Aliy Zirkle 1st into Shaktoolik

” 5 Miles out ” is my 3 a.m., wake up call. We all had been taking a bit of a nap before the checkpoints gets busy. Now the checkpoint is a flurry of activity. Half of the village has arrived also…. and that is in the middle of the night.

A look at the other happenings , it is very disappointing to see that Nicolas Petit has scratched. He ran his race of the lifetime, but then that came to an abrupt halt on the Portage over from Kaltag. Doing really well and crashing is a very fine line at times. Only over time do I realize how close the line sometimes is. I wonder why he did not split the long and tough 76 mile run in half, with a nice little rest in the middle, like Jeff King did, right past the bridge of Tripod Flats cabin. But hindsight is always 20/20. And the longer a musher does this game, so more foresight they gain. This was only Nicolas Petit’s 3rd Iditarod. Passing him on the snow machine Nicolas was not his cheerful self. He did not like the presence of my machine and kept on waving me away. I guess now I know that he was already struggling then. One thing about the run to UNK is, that there is a lot of traffic on the trail. This year that traffic was way less snowmachines and a lot more ATV’s. Yes, you read right. Many local were head on passing me on their ATV’s to see the mushers along the trail. I guess that tells you the most about how the trail conditions really are. Talking to Middy Johnson, who was cooking up his usual huge frying pans of bacon in the checkpoint in UKN, he commented on how dismal this whole training season has been for the local mushers. Snow came early but then by middle of November, it kept getting rained on and instead of conditions getting better each month, they just kept on getting worse. The coast was hit very hard with warm weather. On the portage trail there was a very distinct line right about Tripod Flats cabin, where the snow was still deep and somewhat soft. But by Old Woman cabin 12 miles down the trail, the snow was mostly gone and a glaze of ice covered the little that remained.

Nicolas Petit’s place in the Top 5 is now taken by none other than 2012 Iditarod Champion Dallas Seavey. He has come with a strong surge from behind. After taking his 8 hrs in Kaltag, he now pushed on straight through Unalakleet. The other, older Seavey, his dad Mitch the 2013 Champion, is only half an hour behind him. A race within the race. Dad and Son, so close to each other, but more so, both still hoping to duplicate their win.

Strategy wise I am somewhat relieved to see, that the ” good old ” Taktona Routine strategy still seems to have a place. Quite a few of the front runners were on that schedule. Kelly Maixner’s and Martin Buser’s long and early runs for sure mix things up, they make it exciting from the reporting side. On the other hand, they are an incredible tough schedule to run. It is an amazing feat what Martin Buser pulled off this year in some of the most difficult conditions Iditarod has seen, to run all the way to Nikolai on 4 hrs of rest, and doing so with a great looking team. Aliy, Dallas, Jeff, Sonny and Mitch, who are all now right here with Martin Buser, were many hours behind at that point. They slowly kept nipping on that lead during the second half of the race. The schedules they ran were a bit more traditional, except Sonny Lindner and Jeff King who ran all the way to the Yukon River. That is also not done very often, but as such for the musher a much easier schedule to run, as they got quite a bit more rest early on in the race, than Martin Buser did. And here we are, on a windy and barren spit on the sea ice, at 3 a.m. and all those different approaches are coming together. And for now…. it is Aliy Zirkle who is in command of Iditarod 42 with running the ” normal Takotna 24hr layover ” schedule.

I better head outside for some pictures… Here she is……, her dogs still barking and lunging in the air to go. She parked behind the armory, somewhat out of the wind.