Iditarod ‘musher’ Pat Moon visits Elgin’s Creekside School

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

ELGIN — The Iditarod came through Elgin Thursday — or, at least, one of its mushers and his fastest sled dog, Hera, did.

Pat Moon spoke to students at Creekside Elementary School in Elgin, including students who had learned about and written to the Illinoisan in teacher Donna Yehl’s fourth-grade gifted class.

“I learned about it like everybody else in grade school at some point,” Moon said.

The Park Ridge resident later got the idea to start his own dog sled team after he won the opportunity to ride along for the first 12 miles of the 2006 Iditarod as part of the Idita-Rider charity program. And in February, he won the International North Hope Invitational, Russia’s version of the famous Alaskan dog sled race.

Yehl’s students and their kindergarten buddies learned about Moon’s team while studying the Iditarod last year. They tracked the rookie musher’s progress through the race, and when he “scratched” after hitting a tree, they sent him get-well cards.

Then, Yehl said, “He called me.”

“It took him a year to read our letters. I just sent it to a P.O. box. Teachers never think you’re going to hear back from anybody, and I was crazy enough to put my number in there.”

There’s a lot of crazy that goes into sled dog racing, Moon said, especially since “I’m not the most healthy person in the world.”

Moon has been diagnosed with both an auto-immune disease and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, he said. His goal is not only to finish the Iditarod healthy, but also to prove to anyone who has an illness that anything is possible.

He plans to compete again in the Iditarod next year, he told the students at Creekside. That’s more than 1,150 miles, with temperatures ideally around -25 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. The dogs will start to feel cold at -40, and he’ll stop racing at -80, he said.

An average sled dog runs about 8 or 9 miles per hour, Moon said. Hera, though, tops out at 35, he said, to “oohs” and “aahs” from the students.

Moon and Hera also demonstrated the high-pitched call that will bring his sled dogs running from anywhere, anytime, he said. And he dressed Yehl’s substitute teacher in the same snow pants and coat with a fur-lined hood he wears while racing.

“It was cool,” said student Marcus Nguyen, 10. “I liked it when she dressed up.”

And classmate Aakash Nagarapu, 9, said, “I liked when Pat Moon called the dog.”

The students had raised money to bring Moon to the school. They had hoped to collect a $350 donation for the musher, and presented him with more than $750 Thursday, Yehl said.

Yehl said she’s taught a unit on the Iditarod for the past five years. Each student in her fourth-grade gifted classes pulls a musher’s name from a hat, then tracks his progress through the race in March.

For the coming year, Moon promised all of Creekside’s classrooms access to the Iditarod Insider so they can track him and watch video of the race, too. But he said they couldn’t pet Hera.

“It’s kind of like you’d like to drive Jeff Gordon’s car, but he’s probably not going to let you,” he said.