Blowhole the Sled Dog Became a Social Media Star—But Was He a Criminal First?

If you’ve never heard the legend of Blowhole, I can tell you all about it, because I was there from the start.

My husband and I are dogsledders. Wisconsin-based, though we travel; when your life revolves around sled dogs, you’re always chasing snow. We met Blowhole in April 2018. I had entered the Kobuk, an unsupported, 440-mile race between seven remote villages in the Alaskan Arctic, and I’d borrowed dogs from a few friends to fill out my team. One of them was a shaggy black and white two-year-old owned by Inupiaq musher Ryan Redington. Like most modern sled dogs, he was an Alaskan husky: a thick-furred, super-athletic mutt. He was named for the vicious wind tunnels that form on the Bering coast, the ones that threaten to throw you out to sea and, heck, halfway to Siberia. Blowhole.

The race started on ice. Blowhole pulled hard, muscles rippling under fur, as we crossed the wind-carved surface of Kotzebue Sound. No sooner had we reached land than he stepped into a moose hole—a deep, tube-shaped footprint left by the antlered beast. He charged on, but his gait was off; he’d tweaked a wrist. I unhooked his harness and made him ride with me in the sled.

It feels heartless, carrying a dog that wants to run, but not as heartless as what I did next—though I acted with genuine concern. In the village of Selawik, I left Blowhole with race volunteers so his wrist could rest and heal. He was given warm food, a straw bed, attention, and massages. I knew we’d see each other again when the race was over. But he was distraught. All he wanted was to keep going. He howled desperately as the other dogs and I continued down the trail without him.

Days later, after the race, my husband and I brought Blowhole back to Ryan’s place in Knik. Immediately after we left, we discovered that the brakes on our truck were barely working. We white-knuckled it to a repair shop, where a mechanic diagnosed the problem and scrawled it on our $1,200 bill: Brake lines chewed by dog.

And this is where the legend begins to spiral into something greater than all of us, uniting a sea of strangers with broken equipment, looking for meaning and explanations.

I posted a jokey tweet about what had happened. “Blowhole owes us $1,200,” I griped next to a photo of his defiant face, ears up and eyes narrow inside his black bandit’s mask.

“That is the least innocent face I’ve ever seen,” someone commented. Others were sympathetic: “The only thing he’s guilty of is being a good boy.” Well-known social media accounts started weighing in, including @darth, the anonymous dog-adoring Photoshopper beloved by hundreds of thousands of followers.

“DOES THIS LOOK LIKE THE FACE OF A PUP WHO WOULD CHEW THROUGH A TRUCK BRAKE LINE AND CAUSE $1,200 IN DAMAGES I DO NOT BELIEVE SO,” @darth tweeted on April 24, followed shortly by Blowhole’s face on a wanted poster with the caption BRAKE LINE BANDIT.

As word spread—as Blowhole went viral—responses kept pouring in.

“You can’t name a dog Blowhole then be angry when he blows a hole in your break lines.”

“They had more evidence on Meek Mill.”

“Blowhole is my hero.”

Soon it seemed that half of Twitter had an opinion about Blowhole and the question of his guilt or innocence. Obviously, I was sure he’d done it. He had the means: teeth. He had the motive: revenge, against yours truly for benching him. I assumed most people would look at the facts and come to the same conclusion. I assumed wrong.

Some celebrated his bad behavior. Others said he was framed. Eventually, in the style of ever changing internet semiotics, he became a symbol of different things to different people. Perpetrator. Victim. Mystical being, associated with weird stuff that went wrong with vehicles, technology, and pretty much everything else, all over the world.

“Dammit, Blowhole,” wrote a journalist in Alaska when her debit card—bravely personalized with a photo of the dog himself—was canceled by her bank.

“Dammit, Blowhole,” complained a woman in Croatia when her toilet flooded the laundry room.

“Dammit, Blowhole,” said a guy in Minneapolis after a SpaceX rocket exploded last April.

Ryan Redington won the Iditarod in 2023, sealing his status as a mushing legend. Like me, though, he can never quite escape Blowhole’s gravitational pull. When he speaks in front of fans, somebody in the audience often calls out: “Free Blowhole!”

In these ways and many others, the legend grew. Blowhole became a cryptid, child of anarchy and son of Rage (literally—that’s his mom’s name), catalyst for rabid discussions about the nature of guilt itself, even as the dog at the heart of the furor slipped quietly from public view. He never read the memes or saw the fan art created in his honor. He wasn’t present for his online trials. He didn’t face any juries. His face adorned stickers, notebooks, magnets, bumpers of wheelchairs, and cars he’d never chewed. He wasn’t aware that he was presumed to be on the run, that he’d been sighted in South Africa, Germany, and a 15th-century Dutch painting. And if he did know, he never let on. That was Blowhole’s power. He didn’t let on to any of it.

One of Blowhole’s most ardent supporters is a mild-mannered 34-year-old man from Iowa named Austin Hancock. Offline he plays trumpet and helps oversee an assembly line. Online he’s been Blowhole’s self-appointed lawyer for the past five years, representing his client in mock trials and defending him from slanderous allegations whenever they arise. He posts under the handle @sasshole on an X account dubbed the Blowhole Innocence Project, but most Blowhole stans call him Sass. Needless to say he loves dogs, and he tends to pop up anytime someone mentions one that has misbehaved—like, say, by tearing open a bag of kibble and spreading it around the kitchen. “Innocent!” he’ll proclaim.

Sass and I have never met in person, but we’ve communicated a lot. Last fall I called him to discuss the metaphysics of canine guilt. He walked me through a concept at the heart of his worldview: universal basic innocence.

“I think dogs are dogs and humans are humans, and our concept of guilt is something we’ve mapped onto them and they don’t really understand,” he said. “I guess I’d say that since they don’t understand guilt, they are all innocent.” In addition to his online efforts to clear Blowhole’s name, he spreads his message IRL. “Sometimes that just means yelling ‘Innocent!’ whenever I see or hear something about a dog,” he said. “It’s a grassroots movement. Not all that organized. I’d say there’s room for growth as an industry.”

As for his legal training, Sass is modest, since he has none. “My expertise is really more constricted to what we refer to as dog law. The dog law system.”

One thing always confused me about the public’s defense of Blowhole, I told Sass. People claimed passionately that he hadn’t done it. But it seemed to me that if he had chewed our brake line, he might be dang proud of it. In maintaining his innocence, were Blowhole’s supporters diminishing his triumph? What’s a dog have to do to get credit for eating a truck around here?

I offered a hypothetical. Let’s say there’s a dog named Snowhole. If we knew for a fact that Snowhole ate a brake line, and there were witnesses, and then Snowhole pooped out half a brake line—

“I think that, in any situation where a dog eats a brake line, they’re still innocent,”
Sass said.

“Have you ever tried a brake line yourself?” I asked.

“I have not.”

“Would you consider it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“If it were delicious, would that change your mind about anything?”

“I think I may have stepped into a bit of a trap here,” Sass said.

“Say I feel that I’m universally innocent,” I said. “Can I be tried in a dog court of law for my crimes?”

“I have to say, we haven’t had any cases like that. Although,” he conceded, “the dogs, when you talk about their cases with them, they yawn and go back to their sticks. They’re not even an ancillary part of this. What we’re trying to do is go after humans when we think what they’re doing is unfair.”

“And by ‘go after’ you mean—”

“Yelling ‘Innocent!’ ” Sass confirmed.

Blowhole, eight years old and retired from long-distance racing after an esteemed Iditarod career, now lives at a tour company called Nature’s Kennel in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s a well-run operation where visitors can pet sled dogs, take a dog-powered sled ride, and even drive their own team. The kennel is home to almost 150 huskies, who are divided into much smaller groups, each with its own full-time musher. Blowhole’s musher, Elizabeth Coons, is a 21-year-old from Plainview, Minnesota, who’s on her fourth year at Nature’s Kennel. Blowhole is her favorite. She requests him for her team every season.

I drove to Michigan to see Blowhole for the first time since our fateful encounter years before. It was September; autumn leaves were just starting to peak. “Maybe bring him some brake lines to chew?” Sass texted. “There’s a first time for everything.”

What better peace offering? I stopped at Auto Value in Munising, a boxy store near the gray-blue expanse of Lake Superior. “Can I help you?” said the man behind the counter, turning his cap forward. I need a brake line, I told him. What kind of vehicle? he asked. Any kind, I said. It’s for a dog to gnaw on.

“I know just the one.” He led me to a wall and handed me an eight-inch length of braided steel, smaller and thinner than Blowhole’s previous quarry. “I think it will be tender.”

When I arrived at Nature’s Kennel—it was half hidden within a maze of sandy roads and sparse forests crisscrossed by ATV tracks—I tucked the brake line into my pocket. The kennel was spotless, each building brightly painted, with a towering three-story playground for puppies and a network of playpens connected by bridges and tunnels, all surrounded by ripe blackberry bushes. The tour dogs stretched and snoozed just past the play area. They had already run that morning, in the crisp dawn air, and now they were napping in the midday warmth.

Elizabeth drove a tractor between rows of doghouses, pushing sand around, then hopped off when she saw me. She was blond, warm, and energetic. She petted a few dogs as she walked over, then led me to the accused himself, who showed no sign of recalling our storied past. He only had eyes for Elizabeth. He wrapped his front legs around her waist, lifted his chin to gaze at her face.

“Can you go oooh?” she said.

“Oooh,” Blowhole howled.

“Yeahhh,” she said. “You like to sing.”

He was just as shaggy as I remembered, just as muscular, but with a fraction of the mania he’d radiated at age two. There’s an angst in some young huskies—as much as they run and run, it will somehow never be enough. He was chill now, older. Mature?

“If he were a human, he’d have a flip phone,” Elizabeth said. “He’d talk to every person at a party. He’d be a construction worker. He’d drink Red Bull. His friends would be like: You should stop drinking those. He’d be like: No, man. It helps me get so much more done!”

She was training for her first race that winter, and planned to pick Blowhole for her team. He was a follower, not a leader. When she tried to put him in front—the lead dog position—he would turn around and come back to the sled to see her. But as a team dog, he shone. He was always trying to get the other dogs motivated.

Elizabeth knew in a general way that Blowhole was famous, but not why. I tried to keep my voice casual. “Would you say you notice things… breaking around here?”

“Breaking? Like collars? Equipment?”

“Like equipment… near him?”

She looked around, a hand on Blowhole’s back. “Not a whole lot, actually. He’s the least of my worries when it comes to chewing rope and stuff. Why?”

I told her the whole story.

“Gosh,” she said. “I’m gonna keep him away from the truck.”

I took the brake line from my pocket, asked Elizabeth if I could give it to Blowhole to chew. I might have slipped it to him secretly, but you don’t give anything to someone else’s dog without permission. I placed the line on the sand. Blowhole sniffed with interest, if not obvious recognition, and then placed a paw on top of it.

We stepped back to give him privacy, and I petted some of the neighboring dogs, who’d been waiting for our attention. One of them, Nickel, was smaller, soft as velvet. Elizabeth said he was her youngest, barely out of puppyhood. I was pregnant; he snuffled his lips against my huge belly, hopeful and eager, trying to nurse. It was cute. Then he started nibbling with his teeth.

I backed away, feeling guilty for disappointing him. There it was again: guilt. But I hadn’t done anything wrong, had I, in stepping back? Anyone would do the same if they didn’t want to get gnawed. And maybe anyone would chew a brake line if they were a lone sled dog with 400 miles’ worth of unburned energy, in need of a tasty distraction.

When we came back to Blowhole, he was lying next to the brake line, eyes half closed. He hadn’t so much as licked it.

“I think he spoke with his lawyer before you came,” Elizabeth said.

Blowhole yawned.

I could see where his fans were coming from, shouting “Innocent!” There was certainly nothing punishable in that sleepy face. But if guilt is a human concept, then innocence is, too. The dog in question doesn’t care.

Did Blowhole do it? Only a fool—a human—would try to say for sure. We need our legends as much as he needs to run, and what better explanation for the endless nuisance of broken vehicles and buggy technology than a masked dog exacting justice in the night?

After the trip, when I talked to Sass, he embraced the ambiguity. “I’m concerned that any result of your experiment wouldn’t necessarily indicate a clear outcome,” he said. “Not eating a new brake line at this time. A clever prosecutor might say: ‘Maybe he’d already tried it and didn’t like it.’ ”

Blowhole is, literally and figuratively, a furry Rorschach test. Do you look at his spots and see wild genius, triumph over machine, purity? Do you see the black dot on his forehead and presume, as his tour guests do, that he’s named for a dolphin’s breathing spout? Can everything be true at once?

“Free Blowhole,” Elizabeth said as she walked away. “Free Blowhole!”

“Oooh,” Blowhole sang.

When I got back to my car and started it, the check-engine light came on.