PUNTILLA LAKE -- A trickle of blood dripped down Jeff King's face Monday afternoon as the four-time champion of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race paused for a break.
Unaware that something had sliced open a dime-size cut on his cheek, the Denali Park musher posed for a photograph with three fans here to watch the race pass Rainy Pass Lodge into the heart of the Alaska Range.
"You guys from Anchorage?" asked King.
"Yep, we're on spring break," answered Keith Perrins, a schoolteacher at O'Malley Elementary School, whose older brother owns the lodge. "Can you take a picture with my daughter?"
"Yep, just tell me when you're looking through the viewfinder," said King.
The musher wore a black and yellow ball cap sporting his name, a fur-trimmed hood and glasses. He smiled for the picture, then continued on with his checkpoint chores. His dogs rested on piles of straw atop the cold, deep snow in the gigantic dog lot that is Puntilla Lake.
King was in good spirits. Snowflakes the size of peas blew sideways into his face. Nearby, three other Iditarod leaders -- defending champ Lance Mackey from Fairbanks, DeeDee Jonrowe from Willow and Bjornar Andersen from Norway -- were working around their teams.
Jonrowe was counting her blessings as she tossed chunks of frozen kibble to her dogs.
A few hours earlier, she pulled into the checkpoint slowly with the right stanchion on her sled shattered. She'd tipped into a cluster of willows only about 10 miles out and was fortunate the only casualty was a piece of wood, she said.
Wooden parts can be quickly fixed with a few screws and some tape. Body parts take weeks, sometimes months, to repair.
Jonrowe knows well. Two years ago she crashed on the way here and broke her pinkie finger. The damage was so severe she ended up dropping out of the race. Not this year.
All this accident cost was a "thank you" to a couple of the Perrins boys after they gave her some parts to fix the sled damaged in a scary crash coming around a bend in the trail as it climbed along the Happy River canyon.
"My sled was sideways," she said. "I was almost upside down."
The 55-year-old cancer survivor almost panicked but told herself to remain calm so the dogs wouldn't freak out and bolt down a hill ahead. Good thing, because the trail there was laced with sled-busting spruce trees, she said.
This is one of the worst sections of the whole 1,000 mile Iditarod trail and mushers often describe the journey up from Finger Lake as something like being the pinball in an arcade game. Jonrowe felt like the game winner despite the damage to her sled.
"Praise God it was my sled and not my hand," she said. "I can do something with (a broken sled)."
The 24-year Iditarod veteran knows how to make do. She once steered a brakeless sled down the treacherous Dalzell Gorge ahead after a stump ripped off the brake. The gorge looks to be in better shape this year, given how fast race leaders Rick Swenson and Paul Gehbardt made it through.
But to get to her new sled in Nikolai, Jonrowe not only has to get over the pass, down through the gorge, but across the Farewell Burn as well. Trail conditions there are unpredictable.
"What have you heard about the weather?" Jonrowe asked race judge John "Andy" Anderson.
"Oh the weather outside is frightful," sang Anderson in the tune of the Christmas song, 'Let it Snow.'
A former Iditarod musher, Anderson hadn't been quite so jolly earlier in the day when he had to chase off a flock of ravens that tore into some drop bags. The all-volunteer Iditarod Air Force leaves the bags of food and extra gear at most of the 22 checkpoints along the 1,000-mile trail days before the race.
These were covered with blue tarps to keep wild animals out, but the ravens saw through the ploy.
"(The tarp) was like a bull's-eye for them," Anderson said. "Those ravens are pretty smart."
The big, black crows on steroids were gathered along the lakeshore singing and dancing in celebration of what they'd found Monday morning, Anderson said. Between them and the foxes, about a dozen bags had been scavenged.
Four-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser of Big Lake pulled in and immediately knew he'd been hit.
"Hello, hello!" Buser said. "So my food was torn into, huh? Any word on Gatt's stuff?"
Buser was referring to Hans Gatt, a three-time Yukon Quest champion who had only one drop bag waiting because the plane with his other bags was stuck in Willow due to poor visibility. When Gatt arrived, he discovered 20 percent of the supplies in his one bag had been stolen by either the rogue ravens or feisty foxes.
"He was worse off than you," Anderson told Buser.
Dallas Seavey, son of 2004 Iditarod champion Mitch Seavey from Sterling, was happy the ravens didn't get into his stash. One of his sponsors is Four Star Catering in Soldotna, and his bag was full of amazingly delicious frozen dinners.
His dogs were eating pretty well, too. Seavey fed them bowls of Blackwood 7000, a dog food that costs $52 for a 40-pound bag.
"It's the high-end stuff," he said.
Next to Seavey's team, King was preparing his Rainy Pass dessert, a king-size Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. He needed the chocolate boost, he said. He also needed a decent knife. The 53-year-old musher lost his at Finger Lake and was making do with a cheap, $5 substitute. He was hoping to get back the knife, a gift from his daughter's boyfriend, Matt. He noted that during the 1993 race, he lost a prized knife in Elim but got it back in Nome.
At least he couldn't lose the candy. He was tucking that away safely in his gut.
"That's going to keep me smiling," King said.
Find Daily News sports reporter Kevin Klott at adn.com/sports/kklott or 257-4335.
Video: Riding through Anchorage
Map: Iditarod trail and checkpoints
Reader-submitted: Iditarod photos
By KEVIN KLOTT
kklott@adn.com