It’s Doggone Tough Sledding With Moose on the Loose

--Lavon Barve took the lead of the 1,135-mile Iditarod marathon dog-sled race in the Alaska wilderness after the previous front-runner had to quit because one of her dogs was killed by a mad moose. Because of deep snow along the historic Gold Rush route, numerous moose have congregated on the trail, which is being put down by snow machines traveling about a day in front of the mushers. Leader and two-time Iditarod runner-up Susan Butcher, 30, of Manley Hot Springs was taking her team through a willow thicket on her way to Rabbit Lake when a charging cow moose killed one of her dogs and injured seven others. “We didn’t even see it,” Butcher said. “The first time I saw it, it was already into the team,” trampling, kicking and butting the dogs. “I was scared out of my wits,” she said. After about 20 minutes, Trapper Creek musher Duane (Dewey) Halverson arrived and chased off the moose with a gun. “I was real glad to see Dewey and his .44,” Butcher said. The pack of 61 mushers left Anchorage on Saturday on the two-to-three-week trek to Nome.

--Singer-actress Cher admits she might appear a bit unconventional but asks the public to look deeper. “The misconception about me is that I am what I look like,” she said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “If you look at me today, you know I’ve got kind of a skunk Mohawk and five-inch earrings. I want people to look at my work. I don’t think people can ever really know me, but I try to take work that lets them know who I am as a person.”

--A couple from Pittsburgh, the nation’s “most livable” city, will be going on a cultural exchange program to the nation’s “worst”--Yuba City, Calif. Keith Abrams, program director of WHTX in Pittsburgh, came up with the idea last week when Pittsburgh was named first and Yuba City last of 329 U.S. cities ranked by Rand McNally & Co.’s “Places Rated Almanac.” “We wanted to know what it was like in the least livable place and see that it couldn’t be as bad as it sounded,” Abrams said. “If it finished lower than Cleveland, something had to be wrong. I mean, what could be worse than Cleveland?” The Pittsburgh couple, to be chosen Friday, will be honored at Yuba City’s 105th annual Bok-ai Festival the weekend of March 22-24, which will include a tour of the local Air Force base.