About this ebook
About the author
Andrea Aufder Heyde has been known as "Finney" during the thirty-four years of her teaching profession. Because of her passion for teaching her students about Alaska and the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, she enthusiastically embraced her school's adoption of a program called CLASS (Connecting Learning Assures Successful Students), which focused on setting goals and using life skills to achieve the goals. In doing do she was inspired to contact the Iditarod education department and shared with them her idea of being a teacher who would go out on the Iditarod Trail and send messages back citing how life skills were being used by not only the mushers, drivers of the sleds, but the dogs to achieve their goal of going from Anchorage to Nome. After steadfastly believing in the educational value of her idea and using many of the life skills herself, the Iditarod committee finally agreed that her idea had value and she could be the first Teacher on the Trail in 1999. She was flown by bush planes as close to most of the checkpoints as possible and dropped off to hike her way to the villages. There she excitedly and passionately watched, listened, and learned the ins and outs of the race, viewed excellent dog care, and interacted with the extraordinary village natives, Iditarod volunteers, teachers and bush pilots. After her trail experience she felt she needed to teach her students about the raising and training of the sled dogs, so she asked a musher if she could work at her Iditarod kennel for a summer. That summer turned into many, many summers of constant hands-on experience with the training and running of a kennel. It was eye opening and constantly gave her more to teach her students. Annui's (ah.noo.EE) story began the first summer at the kennel when Finney met the litter of wee babies. On the flight home to Indiana with Annui in a little cat crate under the seat of the plane, Finney began to write Annui's story. It has developed over the years and Finney felt passionate about telling Annui's story as a tribute to her devotion and love.
