Bleary-eyed hangers-on follow Yukon Quest from checkpoint to checkpoint

CIRCLE — The 45 people in this small fire station garage were bleary-eyed and punch-drunk Saturday evening, but almost no one complained of their fatigue, because they knew somewhere out on the Yukon River there were mushers and dog teams who were tired and much colder.

Alongside the Yukon Quest trail is a traveling sideshow at checkpoints that simultaneously resembles a bus station and a carnival.

In between dog team arrivals and departures, the support staff of dog handlers, veterinarians, race officials and public relations staff have been finding space to nap for a few hours.

At most of the Canadian checkpoints earlier in the race, which started Feb. 4 in Whitehorse, there was a separate room in which to sleep. In Circle, there's not much space for anyone except mushers to sleep, but people will nap in their cars or pay $50 for floor space at the school.

Mark Sass, the father of Eureka musher Brent Sass, has been coming north to Alaska for the last 13 years to follow his son along the trail. He has a musher-like approach to the amount of sleep he needs to function.

"If you can get an hour of sleep, you can go again. You get another hour of sleep, you can go another day," he said as he waited for his son to arrive Saturday.

Brent Sass said at the halfway point of this year's Quest  — four days into the race — that he hadn't been able to sleep at all during a series of four-to-six-hour breaks he took.

Neil Gabbart works for the Yukon Quest's Fairbanks office and has been getting ready for the race for weeks. This week he drove a vehicle to this checkpoint at the end of the Steese Highway.

After not getting much sleep the two previous evenings, Gabbart slept Friday night in his vehicle, turning it on every few hours to rev up the heater.

"I shivered for 10 hours and it was the best sleep I've gotten," he said, sounding relieved to have caught up.

Not everyone gets less sleep on the Yukon Quest trail. Padee McCrery is a former Santa Rosa, California, schoolteacher who used to stay awake late watching the race GPS tracker online.

McCrery became a fan of musher Aliy Zirkle after discovering her blog. She later became a sponsor of Zirkle's SP Kennel. After retiring, she moved to Fairbanks in 2015.

This year McCrery is traveling with the SP Kennel team. Despite being closer to the race, she's making a point of getting rest instead of following the mushers' every move.

"It's too nerve-racking when you're this close (to the action). When I was in California, it was easy to stay up all night and go to work the next morning. But here, it just drives me nuts and I have to scoop poop or fold booties or do something in the yard to avoid it."

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reporter Sam Friedman is covering the Yukon Quest from Whitehorse to Fairbanks.