8PM White Mountain

Our team arrived in White Mountain ready to blog, but the internet went entire belly up.  After a period of time with no success in getting connectivity and realizing that the White Mountain is not functional—maybe too much traffic from fans and , we finally did a work around with a system close to rigamortis.

Meanwhile we sat here in White Mountain in a complete information vacuum.   At 10:45 PM I finally got hold of Elim communications, which, from my memory is in the Elim firestation.  The Comm guy handed the phone to Aaron Burmeister who very graciously gave me a couple of minutes to unravel the story at Elim.

Apparently the Iron Dog (the big snowmachine race a couple of weeks before iditarod) broke  trail and obviously raced on it.  Therefore, that trail is theoretically the one you want to run the Iditarod on because it has a bottom that has firmed up over time—plus local traffic that hardens up the trail even more.

However, a foot snowfall after the Iron Dog, plus slight local traffic, left the good trail buried in snow.  The Iditarod trail breakers, yesterday, aimed their machines to Elim and on to White Mountain.  The trail breakers did a great job hustling  and trying to keep the trail open 24 hours ahead of the mushers.

But, this is what happened.  They missed the Iron Dog Trail most of the time, only occasionally getting on it for a while,  then falling off of it.  This is completely understandable because these guys are on machines and can’t see the trail.

Since it has been -20F, and the snow was deep, the trail has not set up.  Aaron said, “ The trail was really punchy, just sugar with no base.  The snow was belly deep and just physically exhausting.  It’s a total game changer.  It could be anybody’s race.   Mitch and Aliy Zirkle are already out of Elim but we don’t have any idea on the trail to White Mountain (46 miles total, 28 miles to Golovin, then 18 miles from Golovin to White Mountain basically on sea ice.)

So, this is a huge hurdle again in a race which has seen challenge after challenge thrown at mushers and dogs.    We can imagine that there is once again no base to the trail out of Elim, meaning the teams are going to wallow again to White Mountain.  WE usually think of the run from Koyuk to Elim to White mOUntain to total 12 hours, but this year it is going to be a lot longer.  Aaron figured it could take 8 or 9 hours from Elim to White Mountain.

Lead competitors still resting in Elim include Jeff King , Aaron, and Ray Redington.  They plan on pursuing Mitch and Zirkle after more rest.

Now, to complicate race coverage even further, we finally got a gps tracker picture of the mushers on one of our special gps units used on our snowmachines.  We could see that Mitch and Aliy are tracked on the beach going north out of Elim.  Instead of portaging over Little McKinley, a notoriously steep climb overland  to Golovin, it appears they are taking the beach.  We see an email from Comms in Koyuk with the question  , from Dallas Seavey, “Does the trail go over Little McKinley out of Elim or does it follow the coast?” indicating the mushers were thinking about it earlier today.

We find out in a conversation with an official that they are going over on the Little Mckinlye portage trail and the trail line on the map was correctly platted.