What are the odds of a refugee posing as a musher?
Via The Guardian:
For the first time in its 33-year history, dog mushers competing in a gruelling 1,000-mile dog sled race from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon, have been asked to present travel documents to Canadian border officials.
Earlier this week, Brent Sass, a 36-year-old musher from Eureka, Alaska, became the first of 22 competitors in the 2016 Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race to reach Canada, gliding into a checkpoint at Dawson City, Yukon, on Wednesday.
There, he presented his passport to a Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) official.
Asked if he had anything to declare, Sass, the defending champion, replied: “Fourteen dogs.”
Few points along any of North America’s international borders are as remote, wild or forbidding as this, and few travellers are intrepid enough to reach it by dog sled. Yet passports must now be checked.
In previous years, Canadian immigration officials were more relaxed about the Yukon Quest dog-sledders, and did little beyond pre-screening competitors. This year, like all other dog-sled enthusiasts in the city, CBSA personnel in Dawson tracked the progress of the dog teams along the trail via GPS to time their arrival at the checkpoint, said race manager Alex Olesen.
“That’s the first year they’ve actually checked us here,” said the victorious Sass. “We were warned of that, and that’s why we were told to bring our passports with us.”