Every March, Runners Race Reindeer Through the Streets of Anchorage

Like any good origin story, exactly how the Fur Rendezvous Festival’s annual Running of the Reindeer event came to be depends on who you ask.

There’s no argument over who came up with the idea. Anchorage DJ Bob Lester, who is the morning host for radio station KWHL, and his co-host Mark Colavecchio first saw the potential for humans in costumes racing against reindeer through the heart of Alaska’s largest city. According to Lester, while on air one morning in 2007, he was reading about the running of the bulls in Spain when he told his listeners they should do the same thing in Alaska but with reindeer.

“I called my friend Susan Duck, who was the executive director of the Fur Rondy Festival. I told her about it live on air. She loved it and said she’d get to work on it,” says Lester.

John McCleary remembers things a little differently. McCleary is the current executive director of the Fur Rendezvous Festival, affectionately known as Fur Rondy, a winter festival held in Anchorage that celebrates the region’s history and culture with winter sports competitions and activities.

According to McCleary, Lester and Colavecchio were keeping Fur Rendezvous Festival attendees entertained during the sled dog races when they saw a loose reindeer being chased by its handlers. “Bob and Mark were hooting and hollering, having so much fun watching the handlers chase the reindeer,” says McCleary. “Then one of them said, ‘You won’t believe it! Right now in the middle of Anchorage we have the running of the bulls!’ Then there was complete silence. The other said, ‘That should be a new Fur Rondy event next year!’”

Whatever its origin story, ever since it debuted in 2008, the Running of the Reindeer has become one of the signature events of the Fur Rendezvous Festival. As soon as it was announced, locals in Anchorage were electrified by the chance to get so close to the majestic beasts. At the first race, just nine reindeer took part. After the 1,000 human racers set off down Anchorage’s 4th Avenue between D and H Streets, the three and a half blocks where the event takes place every year, the animals chased and then overtook them.

“There is no winner,” says Dakotah Fujan, the assistant executive director at the festival. “The goal is just to outrun the reindeer.”

After seeing how popular the Running of the Reindeer was that first year, the organizers knew they had to separate the runners into four distinct groups. “We had 1,000 competitors in the [first] race, but there was anywhere between 10,000 and 12,000 people jampacked on the streets watching,” says Lester. “It was a beautiful winter day. I’ve had a lot of great days in my life, but after watching the reindeer run and hearing the screams of the crowd, my feet didn’t touch the ground.”

Right from the get-go, participants ran in costumes, too. Some dressed as their favorite superheroes, others in their long johns, while the bravest runners just wore fur bikinis and jockstraps. This is despite the fact that many had to wait in the cold for as long as 40 minutes for their heats to begin.

The Running of the Reindeer’s popularity has only increased in the 17 years since it began. “In the second year we had 1,800 people. In the third there were 2,200. The fourth there was 2,600, and by the fifth there were 2,800 doing it,” says McCleary. Over the years, the Running of the Reindeer has become a huge tourist attraction for the city and state—one that attracts corporate sponsorship, with this year’s run sponsored by Alaska Communications.

The Running of the Reindeer has been recognized internationally, too. The International Festivals and Events Association, which celebrates festivals from around the globe, awarded it gold for Best Event in 2024. The Fur Rendezvous Festival even picked up four other awards at the event, for its charitable contributions, collector’s pin, program materials and website.

History of the Fur Rendezvous Festival

The Fur Rendezvous Festival, which just celebrated its 90th year, was first touted by Vern Johnson, the coach of Anchorage’s professional hockey team, in 1935. He wanted to hold a winter sports tournament in the middle of February to bring the community together after the long winter. “It was a winter sports tournament that was around seven different sports and activities,” explains McCleary.

Since the fur trade was the second-largest industry in Alaska at that time, the decision was made in 1937 to combine the tournament with the mid-February meeting of fur trappers to sell their winter harvests. “They said, ‘Why don’t we call this the Fur Rendezvous rather than the Anchorage Winter Sports Tournament,’ and that’s how it got its name,” adds McCleary. Even now, Fur Rondy celebrates this history with its fur auctions, which are presented by the Alaska Trappers Association.

Every year, Alaskans would anticipate the Fur Rendezvous Festival, as it meant that they’d survived another long, hard winter. “It became a big winter carnival,” says Lester. “It’s like Mardi Gras and spring break on steroids in Alaska. It’s a huge party, full of music, dancing and beer. It has become its own entity.” To celebrate the fact that spring has arrived, and with it, nine hours of sunlight a day compared to just five and a half, visitors partake in a reindeer sausage eating contest, hockey and snow sculpture tournaments, and world champion sled dog and outhouse races, to name but a few of its events.

McCleary believes that anywhere between 80,000 to 100,000 people now attend Fur Rondy over its 12-day run. While about 85 percent of those are Alaskans, he believes 10 percent come from the other U.S. states, and 5 percent arrive internationally. “Throughout January, local businesses are really struggling because it’s so cold and dark,” says McCleary. “But by the second week of February, there’s a different energy. Our mission is more than just providing a festival, it’s about having an economic impact in the city by bringing visitors to Anchorage.”

How the Running of the Reindeer breathed new life into the Fur Rendezvous

The Fur Rendezvous Festival could only have dreamed of such success in the years before the inaugural Running of the Reindeer. “It was kind of struggling,” says Lester. “Attendance was down because there was another winter festival competing with it. Fur Rondy really needed a shot in the arm.” Running of the Reindeer provided just that, with Duck being integral to making Lester and Colavecchio’s quick-witted remark a reality. “She had the contacts. She had the tenacity. She knew it was going to be cool, and she worked so hard to make it happen,” says Lester. “Without her, it’s just an idea.”

One of Duck’s first calls was to Tom Williams, owner of the Reindeer Farm in nearby Palmer, as she sought someone with the knowledge and animals to make the event a reality. “My dad thought it was such a fun, great idea,” says Denise Hardy, Tom's daughter who now runs the farm. “It just embraces the wacky side of Alaska.” Williams was able to provide a crash course to the Fur Rendezvous organizers on the habits of the reindeer, showing how they could be trained to run to the other reindeer.

Each year, on the first Saturday of March, a snow groomer smooths out the surface to make sure the streets of Anchorage are primed and ready for reindeer hooves. It was previously held on the second Sunday of Fur Rendezvous, but it was moved to the day before to coincide with the Saturday night parties. A lot of costumed participants take part in a pub crawl before the run, treating pints and shots as their “antifreeze,” says McCleary. This way, they can bear the cold, sometimes in temperatures as low as 10 degrees above zero when it is time to get moving.

People start showing up for the Running of the Reindeer at around 2:30 p.m. At around 3:30 p.m., the opening ceremony commences, with many songs written by Alaska’s official balladeer, the late Hobo Jim, played and sung. He wrote various tunes about Alaska, including one at the behest of Lester about the Running of the Reindeer. “I remember he wrote the song in like 30 minutes and then he performed it on our show,” says Lester. “It was perfect.”

The first heat runs at 4 p.m., with the fourth and final herd finishing by 5:15 p.m. “The heats are usually split up into women, men, teams and tourists,” says McCleary. “They run down three and a half city blocks, and they’re chased by about 14 reindeer.” Each heat has between 600 and 700 people. “If it’s any more, there’s just too many people, and there’s a crush. It’s better to break it up and make it last a bit longer,” says Lester.

Hardy brings between 20 and 24 reindeer to the celebration, which are then rotated for each heat. “We check to see who is tired and if they need to be subbed out and rested,” she explains. Rather than releasing more than a dozen reindeer at once, they’ll divide them into two or three groups of five or more, so that they can control which direction they go. “Otherwise, they’ll all group together, and there will just be one big group of reindeer that runs to the end,” says Hardy. “This way we can send them down the right, center or left.”

The reindeer are not aggressive and will run alongside people. Instead, it’s the participants that can sometimes try to provoke the animals. “They’ll try to jump in front of them. Some want to get stabbed just for the story,” says Hardy. “But the reindeer are nimble. They’ll jump over them or go around. They have to avoid predators in the wild, so they can certainly avoid intoxicated Alaskans.” While there have been dozens of injuries in the 17-year history of the Running of the Reindeer, they’ve only been from people trampling on their fellow participants after being spooked by the animal. “A reindeer has never injured a single person,” says Lester.

With more people attending the Fur Rendezvous Festival just to take part in the Running of the Reindeer, McCleary and his fellow organizers created a “Far, Far Away Award”—in the form of a gold pan—to honor the individual who traveled the farthest to be involved. “We had a gentleman from South Australia travel 7,567 miles to run with the reindeer,” says McCleary. “We’ve also had people from Mexico, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and every single continent.”

Most important, though, thousands of dollars collected in $35 entry fees are given to the Toys for Tots Foundation. “They always get over $10,000 from Running of the Reindeer every year,” says Lester. Meanwhile, the rest of the Fur Rendezvous Festival helps over 40 other different local nonprofits and charities.

A spectacle worth traveling for

For Lester, both the Running of the Reindeer and the Fur Rendezvous Festival are the perfect excuse to give Anchorage a try even when its weather is less hospitable. “I know everyone wants to come up here in the summer. I get it. There’s nothing like an Alaskan summer. It’ll change your life,” says Lester. “But this gives people a chance to experience a different kind of Alaska. The northern lights are out, the locals are friendly, [and] the event has international flair.”

This year’s Running of the Reindeer once again brought joy and mayhem to the streets of downtown Anchorage. Over 1,500 people are estimated to have run, 300 of whom were from the lower 48 states and different countries. If they weren’t dressed as animals, beer bottles, giant burritos, glittery unicorns, or cartoon and video game characters, runners had on foam reindeer antlers. Some just even wore bikinis and speedos, while one individual, who runs every year in just his underwear, kicked off the event by doing a near-nude snow angel, even though it was just 34 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

It was La’shawn Donelson’s first time taking part in the event, having moved to Alaska from Washington, D.C. nearly three years ago. She dressed as a turkey for her debut run.

“I have never been that close to a reindeer, so being able to run alongside them was fun,” Donelson says. “Some reindeer ran slowly, while others raced past us. People were pulling out their phones to selfie, live stream or take pictures of the reindeer and the run.” She called it a “once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Running of the Reindeer may be the least competitive event held at Fur Rondy, but everyone agrees who the real winners are. “The reindeer won,” says Lester. “They always win.”

Gregory Wakeman | READ MORE

A professional journalist for over a decade, Gregory Wakeman was raised in England but is now based in the United States. He has written for the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, GQ and Yahoo Movies.