Heather Siirtola might have had the only Kitty to compete in the world's largest sled dog race last month.

Kitty is a 35-pound husky who helped Siirtola, a Bismarck native, complete the Iditarod Trail in March in Alaska. And next week, Kitty will help Siirtola tell her story to hundreds of people from her hometown.

Siirtola, 30, will speak at several local schools next week, including two presentations at Bismarck State College that will be open to the public. She'll show a lot of photos from the race and the events leading up to it, and will talk about the adventures she had along the 1,122-mile trail from Anchorage to Nome.

The piece de resistance, however, will likely be Siirtola's four-legged companion.

"It's going to be great," said Kay Berg, a teacher at Mandan's Christ the King school. "She was in the news quite often. Many of our students followed her as she went through the race. And the dog will be the biggest hit, I'm sure."

Siirtola's stepbrother, Jacob, is a third-grader at Christ the King. That will be her first stop, at 9 a.m. Monday. On Tuesday, she will speak in Bismarck at Centennial, Miller and Saxvik elementary schools.

Then, at 3 and 7 p.m. Tuesday, Siirtola will deliver her program in the Sidney J. Lee Auditorium at Bismarck State College. Those presentations will be free and open to the public.

Wednesday, she'll speak at Pioneer, Dorothy Moses and Prairie Rose schools. She'll wrap things up Thursday, with a presentation at Bismarck High School, her alma mater.

Siirtola graduated from BHS in 1995. She eventually moved to Colorado, where she got her first taste of driving sled dogs. In 2003, she moved to Talkeetna, Alaska, where she learned how to compete in long-distance races. She bought her own dogs and took part in her first Iditarod this year. Siirtola finished the race on March 20. It took 16 days, and she had to overcome several obstacles, including getting soaked in frigid river water and falling from her sled.

Still, she finished the race. Twenty-four others didn't. Fewer people have completed the Iditarod than have climbed Mount Everest.

And perhaps only one of them did it with a Kitty.

(Reach reporter Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tony.spilde@;bismarcktribune.com.)