The real race is on as Iditarod mushers run and rest between Cripple and Nikolai

Through Wednesday, Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race mushers were stretched between the headwaters of the Kuskokwim River to the abandoned gold rush checkpoints of Ophir and Cripple. As of early evening, Eureka’s Brent Sass was leading the pack as the first to arrive in Cripple, where he was set to start his mandatory 24-hour rest.

Pulling into the checkpoint at 3:50 p.m. with 13 dogs in harness, Sass was awarded the GCI Dorothy G. Page Halfway Award, which comes with his choice of either $3,000 in gold nuggets or a smartphone with a year of free GCI service.

About 20 miles behind Sass, defending champion Dallas Seavey of Talkeetna tried to close the distance. If both racers take their 24s in Cripple, it will give Sass a slight lead as they get back on the trail Thursday afternoon.

By that point, though, there is a chance that Nome/Nenana’s Aaron Burmeister will have caught up after scrapping his initial plans and opting to declare his 24 in McGrath. The move could position Burmeister to make the push through the sparse mining district during lower overnight temperatures rather than the heat of the day, and set him up to be neck-and-neck(-and-neck) with Sass and Seavey on Thursday.

That’s not to say those three competitors have a lock on a solid lead. Several teams are giving chase to Cripple, running similar strategies to Sass and Seavey. A number of others arrived overnight and in the early morning at Ophir to start their 24s, and depending on what happens with light snow in the area and moderately high temperatures, it could be a faster or slower trail than what the front pack is facing.

Sass arrived in Ophir just before midnight Tuesday, where he rested for a little more than four hours. Toward the end, Seavey blazed through, only stopping long enough to knife open drop bags as he loaded up on salmon, dog food and straw before heading out to rest along the trail.

“I didn’t know what his strategy was gonna be, but clearly he’s heading to Cripple. So am I,” Sass said in an interview with Iditarod Insider. “We’ll see what happens. We’ll both be 24-ing in Cripple, it looks like.”

He added that he is intent on not modifying his plan based on what his closest competitor is doing.

“I don’t make that mistake anymore. I mean, I made that mistake chasing Dallas,” Sass told Insider. “What he does has no bearing on what I’m doing right now, that’s for sure.”

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Though he has repeatedly led in the early half of the Iditarod and posted high finishes, the four-time Yukon Quest champion has never won the Iditarod. He raced a similar strategy in 2020 along the northern route, though is running about six hours ahead of that this year, posting some faster times between checkpoints.

While many difficult stretches of this year’s trail have had superb snow cover and overall conditions, mushers have started relaying horror stories about the portion leaving Rohn, passing through the Farewell Burn en route to Nikolai, and more challenges on the way into McGrath.

Trail conditions were terrific for the front-pack mushers crossing the Alaska Range through Rainy Pass, but got messier later on as an overnight storm severely hampered visibility, making for difficult going along twists, turns, bumps and drops for racers farther back, Alaska Public Media reported.

South African rookie Gerhardt Thiart told Alaska Public Media that he kept bumping into trees trying to descend the Dalzell Gorge, and at one point realized his lead dog was no longer attached to the gang-line. Thiart followed footprints along the trail for a while searching for his leader.

Thiart “went down the trail and stopped to do something and there he is: ‘What’s up boss man, I’m back!’ " he told Alaska Public Media.

Dropping down from Rohn along rivers, several mushers said they hit overflow, the water that pools atop frozen river ice. At Ophir, Yukon musher Michelle Phillips told Insider she was boot-deep in water when her sled snagged a stump. She didn’t realize how bad things were until she tried to swap out her runner plastic in Nikolai. Lamenting the severity of the damage to Knik’s Ryan Redington, he offered her a spare sled he had sent out ahead.

“That’s the spirit of the Iditarod,” Phillips said.

The trail into Nikolai and McGrath was rough. Overhead pictures show little more than a thin brown ribbon of dirt and mud winding through spindly trees along the Farewell Burn. That meant miles of a brutal, bumpy slog for mushers. Between Nikolai and McGrath, mushers talked of snow moguls and drift that took a toll on their sleds and bodies.

That was one of the reasons Burmeister scrapped his plan to try and push all the way to Cripple, and instead turned a stop at McGrath into his 24-hour rest.

“We’ve run the dogs through a lot of heat since the start, we’ve run ‘em through the most hellish moguls I’ve seen in a lifetime,” Burmeister said in an interview with Iditarod Insider in McGrath. “It reminds me of when I was a kid running dogs in Nome out on the ocean, and running through jumble ice. We’ve done about 140 miles of jumble ice getting here to McGrath. And that takes its toll on me, every part of my body is hurting.”

Burmeister recalibrated on the fly. Given the temperatures and timing ahead, he figured coming off his 24-hour rest Wednesday evening will let him run through the night and get to Cripple around noon on Thursday, just in time to rest his dogs during the highest temperatures of the day.

“The dogs look great,” Burmeister said. “But I think the right decision for the dog team is to stay here in McGrath.”

Most mushers have now gotten past those rough sections of trail. And, remarkably for the third full day of the race, no one has scratched. All 49 mushers who started the race are still competing.

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While no stories have come out so far about tangles with the bison herd that hangs out around the Farewell Burn and Buffalo Tunnels (hence the nickname), Redington told Alaska Public Media his team got a pick-me-up ascending toward Rainy Pass as his dogs gave chase to a moose for a little under a mile.

Keenly aware that the wild animal could switch tactics and charge at any moment, Redington had a pistol ready just in case, reported Alaska Public Media. For an absolutely insane story about a moose attack earlier this winter, the Iditapod has an extended interview with Salcha rookie Bridgett Watkins about one attacking her team on a training run (all the dogs survived, but it is … terrifying).

And even though mushers did not stop in Takotna, which isn’t serving as a checkpoint this year, Iditarod Insider analyst Bruce Lee said in a segment that overnight, as racers passed by the small community, several residents came out to the trail and handed out bagged lunches. It wasn’t immediately clear whether they included the homemade pies that Takotna is famous for.