The leaders in the nearly 2,000 mile Tesoro Iron Dog snowmachine race from Big Lake to Nome to Fairbanks on Wednesday enjoyed a long rest stop in the City of the Gold Sands as the last two teams still running struggled north along the Bering Sea.
Thirty-five teams started the race at Big Lake on Sunday. Twenty-five are in Nome. Two are still sputtering toward there. And eight have either crashed out or broken down.
Two ended early in bone-breaking smash ups. Mark Brown. 53, from Big Lake remains hospitalized at the Providence Medical Center with a broken pelvis. Steven Graham, 56, is recovering in Anchorage after surgery Tuesday at Providence to rebuild his shattered right wrist with a titanium plate.
Brown was injured after hitting a berm on an ice road near the end of Big Lake. Graham was injured in a very similar crash up the trail another 30 miles or so near the Yentna Station Roadhouse.
The injury killed his dream of racing Iron Dog with 18-year-old son Casey, who has signed up to join the Marine Corps in June.
The Iron Dog requires racers to compete in teams of two for safety. If one crashes out, the team is done. The younger Graham seemed to be taking events in stride better than his dad.
"I'm pretty bummed out,'' Steve said. "Twenty years of dreaming gone in the first 40 miles.''
He said he apologized over and over to Casey after the accident.
"He finally told me flat out to my face to quit apologizing,'' Steve said. "He said, 'This was your dream more than mine.' I've got a super boy."
Steve added that he isn't sure how he came to crash. He knows he hit an ice ridge on the river and got bucked off the machine, which landed upright on its track and sat idling as it waited for him to get back on. He isn't sure why he never saw the ridge coming.
"It was a beautiful day,'' he said. "The sun was shining. I don't know why I didn't see it. My son asked me, 'You didn't see that? It's as big as car.' I don't think it was that big.''
There have been plenty of crashes since those of Brown and Graham, but no other serious injuries have been reported.
The race leaders in Nome are Polaris Dragon riders Todd Minnick, 29, and Nick Olstad, 26, from Wasilla. With more than 800 miles of racing yet to go on the run east to Fairbanks, they hold a 36-minute gap on Ski-doo Rev XP drivers Tyler Aklestad, 23, from Palmer and Tyson Johnson, 29, from Eagle River.
Four other teams are also within striking distance. A second team of Ski-doo racers -- Marc McKenna, 34, from Anchorage and Dusty Van Meter, 39, from Kasilof -- are 52 minutes back. Arctic Cat F6 jockeys Bradley Helwig, 35, from Anchorage and Eric Quam, 38, from Eagle River, are 61 minutes off the pace.
McKenna and Quam won the Iron Dog for Arctic Cat last year before splitting to find new racing partners. Van Meter is a former three-time champ who won a couple of those races on Cats with Todd Palin, 44, from Wasilla.
Palin is now teamed up with long-time Cat racer Scott Davis, 49, from Soldotna. A seven-time champ, Davis is one of the winningest racers in Iron Dog history. He and Palin, the husband of the Alaska governor, are in fifth, about 2 hours, 3 minutes behind the leaders. Only eight minutes behind them are 23-year-old Tyler Huntington from Galena and 23-year-old Mike Morgan from Fairbanks on a couple more of those Polaris Dragons. Huntington was third in the Iron Dog last year with a partner more than twice his age.
A two-hour gap is a lot to make up, but not impossible. The rest of the teams in the race are four hours or more back, and that gap is pretty much impossible to close, barring a monster storm that jams up the entire field. That is not expected before the racers leave Nome today.
The finish is in Fairbanks on Saturday. Racers are held at the last checkpoint before the Interior City to ensure that happens in daylight.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
Leader board: Updated standings
2010 Trail map: Updated race standings
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com