Evening Update from White Mountain

Posted by Sebastian Schnuelle
Date: March 13, 2019 8:06 pm

White Mountain has seen a steady stream of teams come and go over the last day and a half. Wade Marrs is pulling the hook, as we await the Berington twins.

Jeff Deeter arrived with 7 dogs right as the other, much older, Jeff was booting up his team. Jeff King is still driving a big string of 13 dogs. And they look good. As great as plenty of pulling power is in the hills, putting on 52 booties at this stage in the game is quite the chore. Jeff joked: ” Next week I will just go in the dog yard and boot up the dogs for the hell of it “. He is posting some of the fastest runtimes along the coast.

So is Wade Marrs. His team is moving right along, ever since he was able to switch out his busted up sled in Shaktoolik. The pace is getting a bit more relaxed, Wade pulled the hook 15 minutes later than he could have. He thought that catching Jeff King was out of the question, and he has nobody challenging from behind.

Trail stories from Elim over to here are of deep snow and very drifted in trails. White Mountain itself has been surprisingly nice, I guess the locals settled here for a reason. It is 36F out there at 8 p.m. The blowhole towards Safety seems to put on a challenge for some teams, as both Matt Hall and Paige Drobny spend some extra time there. Matt then put on the afterburners from Safety to Nome, to edge out Paige by 6 minutes.

Here a few shots from around the checkpoint, take a close look at 2 of them, mushers do funny things when they are tired.