the spindly trunks to provide much of a barrier. The dogs nestled down in the deep snow and Reitan huddled in her sled as the wind howled around her. Exhaustion won out and she fell asleep, alone on the mountain.
“When you’re out there, you have to rely on yourself,” said her father, Ketil.
It was something Reitan had been doing internally for many years before coming out. Just like the snow-covered trail, her path to that point in time hadn’t always been smooth.
She’d struggled as a teenager. She was shy and often kept to herself, spending lots of time alone in her room.
“She didn’t really fit in and had some problems finishing school,” said Ketil. “I felt something was wrong and I was worried about her.”
Looking back, Reitan remembered telling people in kindergarten that she was going to be a girl when she grew up.
“But then, one day I looked in the mirror and thought, nobody’s telling me that this can be a thing. I can’t be a girl. So, I just repressed that thought for years,” she said. “Maybe my life would have been a lot different – maybe I would have avoided a lot of pain in my teenage years if I was told when I was a kid that I could change my gender.”
Time stretched on atop Rosebud Summit. When she awoke, she was chilled to the bone.
“Snow had blown into the sled and I was thinking, ‘If I don’t get moving now, I’m going to freeze,’” she said.
She got up and roused the team. The conditions had improved a bit and her lead dogs could sniff out the trail. Soon, they were zipping down the mountain with the end in sight.
“It’s just like if you have been to the top of Mount Everest,” said Ketil. “You don’t come back as the same person after having completed something like that.”
She finished the race in 14th place. Her perseverance earned her the 2019 rookie of the year award, given to the first rookie to cross the finish line. Just weeks later, she and her dog team returned to the backcountry to compete in the 1,000-mile Iditarod, which they finished successfully, despite a broken sled and bad weather.
With her goal met, she knew it was time to tell her family.
“She seems much more content,” said Ketil. “That makes me happy to see that she’s happy.”
She dropped her English name and started exclusively using her Iñupiaq name, which is gender neutral and which she shared with her great-grandmother. She also got her tavluġun, the Iñupiaq women’s chin tattoo.
“She’s not afraid to do anything. Once she gets her mind to do something, she does it,” said Anguyak. “She’s a very strong person. I’m very proud of her to not be afraid to say what she really means or say who she is. It’s better to let it out than keep it in, I think, and I’m very proud.”
Throughout the pandemic, she attended photography school in Trondheim, Norway, so her main connection with Alaska was online. On 8 March 2021 – International Women’s Day – she came out publicly on social media. Reactions were overwhelmingly supportive, including from fellow mushers who reached out, though she did notice a change in how some community members interacted with her. She said she knows it will just take time.
“Being a trans woman is kind of like life on hard mode,” she said.
But she’s no stranger to that. After the Iditarod, she plans to go back to Kaktovik to work and is considering pursuing a degree in Alaska Native studies in the future.
The race is set to begin on 5 March. That means she’ll be mushing through the Alaska backcountry, adapting to all the trail has in store for her, on the one-year anniversary of her coming out to the world.
“Part of the reason I decided to do the Iditarod again is to have an opportunity to show that you can be trans and do anything,” she said. “I want trans people who are in the closet to see that surprisingly different people can transition and be OK.”
She recalled a night she was out with her dog team before she finished both races in the same year, before the blizzard on Rosebud Summit, and before she came out. It was a full moon night with thousands of stars glittering in the sky above. The only sounds were the whooshing of the sled along the quiet trail and the pitter-patter of the dogs’ paws in the snow.
She looked up at the sky and felt at peace.
“I’m a person and I’m with my dogs, and we’re all traveling together in this very particular way on this one planet, in this one solar system, and there’s all these stars,” she said. “And it’s so amazing to be a being that’s made of star stuff.”
