"This team has plenty of fight. I have 12 dogs here who would walk to the end of the earth for me, nonstop."
- Lance Mackey at Ruby
Lance Mackey appears to be a man of his word, and great faith in the ability of his dog team. The reigning three-time champion is putting that confidence to the test at a crucial stage of the Iditarod – a move that may be the deciding factor if Mackey is to become the first musher ever to win four Iditarods in a row.
Mackey did what some probably would have guessed: He figured the four and a half hour run from Nulato to Kaltag wasn't long enough and chose to keep going a for a while, maybe he would go a third of the way to Tripod Flats cabin; or maybe two-thirds of the 80-mile run to Old Woman cabin; or maybe he'd just stop on the trail when it felt right. That's Mackey's style. But what is also his style – as we saw last year when he carried a bale of straw for several hours out of Ophir before dumping it when it was obvious his team had enough spunk to run straight to Iditarod – is the ability to gauge his dogs and say, "Let's just keep going."
It appeared Saturday night that Mackey was doing just that: Going all the way to Unalakleet nonstop from Nulato, a move tried only once before in my memory, and not by a team vying for first place.
Joe Runyan has been writing posts for Alaska Dispatch about the race, and had this insight into some of Mackey's training techniques that may just now be fully coming into play. Runyan wrote:
"He begins in August by training his dogs to expect uncertainty by harnessing them innumerable times. Day or night, he will harness his dogs to his four-wheeler, train with them on dry-land trails, rest, and then go again. The distances and the rests can be long or short and are completely random. The result, Mackey likes to report, is that his dogs develop a calm confidence in his unpredictability. Mackey's move Saturday out of Kaltag may have been the moment he trained for so deliberately for in the fall."
If this move were done by ANY other dog driver on the trail right now, and they're the best mushers in the world, I would say they were making a huge mistake, one that would drastically slow down their team, at best. But this is Lance Mackey. I still think the move is risky and it could hurt his team's ability in the final stretch, but given his track record in the last three years, I've become a believer in his judgment. If he's asking his dogs to do something difficult like this, it is because he sees they have the ability and desire to pull it off.
Meanwhile, Hans Gatt is making moves of his own to position himself to keep near the front while preserving his superior speed. He also blew through Kaltag, but Gatt pulled over to rest. I'm guessing it was at Tripod Flats, where there is a comfortable log cabin. It is about three hours from Kaltag, leaving a six to seven hour run down to Unalakleet. That leaves Gatt some options if he later feels he has the team to blow through Shaktoolik.
Jeff King is sticking to his formula of stopping at checkpoints. King is forced to make the run from Kaltag to Unalakleet in one blow, but he's been giving his team good rest breaks and relatively short runs all the way down the Yukon River. They should be up for the 10 to 12 hour run over the hills and down to the Bering Sea Coast.
Bruce Lee, the Insider race expert, said Mackey's team ate like pigs (that's a compliment, a big compliment) and moved well on the trail, indicating that Mackey may now be the team to beat. Looking at the Insider videos from Kaltag, though, Hugh Neff and Jeff King each have very sharp dog teams at this point, moving easily and driving hard.
The mushers' tracker units were indicating temperatures of about 24 below zero on the trail to Unalalkeet, which was the exact temperature reported at the village's airport. The cold, with highs of five to 10 below and lows to 25 below was forecast to continue through Sunday, but most importantly, winds were not supposed to be strong in this wind-whipped region. Winds out of the north at 10 mph were forecast.
Jon Little, a journalist for 20 years and a veteran of five Iditarods, is providing Iditarod commentary on the Check Point blog, hosted by Dr. Tim's Pet Food Co. at http://drtims.com/blog
By JON LITTLE