An Anchorage-based team of runners staged its own rush to the Klondike over the weekend.
Led by Anna Dalton's record run, Team Raven captured the overall victory and broke the mixed division record in the Klondike Trail of '98 International Road Relay.
The 109-mile relay race began Friday in Skagway and ended Saturday in Whitehorse. It drew 177 teams and nearly 1,700 runners.
Team Raven's 10 runners -- seven men, three women -- compiled a time of 10 hours, 56 minutes, 36 seconds. They won by more than an hour and sliced nearly 90 seconds off the mixed-division record of 10:58:03 set in 1995 by an Eagle River team.
The relay's top two teams came from the mixed division -- Eikelboom Physiotherapy of Whitehorse was second in 12:00:36. Third place went to Scarecrow, a men's open team from Whitehorse that clocked 12:04:13.
Team Raven won seven of the 10 legs, with Dalton setting a women's record in the 8.8-mile seventh leg. She made the run in 55:34, taking 12 seconds off the previous fastest time by a woman.
Two of Team Raven's three women were the overall winners of their respective legs – Dalton and Katelyn Steen, a former star runner at Western Washington who set the pace in the 7.8-mile third leg. Steen is the only non-Anchorage runner on the team.
Denali Strabel, the team's other woman, was third overall and the top woman in the 5.6-mile second leg.
The race follows the Klondike gold rush trail over the famous White Pass at the Alaska-Canada border, through British Columbia and into the Yukon.
Runners climb roughly 3,300 feet in the first two legs, stretches that were taken on by leadoff runner Andrew Richie and Strabel.
Posting overall wins for their respective legs for Team Raven were Richie (1:01:05, 8.8 miles), Steen (45:52), Jacob Kirk (1:13:57 in the 13.9-mile fifth leg), Yon Yilma (1:27:24 in the 16-mile sixth leg), Dalton, Corbyn Jahn (1:12:50 in the 12.4-mile eighth leg) and Ryan Cox (1:07.06 in the 11-mile ninth leg).
Ryan Beckett placed second in the 13.1-mile fourth leg (1:17:17) and Dylan Peterson placed third in the 12.1-mile 10th and final leg (1:11:20).
Strabel ran the second leg in 44:11. The overall winner in that stretch was Kodiak's Dylan Anthony of the Rough and Tough Stuff Team, who finished in 38:26 and ran the next leg too, placing second to Steen in 50:37.