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KALTAG - Driving snow covered the trail ahead, and the blowing wind sounded like a jet engine. So former Iditarod champions Jeff King and Rick Swenson came to a standstill on the vast expanse of the Yukon River, waiting in the dark for a break in the weather. "It was hellacious," King said of the 70-mile trip up the river from Eagle Island to Kaltag. "It was a whiteout. There was no visibility. We had to camp until it was light or the wind stopped." Sitting on a chair in the village community hall here, his stocking feet perched on another, King looked ready for a long nap after his battle with the Yukon. "I don't want to move," he said, rubbing his weathered face. A headband drooped around his stubbled chin. Surrounding him were nearly half a dozen equally dazed mushers. Instead of the front-runners of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, they looked like a bunch of fraternity brothers after a long night out - bleary-eyed, red-faced and wondering what happened to them the night before. "I'm too old for this," said 56-year-old Charlie Boulding, whose face had been chapped a bright red by the wind. The mushers had been battered on the run up the Yukon River to Kaltag, known as a miserable stretch because of frequent head winds and cold temperatures. This year proved worse than usual. King and Swenson took the brunt of it. Caught in the dark, they traded off breaking trail - or searching for it. Once, Swenson held both teams while King walked ahead trying to find the trail. Finally they decided to camp, King said. They pulled into a small slough away from the wind and fed their dogs. "This is the toughest Iditarod I've done in 10 years," King said. Even worse, King had yet to take his mandatory eight-hour rest on the Yukon River. He camped for almost as long on the trail, but the mandatory rest counts only if he's at a checkpoint. By camping on the river, he lost several hours and still had to wait in Kaltag for eight hours before heading for Unalakleet, the next checkpoint. Behind King and Swenson, Boulding also had been battered by the storm. He made his run up the river with two other mushers - Vern Halter and Bill Cotter - and had the same problems finding the trail. "It was all drifted over," Boulding said. "I had to walk around to try to find it." Those who came behind struggled as well, even though the wind slacked off a bit. "It was hard to describe," said Willow musher Linwood Fiedler, whose cheek was white with frostbite. "It was like North Dakota out there." Fiedler said he had to give his leaders repeated commands to get them to turn onto a section of trail where the wind blows directly in their face. "They don't like that," he said. As the mushers rested their teams and warmed up inside the community hall that serves as the checkpoint, they all marveled at leader Doug Swingley's good fortune with the weather. While they had slogged through half a foot of blowing, drifting snow, Swingley was miles ahead, running on a hard, fast trail. It was the second time the Montana musher had just missed a snowstorm that caught the others behind him. On his way from Ophir to Iditarod - the halfway point - he'd run on a hard trail while the chase pack wallowed in 9 inches of fresh snow. "Divine intervention. That's the only explanation," Boulding said. "Lady luck," King added. "You dream about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to separate yourself from the other mushers with weather, and he got it back to back." So as Swingley rested his team under sunny skies 90 miles away in Unalakleet, dining on a steak breakfast, these mushers conceded the top spot. Barring a storm to pin Swingley down or some other unforeseen catastrophe, the race for first was over, they said. "I'm wondering if it's just becoming a matter of how much he can win by," King said. Several mushers said they wanted their race to be over. After eight days with minimal sleep, dealing with a bone-rattling trail early on, temperatures to 40 below and two snowstorms, they'd had their fill of the Alaska wilderness. "All I want at this point is a paycheck," Fiedler said. But their race was just beginning. The same storm that had allowed Swingley to get so far ahead had bunched these teams. A dozen teams had reached Kaltag within two hours of one another. Even King, who arrived four hours earlier, would be caught in the mob scene. He had to wait out his eight-hour break. He could leave at 7 p.m., but several teams would be chasing him out. "It's going to be a race," Cotter said. "It's like an old-fashioned Iditarod." * Reporter S.J. Komarnitsky can be reached at skomarnitsky@adn.co
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