Update—our Insider crews on snowmachine should be at our location here in Finger Lake about 11pm with footage from the race trail.

3pm this afternoon we departed Willow in direction Finger Lake.  Our pilot, however, did divert so we could see teams moving evenly on the Yentna River in direction Yentna Station Roadhouse. Hundreds of snow machines parked along the trail, many with bonfires.  Even from the air, Bruce Lee and I could see open patches of bare ground and lakes with a pack of snow melted into smooth ice.   Tons of airplanes were on the riverbed and not far away we could see the occupants to the side of the road, many of them near piles of firewood.  Anybody that has run the Iditarod remembers the parties along the trails, whoops of encouragement, hot dogs and hamburgers, refreshment, available on the fly.

 From the air it appeared water was on top of some of the pot hole lakes as we followed the trail from Skwetna and then up the lower shoulders of the Alaska Range to Shell Lake.  Shell lake appeared like a hockey rink from the air.  Snow machines and a huge pile of logs to the side of the trail indicated another party waiting for the first musher later tonight.

3 miles from Finger Lake we spotted a bicyclist on the trail, the huge oversize studded tires visible even from the air.  He was cruising.  Later I saw him and asked about what appeared to be a sheen of water on lakes.  He told me that it was instead hard ice and expected the teams to be traveling on very fast trail.  

Our walk from the airplane brought us to what was to have been the dog parking lot.  Snow cover has melted on this part of the lake, producing a virtual skating rink.  No kidding, it was glare ice , and even with studs on our boots, it was slick hiking.  The handlers in the checkpoint have therefore moved the dog parking area further up the lake where a crust of snow survived—maybe in the shade of the mountains bordering the lake.  The problem is locking the dogs down.  The sleds are equipped with very effective drags with long ice studs. The mushers can certainly stop the dogs.  The problem is actually locking them down for an extended rest since it is almost impossible to set an ice hook.   Some mushers will certainly have brought ice screws, but most mushers probably didn’t even think about it a day ago.  One checkpoint handler was busy using an electric drill to wallow out a hold in the ice for an ice hook—but he has a big job if we have thirty teams in the checkpoint.

Once established in the checkpoint tent city, I took a little walk.  Everyone is fascinated with their ability to walk the lake and into the woods on the frozen crust.  Normally, one would need snow shoes to go off the trail in six foot of soft snow.  It would be a slow founder at best, but tonight you could probably walk through the woods over Rainy Pass with tennis shoes.   No one in our group can remember when the trail on the Iditarod was so hard and fast.  But, many mushers have experience—-for example, the Kusko 300 trail (won incidentally by the Buser kennel) was an ice skating rink earlier this year in February.   Therefore, Buser, for one,  knows what he can with a hard charging dog team on a trail with virtually no drag on the sled runners.  Of course, we are interested to know their opinions.  Will they slow the team with their drags to their trained speeds of 9 or ten miles an hour, allow them to travel slightly faster, stop more often for quick breaks, or take advantage of unbelievable conditions of easy pulling and log the miles to an advantage?  Buser told me that his team won the Kusko and suffered zero trail injuries, so that’s a result to contemplate.

Our crew should be here about 11pm with trail footage and anecdotes.  Buser did it last year—-we may see a musher as early as 1 30 am.