Iditarod racers move onto the Yukon just as deep cold is forecast to blast the river

The front-runners in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race are arriving at the Yukon River, pushing deeper into the long middle stretch of the race just as intense cold is forecast for the region. The conditions will likely affect mushers’ decisions about when and where to rest in the days ahead, which could be critical given how close together teams are up front.

Nicolas Petit, a veteran racer from Big Lake, was the first to reach the Yukon community of Ruby on Thursday night. That’s in part because of a seldom-tried strategy of pushing all the way there, 495 miles into the race, before opting to take his mandatory 24-hour rest. It will be late Friday before Petit can depart and hope his team is rested and fast enough to chase down other competitors.

[Iditarod musher Petit and his dogs chow down in Ruby after arriving first to the Yukon River town]

As of Friday morning, veteran Travis Beals of Seward, now living in Knik, had a slight edge over other teams in the front pack. Beals has been keeping a consistent schedule of four-hour rests in between roughly six-hour runs, though he stretched his last leg on the way into Ruby to about eight hours.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Beals told Iditarod Insider of his positioning.

The 32-year-old, who has completed nine Iditarods and finished as high as fifth place, started this year’s race sick and hasn’t fully recovered.

“I still got a bug. Still use plenty of toilet paper on the runs. But other than that we’re doing good,” Beals told Insider commentator Bruce Lee in Ruby.

Beals left Ruby after a little more than four hours. Under race rules, mushers have to take an eight-hour break at one of the checkpoints along the Yukon River — Ruby, Galena, Nulato or Kaltag — before traveling the overland portage to Unalakleet and the final third of the race up the Norton Sound coast.

In hot pursuit of Beals is Jessie Holmes, who lives along the Denali Highway and arrived to Ruby about 2 1/2 hours later Friday morning.

“It seemed like they have more speed than everybody else around me right now,” Holmes said of his dogs. “I made up an hour and 25, 30 minutes on Travis since my camp.”

Throughout the race, Holmes has said he’s running a strategy dictated less by a firm schedule than responding to his dog team’s performance, and he told Insider in Ruby that he’d not yet figured out where he’ll take his eight-hour Yukon break.

“I’m going off that gut instinct of doing what’s right by them, and it’s paying off. So I don’t know if it’s a waste to do it here,” Holmes said.

Behind Holmes into Ruby on Friday morning were Paige Drobny, Ryan Redington and Pete Kaiser, all of whom are highly competitive and running at similar tempos with the two mushers slightly ahead of them along the course.

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Cold weather is forecast for the region. The National Weather Service predicts temperatures will get down to minus 28 degrees in Galena overnight Friday, with wind chills at minus 40. That’s not expected to let up much Saturday, and wind chills could hit minus 55 degrees by Saturday night along portions of the Yukon River.

Even mushers who train in relatively colder, windier parts of Alaska like the Interior and Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta could be challenged by those conditions and opt to rest longer as a strategy to avoid the worst of the weather, or else gamble on gaining time over close competitors by pushing through it.

Either way, little relief can be expected after the Yukon when mushers start arriving at the Norton Sound coast. A wind chill advisory is in effect for the region until Monday afternoon, with effective lows down to 55 degrees below zero. Winds are forecast to be blasting out of the north, meaning mushers will be running headlong into them heading from Unalakleet up to Shaktoolik and Koyuk.

“The dangerously cold wind chills could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 5 minutes,” according to the weather service’s advisory.