POLAND – On its face, it’s a little hard to understand why a century-old dog sled journey across the Alaska wilderness has much to do with Maine.

But it does.

Poland Spring Resort, dog sledders and an assortment of fans are organizing to honor a Seppala Siberian sled dog that Time magazine once called “the most heroic animal of all time.”

They’re going to make 2025 “the Year of Togo,” said Cyndi Robbins, owner of the resort.

Togo spent his glory years leading a dog team on the ice and snow of the Yukon River valley and Bering Sea, including a famed trek in 1925 that delivered diphtheria serum to save the children of the isolated Alaskan town of Nome.

In the way of things, though, Togo wound up, like many a retiree back in the day, sitting beside a warm fire at the Poland Spring Resort. He lived out his final years far from the freezing winds and subzero temperatures of his youth.

That was nice for him, of course, but his legacy lives on through another Maine connection: Togo and his canine colleagues were the crucial cogs in establishing the Poland Spring Seppala Kennels, which successfully set out to breed Seppala Siberian sled dogs, named after famed musher and Togo’s owner Leonhard Seppala.

As a result, there are a handful of kennels in the region devoted to keeping the dogs’ descendants true to their traditional nature, with at least a hundred dogs from Togo’s lineage still around should the necessity of wintertime vaccine deliveries or some other critical transportation need ever arise.

Robbins owns one of them, Sawyer, who’s a decade old and blind.

Sawyer helped pull a sled through the Maine woods just a couple of years ago for a successful fundraiser that paid for the creation of a statue of Togo, which now stands beside the Maine State Building adjacent to the resort as part of the Poland Spring Museums complex.

Sawyer, though, ran out of juice halfway through the weeklong trip and spent the last three days sitting in the basket with Maine musher Jonathan Hayes.

When they reached the end of the journey in Greenville, on the shores of Moosehead Lake, Robbins said she told Hayes that “I’m taking Sawyer home. It’s time for Sawyer to retire.”

And so he has, just like his great forebearer, Togo.

TREKKING THROUGH ALASKA

The biggest event of the yearlong celebration of Togo starts next month when Hayes takes as many as 22 of his Seppala Siberian sled dogs in a 32-foot trailer from his Poland Spring Seppala Kennels in Madawaska, across the Trans-Canada Highway, to the state once known as Seward’s Folly, in what is being called the Centennial Seppala Expedition.

Once there, they’re going to follow the original, nearly 700-mile route that Togo and other dogs took 100 years ago across the rugged terrain between Nenana, a tiny town west of Fairbanks, and Nome.

He said they’ll follow “the actual route of the original,” departing on Jan. 27 “on the actual day of the original.”

Hayes said they’ll travel through the most frigid and darkest days of Alaska’s harsh winters, when temperatures can drop to 40 degrees below zero, chilly even for sled dogs that relish the cold.

Along with tents, blankets, a satellite phone and a heap of supplies, his team will haul a symbolic load of diphtheria medicine, “reflecting the spirit and significance of the original mission,” Hayes said.

The plan is to arrive in Nome 18 days later, on Valentine’s Day, but Hayes readily confesses that given the darkness and the cold, that may prove too ambitious.

Honestly, he admitted, he just wants to arrive at all.

His father, Hayes said, dreamed of his son falling through the ice with his dogs, vanishing forever — a fate that almost befell the original team.

Hayes said he and the three other men who are going along, including well-known polar explorer and mountain climber Eric Larsen, have tried to work out exactly what’s needed for a safe trip. But Alaska in winter is bound to be tricky at that time.

“If this is the way I go,” he said, he will at least have perished doing what he loves.

Hayes, who has a wife and seven children, said he grew up in Tennessee and joined the military as a young man. He said he trained for wintry weather duties.

He came to Maine in part three decades ago because its lifestyle and climate attracted him.

Hayes is a life science teacher for students in seventh to 12th grade in St. Agatha. He said his students may not understand the scope of the undertaking he’s about to embark on, but they are “really excited” about it.

It’s been a lot of work getting all the preparations in place, Hayes said.

“I’m already exhausted,” he said. “It’s big. That’s why I’m stressing so much.”

But he is also excited about the adventure that will soon get underway.

“I’m a very nostalgic person by nature,” he said. “I love traditional things.”

He said he’s the type of guy who prefers canoes to speedboats, horses to dirt bikes and, of course, dog sleds to snowmobiles.

TOGO’S TALE

When diphtheria hit Nome, health officials hired Seppala and other mushers to create a chain of dog sleds to race the needed serum from Nenana on a trail normally used for wintertime mail deliveries. It included shelters along the way for the carriers.

Seppala, a Norwegian native who joined a gold rush to Nome in the early 1900s, had by then become a musher who guided dog teams he carefully assembled through several hundred miles of wilderness to ensure mail and supplies reached the western Alaska town when nothing else could get there.

Over time, he had bred a specialized breed of lightweight Siberian sled dogs that exhibited the traits he sought for his widely admired teams — a breed that came to carry his name.

Togo, the leader of Seppala’s team at that time, had little choice but to take on the assignment to race to Nome that freezing winter along the hardest bit of the trail, 261 miles of icy danger.

“Togo’s the one that ran the furthest” along the entire route, Robbins said.

The dogs took Seppala and the necessary medicine along the frozen Tanana River to the equally iced-over Yukon River all the way to the Bering Sea, where the last team raced the serum into Nome.

In the first news stories about the achievement, reporters tended to heap praise on another dog, Balto, the lead dog for that final leg of the journey into Nome. They didn’t know Togo had run the farthest through the hardest territory, Robbins said.

But over time, Togo’s fame grew while Balto’s declined. A 2019 Disney movie titled “Togo” cemented which dog would be remembered most.

Interest in the breed soared after “Togo” hit theaters, which Hayes said had its good points as well as bad ones.

It caused the price of Seppala puppies to rise, he said, which was hard for some people.

Worse than that, though, were breeders pretending their dogs were Togo’s heirs. There were dogs billed as Seppala Siberian sled dogs that didn’t have the right lineage or the character and traits that make them distinct.

On the other hand, he said, “the right kind of attention” can help make people more aware of some great dogs with special skills.

TOGO IN MAINE

When Seppala came to Maine in 1927, two years after the famed life-saving trip, it was a colder, snowier place than it is today.

“Back then, we had real winters,” Robbins said.

Seppala and Elizabeth Ricker, a Poland Spring Resort owner at the time, became so close that they opened a Poland Spring kennel to breed more dogs from Togo’s line.

Seppala also decided, not without qualms, to leave Togo in Maine to live out his life with Ricker, not so different than Sawyer’s happy fate with Robbins today.

Hayes operates the kennel today in Aroostook County, but Poland Spring is where Togo lived and where visitors can see a statue of the dog by Maine artist David Smus.

The idea of having a Year of Togo is meant to help raise awareness of Togo and his connection to Poland Spring, organizers said, and to shine a light on his canine descendants.

Nobody involved will mind if it brings more people to Poland Spring, too.

“There’s a lot of interest in dogs, but not a lot in museums,” Robbins said.

Next summer, Robbins said Poland Spring will do a number of showings of the Disney film that brought new prominence to Togo’s tale.

Visitors will also be able to enjoy the existing Togo Trail that cuts a path through the woods at the Poland Spring Resort. It includes markers that tell Togo’s story in a child-friendly way.

Togo is becoming an ever-bigger star.

Robbins said the resort offers a Togo beer that Lewiston’s Baxter Brewing makes.

“It’s my second most popular beer,” she said, trailing only a ubiquitous national brand.

TOGO’S HEIRS

Hayes is among the small band of breeders working hard to keep Togo’s heirs true to their forebearer.

“We’ve been keeping these guys distinct,” Hayes said, with care taken to track lineages and prevent potentially crippling inbreeding.

So far, it’s working out.

Leading his team during next month’s Alaskan odyssey, Hayes said, will be Druid, who has the experience.

“He’s my rock right now,” Hayes said.

He’s getting old, though, so “this is going to be his last hurrah.”

Fortunately, an unexpected successor has emerged in one of his other dogs, named Juno.

He said Juno came into the world “so little, sickly and runty” that he couldn’t imagine she’d ever amount to anything. She seemed so lacking in promise that he decided he would not even sell her to someone as a pet.

But Juno, a finicky eater with no obvious skill, “became a monster” once harnessed to the sled at 9 months old.

“A little tyke of a thing,” Juno gives “100% all of the time,” Hayes said, and never lets up.

Juno will lead a second team on the Alaska trek, he said, and later will be top dog when Druid gets his turn by the fireside.

“So much of it is heart. So much of it is spirit,” Hayes said.

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