In director Steve Scearcy’s documentary Without Warning, Alaskan ER nurse Bridget Watkins sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of running the Iditarod. While training in 2022, three weeks before the race, a moose attacked her, badly injuring four dogs. Her sidearm proves inadequate to take down the moose, and she watches in horror as the huge animal stomps the beloved sled dogs she had raised from puppies. She talks about the encounter, admitting that she was ill-prepared: “…I wasn’t prepared to kill a moose, that’s correct … It’s not my intention to go around in February and hunt and kill an animal. This is like a worst-case scenario defending my life.”
Despite the injured dogs and the trauma of the attack, Watkins decides to start the 1000-mile race with her remaining sled team, and her first Iditarod begins. The ordeal is not over, however, as she is on-trail near a competitor named Gerhardt Thiart when a massive storm rolls in and pummels them. The two mushers shelter themselves and the dogs against the raging storm, using satellite emergency beacons to call for help. With Thiart and Watkins both badly injured, their race is over. Watkins refuses to be transported for treatment until workers promise to bring her dogs in safely. She then regroups and starts preparing for a second go at the race the following year.
“… Bridget Watkins faces life-threatening challenges on her first Iditarod …”
Without Warning is a solid film with spectacular footage of beautiful Alaskan tundra and mountainous wilderness. Scearcy’s pacing and editing give the viewer a clear, captivating perspective. There are some weaknesses, however. We only get subjective first-person accounts from Watkins, her husband Scotty, Thiart, and others with minimal factual context. Watkins’ performance is anxious and overly dramatic, almost as if she’s hyperventilating. Scearcy amplifies that anxiety with frenetic smash cuts and urgent musical cues, treating every moment as a crisis. This constant attack on the nervous system wears thin quickly. It’s a cheap trick to hold the viewers’ attention and keep the excitement up. One particularly goofy, pointless moment comes when an indigenous man intones, “My people have a saying: ‘some dangers give no warning’.” While that’s obvious, one could argue that moose and storms in Alaska are not exactly unknown risks. The Iditarod is a dangerous extreme endurance sport in an unforgiving wilderness. Watkins sounds like she’s surprised about that.
The film does not present any history of the race, which was conceived in 1967 by Dorothy Page, a White woman who moved to Alaska from New Mexico. She proposed a 1000-mile dog sled race on the historic Iditarod gold-rush era mail delivery trail to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alaska becoming a U.S. Territory.
This is a hard film to stomach for dog lovers. I’m looking at my lazy rescue who tried to push me out of bed last night, and can’t help but question how sled dogs are treated. The Iditarod typically takes 11 days, with 10 hours a day of running. Each year, up to 6 dogs die of exhaustion, and more die or are injured in training. These loyal animals go when asked by mushers who profess to love them as family, but who then run them to death. If humans risk life and limb in an extreme sport, that’s on them, but killing dogs (and moose) to scratch that itch is unethical.
Without Warning is an entertaining, if overwrought, look at Bridget Watkins taking on the Iditarod race twice, and the challenges she overcame to do so.
Learn more at the official Without Warning website.
"…an entertaining, if overwrought, look at a first Iditarod race"
