FeaturesInto The Sport
Jessie Royer
When Jessie Royer and her little brother arrived at the Worlds in 2009, it was a major first for the pair: “It was the first time JJ and I had shot outside of Alaska,” Jessie says.
The Ladies Level 3 and Mens Level 2 competitors had a good enough showing to make their home club proud. But Jessie isn’t your typical mounted shooter.
Yes, she is a ranch girl from Montana. And, yes, she grew up on horseback and handling guns. The big difference is the path that brought her to mounted shooting and what Jessie has done in the intervening years. Jessie Royer races sled dogs.
Mush! “I used to hook up my border collie to my billy goat and that was my first team,” Jessie says. As a child, before she had even heard of the dog sled racing, she would make her “team” haul bales of hay and other things around the ranch.
Then when she was 15, the family moved to another ranch in a part of Montana where sled dog races were held.
“My mom and I went out to help,” Jessie says. She was hooked, so she began putting together a team and going to races in Montana. Twelve years ago she moved to Alaska to train and race with the best teams in the world.
“The capital of dog racing is Alaska,” Jessie says. “The best teams and the biggest races are up here. The funny thing is, it’s actually cheaper to raise a dog team in Montana.”
In spite of the difficulties—expensive dog food, no electricity or running water at her home outside of Fairbanks, and exorbitant race expenses—Jessie has put together a kennel of 60 dogs that are holding their own against the best in the sport. Jessie herself is a world class handler. In 2009, she finished the Iditarod, the most grueling sled dog race in the world, in eighth place. She was the highest ranking woman.
Jessie began running the Iditarod, a race of more than a thousand miles through some of the most challenging terrain on the planet, in 2002. In eight races, she has never finished below 21st, and has been in the top ten twice. In her last two Iditarods, she has been the first woman across the finish line.
Running the Iditarod is physically and emotionally draining. The mushers spend weeks preparing, sending nearly 2,000 pounds of dog food and supplies to drop points along the trail. The entire distance is run in nine to eleven days, depending on the teams and the conditions. During that time, a musher may only get twelve or fifteen hours of sleep during brief breaks in which the dogs are cared for, fed, and bedded down before the human team members can rest.
The 2009 race was run during one of the worst storms in Iditarod history. In her journal of the event, Jessie tells of winds so strong, they blew entire teams and sleds from the icy trails. At one check point, her team got stuck for an unexpected overnight wait, and Jessie had to make a decision early the next morning to face wind chill conditions of minus 70 or to move out and possibly catch up with some teams that were ahead of her.
Racing dogs has filled her need for competition, but Jessie wanted to be around horses again.
“I lived up here for a long time without horses, but growing up with them, I really missed them,” she says. The winters in Alaska are just too hard for horses, especially with no running water at her home. She finally worked out a deal with her parents that her horses could spend the winter months on the ranch in Montana.
Then, three years ago, Jessie discovered mounted shooting.
Shooting Under the Northern Lights There’s a small club in Alaska, the North Range Riders, who hold matches for the three or so months of warm weather each summer.
“I’ve been shooting for three summers,” Jessie says, “but only for a total of about ten months!”
Jessie read about Larry and Tammy Townsend in Western Shooting Horse magazine, so after her first summer of shooting, she scheduled a training session with them the next time she brought her horses to Montana.
“I came back to Alaska pretty much doing everything different,” she says. She bought new pistols and new holsters, ran her patterns differently. The lessons paid off.
By the end of her second summer, even with the limits of the small club and the difficulty of competing outside of Alaska, she reached the Ladies Level 3, where she waits for other women to reach the same level.
Last year, the club applied for and was granted International status with the CMSA. It allows their members to qualify for Worlds with fewer points. Last year, that status allowed any international shooter to participate at the Worlds no matter how many points they had, so Jessie and her little brother JJ were able to compete in Amarillo.
Jessie’s family spends the summers with her in Alaska running a dog tour business, and twelve year old JJ got to shoot with Jessie in 2009. He was the only Junior at the matches, so the family moved him up to the Mens division before Worlds.
“I wish I was down there (the lower 48) in the summer time, and could go around to more shoots” she says. But the responsibility of 60 dogs is not one to be taken lightly. When her family travels to Alaska for their summer work, they bring another 100 dogs for their tour business. Spending a summer shooting outside of Alaska, at least for now, is out of the question.
The Trail Ahead Jessie hopes she can continue to race dogs for many years to come, but the expense is becoming an issue. Her own kennel costs about $50,000 a year to maintain, between training and feeding the dogs, and entering races.
“It costs ten to fifteen thousand to pay for the Iditarod,” she says. As expenses rise and the purses go down, the decision to enter becomes harder each year. “I’d like to keep running it for a while, but might not be able to.”
Jessie will take it a year at a time now. Her decision to run in this year’s Iditarod was only made after she got a sponsor to help. What the future holds–that is for the future to know. For now, Jessie Royer is very busy preparing for this one race and loving every minute of her life.  Related posts:
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