Pace quickens as King beats Buser to Kaltag 1200518834159641

Dogs battling their way up the trail from Grayling leaned into the 25 mph blow. As windchill temperatures pushed toward 30 degrees below zero, mushers tried to hunker low and find what shelter they could behind their sled bags.

"You have to keep a smart-ass attitude about it because it is miserable as hell, absolutely miserable,'' Fairanks musher Lance Mackey said.

Leading the race up the river were four-time champs Martin Buser from Big Lake and Jeff King, who left this checkpoint just minutes apart Saturday afternoon.

But by late Saturday, King had forged a hard-earned 52-minute gap by making the 70-mile run upriver to Kaltag at an impressive speed of 8.27 mph, checking in at 9:23 p.m. King's upriver burst was 0.7 mph faster than Buser's and, perhaps more significantly, faster than the leading teams had been traveling the previous 24 hours.

The chase pack apparently was content to let them go.

According the Iditarod Web site, which sometimes suffers delays posting checkpoint times, no other musher had left Eagle Island by 11 p.m. Saturday.

Earlier in the day, Yukon Quest champion Mackey and Paul Gebhardt from Kasilof had worked together to together to try to bridge the gap between them and the King-Buser duo.

"He'd run first, then I'd run first,'' Gebhardt said. "We'd take turns that way, so you could have different leaders facing the front alone.''

Even then, it was slow going. Fighting upwind for 65 miles along the western shore of the barren, two-mile-wide Yukon, only one team in the first 10 posted an average speed of more than 7 mph.

Most averaged between 61u20444 and 61u20442 mph. Joggers go faster.

Usually, Iditarod teams do, too -- sometimes twice as fast. But the wind turned the Yukon into a tough uphill run.

To give the dogs a break from the pounding of subzero winds and abrasive blowing snow, some mushers rotated lead dogs. Mackey had his little female Fudge out front for a while.

"She's a fine leader,'' he said. "Larry's had his time. Hobo's been up there. Battel's been up there. Rev's been up there.

"It was Fudge's turn to step up a bit. She did fine. She brought me in here real sharp.

"(But) a mile in that stuff (the wind) is a good learning curve. I've ruined some pretty good dogs running them too hard, too soon.''

The winner of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest three years running, Mackey has learned a lot about pacing dogs to cover trail fast without ruining them. He has put every bit of that knowledge to use this year in making a serious challenge for an Iditarod championship.

Only three weeks ago, he and most of the dogs now with him were 700 miles west of here, still on the snow-covered Yukon, racing hard toward Fairbanks and the finish line of the Quest.

At the moment, they appear none the worse for wear.

The same cannot be said for all the dogs. Buser had to drop a key leader named Marlin after the dog was injured in a fight. The injuries were not serious, but Marlin was in no condition to run farther.

"He wasn't using his (right rear) leg,'' said veterinarian Harvey Goho from North Carolina. Marlin was being treated and prepared for an airplane ride back home. Buser and the rest of the team were pressing on.

With Marlin now out of action, Buser is going to have to try to find another dog to help keep Caribou in the middle of the trail. It is one of those small things that could make a big difference in the next few days as the 1,100-mile marathon across the Alaska wilderness rolls toward the Bering Sea coast.

"Jeff and Martin are obviously running about the same speed,'' Gebhardt said. "Jeff cut his rest here a little short to take off with Martin. He said he wanted to run with (Martin). We'll see.''

Since the race began in Anchorage on March 3, Buser has had the powerhouse team. It has consistently been posting some of the fastest times along the trail. Again on Saturday -- on the 20 mile run from Anvik to Grayling, a run so short there is no reason for any team to stop -- Buser posted the best speed of any musher in the top 10.

Still, the gap between his team and the others has been shrinking as all the dogs begin to tire after seven days and 700 miles of running.

"We're not that far behind,'' Gebhardt said. "We started a little early with this catch-up deal. I think we're going to pay for it a little bit with the dogs. It took a little stamina out of them. But at this point, we can still get some of that back. We won't get much speed back, but we'll get the strength back.

"That's why I want to get off the Yukon. I think it's easier dealing with (the wind) off the Yukon.''

For the leaders, this Iditarod has been as much about hanging on as hanging in. Though King and Buser are now clearly in front, others still harbor hopes.

"I made up at least an hour on everybody, I guess, on that last run,'' Zack Steer from Sheep Mountain observed when he pulled in here. "It only took me 8:15. It took everyone else about 9:30 (nine hours and 30 minutes).

"So, I'm gaining, but I'm also resting more, and I haven't taken my eight (hour rest on the Yukon). That's going to bump them forward again.''

Steer, the fifth musher to reach this checkpoint about 400 miles shy of the Nome finish line, didn't seem concerned.

On the coast, he knows, the serious racing begins.

"I'm just trying to focus on my team like everyone else, get them to Nome as fast as I can," he said. "Heck, I'm in the top 10.

"If I said I wasn't happy, I'd be crazy. We're having a good race. My best finish is 14th. But this year, things are coming together a little better.''

Race leaders were into Kaltag Miles from Anchorage: 771 Miles to Nome: 351

At remote Eagle Island, creative wind shields 120051883497017

Goho, an Iditarod veterinarian stationed here in middle-of-nowhere Alaska, lives most of the year in North Carolina near city lights. On this night, there was no full moon, mountains or trees to obstruct his view.

It was 11 p.m. Friday. Martin Buser and Jeff King, leaders in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, weren’t expected to arrive here for hours. Goho should have been sleeping, but this was a moment he couldn’t miss.
Twinkling stars were immaculate in the Alaska sky.

“You just don’t find this in North Carolina,” he said of one of the most remote and inhospitable places of the 1,100-mile trail.

The nearest villages were 70 miles upriver in Kaltag and 60 miles downriver in Grayling.

Actually, the checkpoint isn’t on Eagle Island. That’s five miles to the south, one of the many islands that dot the 2,300-mile long Yukon.

Instead, the checkpoint — 421 miles from Nome — is on river’s west bank, protected from the bitter winds by forests of birch and spruce on the mouth of a frozen slough.

“Imagine yourself lost in an arctic wilderness on some bank of the Yukon and you’re at Eagle Island,” said Keith Larson, a 24-year-old from Boise, Idaho, who volunteered to check mushers in here.

Larson had that feeling for four days while he prepared for the Saturday morning arrival of mushers, media and tourists traveling via Bush planes and helicopters. When he and another checker landed on Wednesday, two wall tents, nasty winds and deep, wind-drifted snow is all that was here.

Larson has spent the winter in North Pole with Iditarod musher Jeff Holt on what he calls a “dog-mushing internship,” a program offered at a small college in Idaho. But this week, it was his job to make this hostile place look presentable.

“It was quiet,” Larson said.

IDITAROD IGLOOS

Day by day, the peacefulness gradually disappeared. Iditarod Air Force planes buzz the ice landing strip, marked by knee-high spruce branches. Pilots drop off loads of straw bales and drop bags for mushers.

Though every drop meant more work for Larson, the snowdrifts harden every time he hauls the bags from the river to the slough by snowmachine. On the northern side of the slough, he pitched a yellow, arctic-oven tent next to the wall tents that would soon be used by mushers and Iditarod officials.

Race marshal Mark Nordman said those wall tents were buried beneath three feet of snow until Iditarod volunteer Jim Paulus dug them out. Paulus also created a four-mile trail along the slough to give mushers a temporary break from the wind.

“It’s a real nice place,” Nordman said. “(But) some years the snow was so deep, you couldn’t get a snowmachine through here.
“For the last few years we’ve been out on the river. But we wanted to get these guys off the line.”

Checkpoint workers walk back and forth, back and forth, in front of the structures, packing a narrow path. Packed snow quickly forms a rock-hard surface.

Larson sawed a spruce log to use as a table leg. He tried cutting it vertically from the ground, but he couldn’t get an angle. As he cut the log horizontally, the saw tip ground into the snow.

Snow cuts easily, he noticed. Soon he was pumping out blocks.
“Hey, what should we do with this stuff?,” he asked co-workers.
With the wind blowing nonstop from the north, there was no shelter other than the tents for checkers outside awaiting mushers. Turn the blocks into icehouses, Larson thought.

He went to work, cutting block after block for hours on end. He turned into an ice architect, constructing a half-igloo shelter at the checkpoint entrance and an ice outhouse on the side of a hill, further down the slough.

“We knew we’d be miserable if we didn’t do something,” he said.

YUKON RIVER WIND

Zack Steer of Sheep Mountain stands on the runners of his sled behind his team, fighting a 20 mph Yukon River headwind. He’s a couple dozen miles out of the Eagle Island checkpoint when an Iditarod helicopter approaches.

“I swear it was only 50 feet behind me,” he said. “He came zooming behind me, and I didn’t even hear him.”

With the wind piercing his face for hours on end, Steer wears goggles and a full facemask. He focuses forward but sometimes ducks below his handlebars for temporary shelter.

“You can see frost bit skin — it’ll get ya if you’re not careful,” he said. “That’s what they say up here — 'It’s not the cold that get’s ya. It’s the wind.’ ”

Miles behind Steer was Ed Iten of Kotzebue, whose dogs are accustomed to running in the wind.

“If it’s a hot day, they love wind,” Iten said. “If they’re beating their heads against it all day long, they get tired of it.

“But they’ll drive into it. They don’t know not to.”

Paul Gebhardt, meanwhile, is miles ahead of Iten and Steer, trading leads with Lance Mackey of Fairbanks.

Gebhardt is having an easier time battling the wind. The Kasilof musher, who is also fighting a cold, wears a bulky Bombardier snowmachine helmet with a plastic face shield. Though Gebhardt says he hates riding snowmachines, the helmet works.

He and Mackey, who used to be Kenai Peninsula neighbors before Mackey moved to Fairbanks last year, trade jokes about the Yukon River winds as one passes another.

“It’s miserable as hell, absolutely miserable,” Mackey said. “But we’re all here voluntarily. We have to go through the same stuff, so it’s like an equal playing field. Our attitude is dry humor. We all deal with this stuff in different ways, but we’re all on the same path.”

“We had fun,” Gebhardt said. “But his sense of humor is different from my sense of humor.”

Mackey’s biggest laugh came when he and other mushers used the ice outhouse. Inside, laying on an ice seat, beside a package of toilet paper, was a sheet of blue Styrofoam with a hole cut in the middle. Beneath the hole, a honey bucket.

“Fantastic,” Mackey said.

Steer said the bathroom accommodations were luxurious compared to Grayling.

“At least it has a door,” he said. “I (went to the bathroom) at 3 in the morning outside the checkpoint without a door in Grayling.”

Gebhardt took off his snowmachine helmet after following Mackey into Eagle Island and made one final joke.

“Where is this place?” he asked. “We figured they moved the checkpoint to Kaltag. We didn’t know.”

Wow, that Mackey looks fine on TV 1200518834183705

Lance Mackey of Fairbanks rose after his 7:45 p.m. wake-up call very chipper. He talked to locals about snowmachining and fishing, then walked to a table where Ken Pivor, an associate producer for cable television station Versus, was dubbing video tapes. Versus is working in cooperation with the Iditarod, filming the 1,100-mile Iditarod with a helicopter.

“That’s amazing,” Mackey said, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “It looks like I’m watching a mirror. Man, they look good. You guys do good work.”

Earlier in the day, Mackey was ragging on the helicopter following him. But after watching footage of his blazing 90-mile run from Kaltag to Unalakleet, where he made up 57 minutes, Mackey had second thoughts.

“They can follow me all they want,” he said. “Oh, I’m moving up on him (Buser) fast.”

• IDITAROD ON TV: The Versus (Cable Channel 39 in Anchorage) one-hour Iditarod special airs Sunday 7-8 p.m. and 10-11 p.m. It repeats 6 p.m. March 22, 7 p.m. March 25 and 6 p.m. March 29.

Gebhardt, Mackey not far behind 1200518834909289

Three hours back as the 1,100-mile race battled headwinds up the frozen Yukon River toward the windswept bluff village of Kaltag Saturday night, Paul Gebhardt from Kasilof and Lance Mackey from Fairbanks left Kaltag only about an hour and a half behind the leads in bitter cold early Sunday.

Temperatures were near 30 degrees below zero in Kaltag and it only warmed to about minus 10 in Unalakleet. But at least the winds that brutalized teams coming up the Yukon appeared to have eased, at least temporarily.

Cold and wind have been the story of this Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome. Both have slowed what was a fast early pace. On leaving Kaltag around 5 a.m. Sunday, the leaders were almost a day behind the sub-9 day, record race Buser ran in 2002.

Twenty to 40-degree below zero cold increases the drag on sled runners, sucks the moisture out of dogs with ever breath of the dry air, and builds sharp crystals on snowy trails that can be hard on dogs feet. Mushers must thus devote much more time to seeing the dogs have good booties, and are getting plenty of water with the their food.

Dog care, they all know, is the real secret to victory. Fit, healthy, happy dogs simply travel faster than tired, unhealthy, unhappy ones.

Some of the change in attitude was clearly evident as the winds eased and the trail improved on the Yukon heading north from Eagle Island on Saturday night. Teams that ground their way into that remote checkpoint at speeds of less than 7 mph were back up over 8 mph, or at least most of them.

King, the defending champ who cut his team's rest about an hour short in Eagle Island to bolt out ahead of Buser, the early race leader, posted a speed of 8.3 mph on the flat but still windy 70-mile leg north from Eagle Island. Buser was slower at 7.6, but he might have stopped to snack the dogs to try to keep them hydrated.

Whatever the case, the leaders had faster teams rolling up the trail behind them. Gebhardt, the third-place finisher in the Iditarod last year, and Mackey, the reigning and three-time Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race champion, have been working together, swapping lead chores with their teams, to try to close the gap on the front-runners, and it appears to be helping. They did 8.4 mph up the river.

Behind them, an even faster chase pack was also forming.

Ken Anderson from Fairbanks and Ed Iten from Kotzebue, who have had good run times between checkpoints throughout the race and seemed to be consciously trying to get their dogs extra rest early in the competition, had moved up to join sometimes race leader Zack Steer from Sheep Mountain.

All three averaged 8.7 mph and pulled into Kaltag only about 45 minutes after the leaders left.

King led the charge out of there at 4:46 a.m. with Buser following in the predawn darkness 15 minutes later. Mackey and Gehbardt were on the trail in pursuit before 6:30 a.m.

The Wells Fargo Gold Coast Award of $2,500 in gold nuggets awaits the first one to the edge of the Bering Sea, along with a village welcome that is traditionally one of the biggest and warmest anywhere along the trail.

The final push to the finish line will start there, too. It is about 300 miles to Nome, and the rough, windswept, often-snowless trail along the coast seems destined to determine who wins the Iditarod this year.