Perhaps taking a page from his 2007 Iditarod victory, Lance Mackey has pushed his well seasoned dogsled team to the front of the pack as the lead teams begin to take on the second half of the Iditarod race. With the top 14 teams now leading on the trail having completed their mandatory 24 hour layovers, the status of teams becomes much easier to follow, and Mackey arrived at the Ruby checkpoint first at 7:32 this morning.
Ruby is the first checkpoint on the Yukon River, thus Mackey is the recipient of the “First to the Yukon” award. A gourmet seven course meal cooked on a camp stove and a cache of 3500 crisp $1 bills comprise the award, and Mackey has frequently commented that he has hunger for both.
With temperatures hovering just below freezing, the trail which follows the Yukon river now has set up to be fast, but that could change depending on the heat of the day. Mackey will have plenty of company at the front as his competitors are leery of letting him get out of reach based on his past performance. There have been multiple lead changes over the past 48 hours and there will likely be more as teams are required to take at least one 8 hour layover at one of the checkpoints along the Yukon river. Closely pursuing Mackey are Hans Gatt, 4 time Iditarod winner Jeff King, 5 time Iditarod winner Rick Swenson, and Kjetil Backen.
The checkpoint personnel at the remote Cripple checkpoint were expecting Paul Gebhardt, but when they spotted the pink harnesses on the team coming in, they knew it wasn’t him. At 6:22 this morning, DeeDee Jonrowe pulled by the fake palm trees into the makeshift checkpoint to claim the first position in this year’s Iditarod. She was taken aback when she was told she was the first team to check in. “No no. Isn’t Paul here?” she asked. “Your kidding!” she said and she had to grab a seat on her sled to let it sink in. “You better get the pink hats ready” she joked.
Jonrowe has yet to take her mandatory 24 hour layover yet, and she may well do that at Cripple. Within 20 minutes, Paul Gebhardt, Zack Steer, and Martin Buser also arrived at the checkpoint. None of these have taken there 24 hr stop yet either, and some or all of them may choose to do so here.
Gebhardt saw his nearly 6 hour lead over Jonrowe at the Ophir checkpoint disappear in what he has termed as his worst run ever. Shortly after leaving Ophir he was forced to begin packing a 60 pound male dog which slowed his team down, and then he ran into heavy snow, which slowed him even more. He turned around at one point when he thought he had passed the checkpoint, and that is where Jonrowe passed him.
Further back are a pack of fresh teams just coming of their 24 hour layovers and storming down the trail. Leading this charge is Norwegian Kjetil Backen who breezed through the Ophir checkpoint about 12 hours later then Jonrowe passed through there, so if he keeps a similar pace he will pass Jonrowe while she is on the 24 hour break. Within 45 minutes of Backen all with their 24s completed are Lance Mackey, Jeff King, and Hans Gatt. It appears at this juncture that those teams who chose to take their mandatory breaks earlier now have the upper hand.
With the Iditarod sled dog race approaching the halfway point at the Cripple checkpoint, some of the lead teams are choosing to take their 24 hour layover which is mandated by race rules to be taken at some point during the race. Paul Gebhardt has chosen to keep moving on however, and this strategy has put him in the lead for now, as all the teams who were ahead of him on the trail have apparently pulled over to take their 24s. This is not a new strategy for Gebhardt given that he took late layovers in the 2006 and 2007 races and that strategy was leveraged for high finishes of 3rd and 2nd respectively in those races.
How far will Gebhardt go before he takes his 24 and will that strategy work? With the warm weather along the trail, and more warm weather predicted for tomorrow, the river portions of the trail promise to be a slow go with heavy snow and plenty of overflow. The trail from Ophir through Cripple on to Ruby is light on river travel, so the trail could be firmer especially for the first teams through. If he chooses to 24 at Ruby, there is a chance that he will have a better trail on the Yukon River out of that checkpoint for his well rested team if the weather turns cooler. Gebhardt reported to is wife Evy this morning that the team was gobbling up everything in sight, so he will certainly require a large drop of dog food where ever he choose to stop.
Other teams are following Gebhardt’s lead of delaying the layover although Gebhardt has a good lead on them and a high bib number which lessens his delay tacked on to the 24. These teams include Hugh Neff, Zack Steer, and the surprising Sylvia Willis. Meanwhile, back at Takotna taking their 24s are former front runners of the race Lance Mackey, Jeff King, and Kjetil Backen. These 3 will come charging down the trail with refreshed teams in the early morning hours with Backen leaving first courtesy of his higher bib number. Only time will tell if they can recapture the lead before Gebhardt finishes his 24.
As unseasonably warm weather has moved into the Kuskokwim River valley, the Iditarod trail has softened, and teams are being forced to make adjustments to their strategies. Some of the teams have the benefit of running the Kuskokwim 300 (K300) race back in January in western Alaska on similar trails where warm weather had a major impact on the race outcome. Current Iditarod race leader, Mitch Seavey won that race. He indicated he was able to succeed by continually swapping out his lead dogs to keep them interested in moving forward through wet snow and plenty of overflow. He says having most of his team able to lead at any time gives him this option.
Some of the mushers have indicated they are having trouble figuring out which dog should lead including last year’s Iditarod winner Lance Mackey. Hobo and Larry, two of Mackey’s more dependable lead dogs got into a fight prior to the Rohn checkpoint. Larry apparently won that fight and Hobo was dropped at the Rohn checkpoint. Larry won the golden harness award at the 2007 Iditarod, and Hobo won the golden harness at the majority of Mackey’s Yukon Quest 4 victories.
With the race now entering the middle stage and teams starting to take their 24 hour layovers, the view of who is leading becomes difficult to determine. Mitch Seavey appears to be in the driver seat with the lead and some rest in the bank at McGrath and the experience from the Kuskowim race for him and his team to bank on. With high bib numbers Kjetil Backen, Paul Gebhardt, and John Baker are looking good given they will have less additional time tacked on to their 24 hour layover. Gebhardt and Baker also had the experience of this year’s K300.
Two other teams that ran in theK300 are the Martin and Rohn Buser. This father/son duet has been running close to each other. Kathy Chapoton who is wife to Martin and mother to Rohn thinks this is a good thing for Martin since it keeps him from pacing to fast and burning his team out for the later stages.
According to the Iditarod Tracker Kjetil Backen was the first into Nikolai. However, Paul Gebhardt checked in 54 minutes behind him. Gebhart’s out time from Willow with bib 69 was 54min after Backen’s bib 42 start. That time will be accounted for during the 24hour mandatory, so taking that into account, they are arrived at the Nikolai checkpoint in a virtual tie for 1st place. Both chose to rest in Nikolai. In looking at the GPS tracking, it appears that Martin Buser and Ed Iten may be resting a bit 10 miles shy of Nikolai. Buser likes to rest at s spot there called Salmon River, and it is certainly possible that his 18 year old son Rohn running his rookie Iditarod race has arrived to that point and is resting there as well, however Rohn is not wearing the tracking device so we don’t know for sure.
Some Iditarod mushers get new fancy new coats each year decorated with numerous sponsor patches. Zack Steer states that the only patches on his well worn coat are the ones covering up the holes. When he crossed the Iditarod finish line last year in 3rd place, he proudly proclaimed, “I like to be able to compete with the big boys, score one for the dirty jackets this year,” said Steer. “Lance and I seemed to do pretty well. We like to beat those clean-coat guys.”
Although this will be Steer’s 5th Iditarod race, he doesn’t consider himself a professional musher. His main source of income is from the Sheep Mountain Lodge that he and his wife Anjanette manage located 2 hours northeast of Anchorage Alaska. He says he shares a kennel there with about 30 dogs “if you count the three-legged ones” with fellow Iditarod musher Robert Bundtzen. It was Bundtzen that introduced Steer to mushing back in 1996 when Steer volunteered to work in Bundtzen’s Anchorage kennel as a dog handler. Steer must have impressed the boss since he found himself running Bundtzen’s team in the 1998 Iditarod finishing an impressive 22nd as a rookie.
Steer was managing a guiding business at the time for sailing and sea kayaking trips in the Prince William Sound during the summer and the rest of the year he would substitute teach and help Bundtzen with the kennel. Bundtzen, a long time family friend, once again raced the kennel’s team in 1999, but Steer got a chance to run the team again in 2000 finishing 14th. Steer would take a hiatus from competitive mushing after the 2000 race when he and his new wife moved away from Anchorage to live at and manage the Steer Mountain Lodge which they had just purchased.
It didn’t take too long for Steer to figure out that the area around Sheep Mountain was ideal territory for mushing dogs, and soon he would start developing his own modest kennel there. He developed an extensive trail system and by 2004 he had created the Sheep Mountain 150 dogsled race which utilized those trails. He also utilized the trail himself as he began the task of grooming some dogs to hopefully enable him to race in the Iditarod again.
Steer still has his day job and the summers at Sheep Mountain Lodge are a very busy time, but he has found that he has some spare time in the off season to train dogs. He decided once again to try the Iditarod in 2005. He would scratch in that race, but in the process he figured out that he was very capable of fielding a competitive team. He was back at the Iditarod in 2007 shocking everybody except himself by finishing 3rd. He credits his success to putting together a plan and sticking with it while maintaining enough flexibility to deal with changes to weather, trail and the team. He will not adjust his plan based on what other teams are doing. He says this philosophy works best when racing under adverse conditions like those encountered in the 2007 race. If the conditions are adverse in the race this year, look for Steer to be contending for the lead. He’ll be the one with the dirty coat.
A little known fact about Twinkies is that they don’t freeze solid like the other food groups in the food pyramid even at 50 below zero. That’s one reason Paul Gebhardt keeps plenty on hand while driving his sled in the Iditarod. The other reason is that he really likes them. He really likes cheeseburgers as well. As part of his pre-race preparation, he will vacuum seal dozens of them for the trail. When using hot water to prepare the dogs meals, he will plop the cheeseburger into the water, and in a matter of minutes his favorite meal will be ready to eat.
Part of Gebhardt’s dogsled racing strategy is to spend a considerable amount of time running behind the sled to lessen the load on his dog team. He figures that over the 1100 miles of the Iditarod trail he will run 300 of them. With that kind of workout, he quickly burns off those excess calories from that special diet. He eats plenty of peanuts and drinks lots of juice along the way as well.
Gebhardt has top 3 finishes in the Iditarod 3 times now with a second place finish in 2000, and 2007 and a 3rd place finish in 2006. Some bad luck has kept him out of the top spot. In 2000, he was in command of the race during the second half only to be passed by the faster running team of Doug Swingley on the Bering Sea coast.
In 2006, he was leading as the race approached the mid point when a spill separated him from his team and he found himself on foot until Doug Swingley and his team caught up and gave him a lift. The ordeal cost him about 3 hours and considerable momentum, and he finished the race in 3rd. In last year’s race he was in hot pursuit of race leader Lance Mackey on the coast when a broken sled and near-pneumonia caused him to take an unscheduled 3 hour stop in Shaktoolik where Mackey was able to give him the slip to win.
In an effort to counter any bad luck he might run into, Gebhardt concentrates on the things that he can control. This season he has a new found commitment to meticulous planning. According to his wife Evy, he is calculating everything about the race like he has never done in the past. This is his 12th go at the Iditarod, and he is hoping this is the one that he will finally win. If he does so, at 52 he will become the oldest musher to ever win the fabled race. He would also be the first winner to celebrate with a Twinkie and cheeseburger!
In this years running of the 1000 mile Yukon Quest dogsled race, Ken Anderson and Lance Mackey have been trading places at the front of the pack since early on in the race. They have crossed paths on the trail, at the dog drops and at the checkpoints. This isn’t the first time their paths have crossed and it may not be the last as both are likely to contend for top spots in next month’s Iditarod race.
Anderson and Mackey have been next door neighbors in Fox Alaska ever since Mackey relocated his family and dogs there in the summer of 2006. They use the same trails to train on, and frequently cross paths. They crossed paths before as young adults when Anderson moved in next to Dick Mackey’s home when his son Lance was still home in the mid 90s, and the two of them found similar interests. Once again, they find their interests are aligned. Mackey would like to repeat his stunning feat from last year when he won both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod and coined the phrase Iditaquest. Anderson believes he is every bit as capable as Mackey to pull off the Iditaquest victory.
Anderson is no stranger to mushing growing up in Minnesota where his parents took him a on a dogsled ride in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in sub zero temperatures when Ken was still in diapers. Later, he would work as a handler for Arleigh Jorgensen where he met his future wife Gwen Holdmann who also handled dogs for Jorgensen. They decide to move to Alaska to “live the dream”.
Ken ran his first Iditarod in 1999 and finished a respectable 26th. He had a top 10 finish in 2003 (5th) and 2007 (7th), but he hopes to do better this year following a strategy that was successful for Mackey last year in racing both the Quest and the Iditarod. Anderson likes to use smaller dogs and females since they eat less and are less prone to injury at the expense of raw power. This seems to be holding true in the Yukon Quest where his team is faster on the flats, and Mackey’s is faster on the hills.
The finish line to the Iditarod is within walking distance to Nome Beltz High School, but this March, senior student Melissa Owens is hoping to get to the finish line by dogsled instead taking an 1100 mile detour. Melissa hopes to be the youngest musher to ever race and complete the legendary dogsled race. Iditarod rules require mushers to be at least 18 years of age to complete in the race. Melissa turns 18 less then 2 weeks before the start of the race on February 18.
Melissa has literally been involved in dogsledding her entire life. Her father first raced the Iditarod in 1987 and brought Melissa up to the stage with him when he drew his number. Melissa and her brother Michael raise and train their own dogs including some that can trace their lineage to her fathers teams in the ‘87 and ‘90 Iditarods. Melissa won the Junior Iditarod in 2005 as an ninth grader. This year she is concentrating on completing the 2 races required to qualify for the Iditarod. She recently completed the soggy Kuskokwim 300 and now has her sights set on the Don Bowers 300.
18 year old Rohn Buser plans to enter this years Iditarod race as well. Rohn finished his senior year at Wasilla High School a semester early last December so he could concentrate on training for his one shot at the Iditarod before he goes off to college.
Mushing is in Rohn’s blood as well. he is the son of 4-time Iditarod winner and course record holder Martin Buser. Rohn is another winner of the Junior Iditarod winning the race in 2007 as a 17 year old. Rohn helps his father with the dogs at the Happy Trails Kennels and has done fairly well in the middle distance races he has entered. He finished 4th in the 2007 Kuskokwim 300, 10th in the 2008 Cantwell Classic 200, and 5th in the 2008 Kuskokwim 300. Rohn has already qualified to run the Iditarod with his finishes in this years Kuskokwim and Cantwell races.
19 year old Jeff Deeter graduated from Wasilla High School last spring. He plans to go to college next fall, but he has one last item to check off his list before he enrolls - run the Iditarod race.
While Jeff can’t trace dogsled racing in his bloodlines, he became involved in the sport at a very young age when his family moved to the arctic village of Noorvik Alaska when he was seven. He began working at the kennel of Iditarod veteran Jeff Sihler at the age of 15. 2 years later Jeff ran the Jr Iditarod finishing 11th in the 2005 race. He ran it again in 2006 finishing 9th. Jeff has completed his qualification races for the Iditarod finishing 15th in the 2007 Knik 200 and 19th in the 2008 Copper Basin 300. He plans to go to college in the fall to study biology.
Weather permitting, the 29th annual Kuskokwim 300 (K300) dog sled race will begin in Bethel, Alaska on Friday January 18th. The start of the race has been delayed four times in the past due to frigid temperatures. This race is regarded as a premier middle distance event and often used as an Iditarod tune-up for elite mushers. The $100,000 in prize money with $20,000 going to the first place finisher helps attract a strong field as well. This year’s field has plenty of Iditarod racing veterans including Jeff King, Paul Gebhardt, Mitch Seavey, Martin Buser, Ed Iten, Dee Dee Jonrowe, and Hugh Neff. Among the favorites to win is 4 time Iditarod and 8 time K300 winner, Jeff King. King finished last years K300 in second place in an epic duel with winner Martin Buser.
Also predicted to finish high is last year’s K300 winner and 4th place finisher, the father-son teams of Martin and Rohn Buser. Rohn will hope to use this as a qualifying run for a shot at the Iditarod this year as an 18 year old rookie, and certainly showed us in last year’s K300 as a 17 year old that he can run with the leaders. Another father-son duo entered in the race are Akiak mushers Mike Williams Sr and Mike Williams Jr. Once again, the race route passes Crow Village twice at the 133 mile mark on the out leg and at the 187 mile mark on the return leg. Last year, race leaders Martin Buser and Jeff King both elected to feed their teams on the Crow Village shore on the return leg shortly after they abruptly left the Aniak checkpoint. The course promises to be fast this year as some early season freeze and thaw cycles smoothed out the river ice and some recent snow fall added some cushion. As usual, the weather can easily become a factor.
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