Doggone Entertaining Alaskan Dog-Sled Racer Turned Author Visits Spokane Schools

Shelley Gill urged the children to imitate the sound of 300 sled dogs, then ordered, “Louder!”

She got laughs for the way she over-pronounced “halibut.” She howled at the moon.

The author and former Iditarod musher entertained Willard Elementary School students Wednesday with stories of her home in Alaska, a land where anything can happen:

Where a grizzly bear breaks into an artist’s paints and leaves purple footprints on the cabin ceiling.

Where a moose bursts from the woods like a freight train and knocks a musher off her sled.

Where a Florida woman learns to race the 1,100-mile Iditarod dog-sled race.

Gill grew up in Delray Beach, Fla.

“I would sit under coconut trees and eat dill pickles and read about all the places I would go someday.”

At age 18, she arrived in Alaska in a Volkswagen bus looking for Jack London-style adventure.

She found it six years later when she became the fifth woman to complete the annual Anchorage-to-Nome dog-sled race. She met Susan Butcher that year and still counts the four-time race champion as a friend.

Now, at age 41, Gill, a former newspaper reporter, continues her adventures while researching and writing children’s books. This spring, she’ll live among Russia’s reindeer-herding people for her next book.

“When I write a book, I want it to be a throat-gripping page-turner,” Gill told the students. “One way to do that is to smell your story, taste your story, squish it through your teeth like Jell-O pudding.”

Gill also wrote a teaching guide and school curriculum centered around the Iditarod race.

The program teaches science (what causes the northern lights), geography (reading topographic maps), social studies (the culture of native Alaskans) and writing (students write to children who live along the Iditarod trail).

Gill’s trail takes her to several other Spokane elementary schools today. She spoke in Sandpoint on Monday and in West Valley schools Tuesday.

At Willard, she stood in one corner of the cafeteria and pointed to the opposite corner to show the distance between a musher and the lead dog.

Gill’s first book, “Kiana’s Iditarod,” is “a love note to my lead dog.” She named her 6-year-old daughter Kye after another sled dog.

Dressed in a reindeer-skin parka and carrying a fossilized woolly mammoth bone, the 5-foot-6 Gill looked powerful and otherworldly. Besides selling books, she visits schools to show children that women can be adventurers.

“Did you ever pet a grizzly bear?” one boy asked - and one could see how a child would believe Gill could.

“No, that would be a bad idea,” Gill told the boy. “When we walk in bear country, we don’t sneak up on them. We say, ‘Yo, bear! We bad; we comin’ through!”’

She also gave an environmental message, condemning logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

“When you dream of Alaska, you’re dreaming of the Tongass,” she said. “We don’t need to be cutting 3,000-year-old trees to make things we’re going to throw away.”

After Gill’s talk, parent Marie Walker brought her 5-year-old son, Nikolaus, into the school library to get a book signed.

“We’re canceling our trip to Disneyland,” Walker said. “He wants to go to Alaska now.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo