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After spending the sunny afternoon in the company of three former champions at frozen Puntilla Lake, Kasilof musher Paul Gebhardt lined out 15 dogs Monday evening and led the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race across the Alaska Range into the Alaska's Interior. Gebhardt arrived at the Rohn checkpoint - 272 miles from the start line - at 9:03 p.m. after crossing the 48 miles through Rainy Pass and down the Dalzell Gorge in just over four hours. Though still early, the 28th Iditarod is already moving at a brisk pace. Only a few hours behind was Willow musher DeeDee Jonrowe, who drove her 16 dogs through the Rainy Pass checkpoint without stopping for a break at 6:20 p.m. The second day of the annual 1,100-mile race to Nome had been Gebhardt's to relish. This year's Copper Basin 300 champion arrived first into Rainy Pass at 11:01 a.m. after spending 3 hours and 42 minutes on the 30-mile leg from Finger Lake. Three-time champ King and Seward musher Mitch Seavey didn't join him for more than two hours. As he cooked food and napped his huskies on beds of straw, Gebhardt said his strategy of resting the team during the day's worst heat and running at night had enabled him to travel at the head of the sport's top contenders. He was happy with his dogs. "They're going good ... They are pretty race hard," Gebhardt said. On his fifth Iditarod, the 43-year-old carpenter has steadily moved to the front ranks of distance dog mushing. He's placed higher in every Iditarod he's entered; last year he was sixth. Gehbardt's travel time Monday between Finger Lake andRainy Pass was within a half-hour of slightly faster times posted by the race's top teams, including three former champions. All day long, mushers had been moving at a rate four and five hours slower than the record pace in this section. In 1998, for instance, 16 mushers had launched for Rohn before Gebhardt's departure time. The reason? Sunshine and temperatures in the upper 30s threatened to overheat the dogs. "It was an absolutely gorgeous day - clear, sunny, 20 degrees," said Debbie Minyard, a year-round caretaker at Rainy Pass Lodge. "In the afternoon if the sun's out," Gebhardt said of the heat while resting in Skwentna Monday morning, "it's going to be really bad. You've got to be careful." Still, the mushers leading the 1,100-mile race into the Alaska Range appeared to be following the same general run-and-rest schedules from previous years - about three to four hours on the trail, about five to six hours of rest. As of Monday evening, Iditarod officials reported that mushers had few problems during the approach to the mountains. "As far as I know, everything's going fine," said race director Joanne Potts. "It seemed like they were having good trail," said Norma Delia, a long-time Skwentna resident who has hosted the checkpoint with her husband, Joe, for many years. Knik musher Harry Caldwell - a respiratory care specialist on his eighth Iditarod - became the second musher to scratch from the race. With several dogs in heat, Caldwell said his team couldn't continue. No one reported any encounters with moose, sometimes a hazard in the Yentna and Susitna valleys. But mushers were grappling with another annoyance - hordes of recreational snow machiners following along as spectators. Iditarod officials had received a report from a photographer that a snowmachine struck a team on the trail about two miles outside Knik on Sunday afternoon. According to the caller, the dogs were unhurt and the musher kept going, Potts said. "They're just all over," Delia said. "They almost were weaving in and out of the teams." The back end of the race reached in Skwentna by about 4 p.m., with the arrival of Australian rookie Neen Brown - about 18 hours after the first musher arrived Sunday night. Such a large split between the leaders and the trailers was telling only 200 miles into the race. In 1999, for instance, the gap was only 12 hours. Iditarod rules don't set a specific minimum performance for pack-of-the-pack teams, but allows the race marshal to withdraw any team "no longer making a valid effort to compete." "That doesn't mean you have to keep up with Martin Buser," Potts said. "It means that this isn't a lollygagging-Sunday-afternoon stroll - it's a race. You need to do what you need to do." Still, this year's back-of-the-packers appeared to be making progress, Potts said.
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