Brent Sass mushes toward Nome, poised for his first Iditarod victory

Update, 5:45 a.m.: Brent Sass crossed the finish line in Nome at 5:38 a.m. Tuesday to seize his first Iditarod win. Read our latest coverage from the finish line here.

Update 4:30 a.m.:

Brent Sass arrived in the final checkpoint of Safety at 2:47 a.m. Tuesday after a run from White Mountain of 7 hours 42 minutes, according to the Iditarod leaderboard. He left Safety for the 22-mile run to Nome after staying for just one minute.

Dallas Seavey arrived in Safety about 1 hour 25 minutes behind Sass and stayed at the checkpoint for 3 minutes.

Original story:

NOME — Crews piled up snow along an icy Front Street in Nome on Monday as the town prepared to welcome the arrival of this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race winner.

On track to win the 50th Iditarod is Brent Sass, whose commanding run in the second half of the race has put him more than two hours ahead of his closest competitor, five-time champion Dallas Seavey.

In White Mountain, where all mushers must take an eight-hour layover before making the final push to Nome, Sass told Alaska Public Media he was somewhat stunned to be leading the race.

“That I’m here in White Mountain, as the No. 1 musher at this point, with one more run left to go in the Iditarod,” he told Alaska Public Media. “It’s, yeah, it’s kind of a dream.”

Sass, a three-time champion of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, is chasing his first victory in the Iditarod — barring any one of a number of complications that could upend his path to victory.

The Eureka musher built up his lead around the race’s midpoint and hadn’t been overtaken since. By Monday evening, just 77 miles of trail stood between him and the burled arch in Nome.

He left the White Mountain checkpoint on the Fish River at 7:05 p.m. Monday with 11 dogs in harness.

This year marks the Iditarod finish’s return to Nome after last year’s route was revised to be an out-and-back trail from Deshka Landing, near Willow. The change was made out of an abundance of caution surrounding COVID-19, and prevented the race from reaching several remote communities that traditionally serve as checkpoints but, in many cases, have limited health care resources.

In the town of several thousand on the edge of the Bering Sea, the sun was shining Monday afternoon and temperatures hovered in the teens as pre-finish preparations were underway and visitors milled about.

Colin McGuire, 25, from Denver, and Minnesotans Avery Thoresen, 23, and Josh Field, 24, were walking down Front Street on Monday. The three have a friend who works on St. Lawrence Island who invited them up for the finish.

“He was like, ‘Heck yeah, its 50th anniversary, couldn’t do it last year, come on out.’ So (we) bought the tickets and here we are,” Thoresen said.

This is their first time in Alaska. They arrived in Nome on Saturday morning and said they were planning to stay up all night for the projected finish.

“We’ll be here when the dog sleds come in,” Field said.

A rugged strategy

Overnight Sunday and through Monday morning, Sass was able to grow the gap between him and Seavey by a few more miles before reaching White Mountain. Seavey arrived at White Mountain at 1:42 p.m., just over 2 1/2 hours after Sass.

A victory for Sass, who has run a hard, fast race, wasn’t guaranteed. Though by all accounts, including his own, his dogs are in superb shape, nothing is assured on the journey down the Norton Sound coast on the way to the burled arch on Nome’s Front Street.

In 2014, a storm caused havoc for the top racers, forcing front-runner Jeff King of Denali Park to scratch near the Safety Roadhouse. That created an opportunity for third-place racer Seavey to ultimately win.

And in 2016, Sass was running in third position and hoping to catch the Talkeetna musher on the trail to Nome, but Sass’ dogs refused to leave White Mountain. Sass said he had asked too much of them. He finished in 20th place that year.

[Technical difficulties, pizza deliveries and life lessons: Scenes from the Iditarod in Unalakleet]

Sass has run a rugged race strategy, stopping his team to rest on a disciplined schedule built around their abilities, even if that means breaking to camp in some of the harshest conditions. On the way north from Shaktoolik toward Koyuk, as Sass crossed open sea ice with winds blowing 30 to 40 mph, he simply stopped in the unprotected expanse, flipped his sled to break the wind, and bundled up his dogs on straw behind the sled for a nap.

“I mean, it’s not really that cold, to be honest with you. It’s windy,” Sass told a film crew member from Iditarod Insider who had snowmachined to his location after presuming there was a problem.

A break on the ice was always part of his plan.

“I wanted to break this next run to get into White Mountain a little bit more equally, and the cabin was too close and Dallas was gonna go there, and I didn’t want Dallas to see me,” Sass told Alaska Public Media at the checkpoint in Koyuk. He was referring to a shelter cabin on a bluff north of Shaktoolik where Seavey is known to take rests before crossing the sea ice.

At that same checkpoint, Sass was asked by Iditarod Insider whether he had started to think about crossing the finish line.

“No way, not quite yet,” Sass bellowed with a big laugh.

“It’s been a good run, but he’s still right back there,” Sass said of Seavey, whom he had not seen on the trail since the Cripple checkpoint nearly 400 miles earlier.

[Aaron Burmeister, veteran musher at the top of his game, plans to step back from Iditarod racing after this year]

Run times from White Mountain to Nome vary widely year to year based on trail and weather conditions, but top mushers generally take eight to 12 hours to travel that stretch.

If past is indeed precedent, that would put Sass in Nome between 3 and 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Zachariah Hughes reported from Anchorage and Morgan Krakow reported from Nome.