Nikolai is hopping. And this is just the beginning. Team after team is coming in. Wade Marrs  was checking in. It was fun to see him sit down while driving his sled. He used to give me a hard time for having a sit down sled. Wade’s leaders wanted to visit locals first,  before heading for the parking spot. Nicolas Petit was walking some of his dogs. That is a good way to prevent lactic acid buildup. His team is young. They are full of energy. They look peppy but have not been eating as well as Nicolas would have liked to this point. It usually takes younger dogs a bit longer to fall into a race rhythm. 

I did backtrack a bit on the trail to shoot a few teams arriving. The locals here have done an amazing amount of trail work. A nasty water crossing about 1.5 miles before the checkpoint  had a nice sturdy bridge built over it. I caught up with Hugh Neff, right when he was crossing over. Hugh was not a happy camper, as he had to haul a 65 lbs ” almost all the way from Rohn “, as he put it. Then again, others like Dallas Seavey were hauling 4 dogs, voluntarily, to slow the team down.

Right behind Hugh was Lance Mackey. True to his sign ” on by  ” he carries on his caboose, he passed Hugh before dropping onto the Kuskokwim River. Lance and Hugh have spent a lot of time on the trails together over the years, in the Yukon Quest and in the Iditarod.

Both Aliy Zirkle and Pete Kaiser were riding their sled brakes hard. I could hear their teams approach, before actually seeing them. That is a big difference to other years. I remember back in 2012, following the leader in on the iron dog, where the trail was virtually blown over and mushers had to work hard to get 7.5 mph. This year, they have to ride the drag mat, to keep the team speed under 10 mph.

The battle stories from further back on the trail are starting to emerge. Specially the upper Happy River, before Dalzall Gorge proved to be an obstacle for quite a few teams. The water there was not deep, but the tricky part was that the trail did a 90 degree turn right before. I have to admit I did not think much off it, being on the iron dogs, but many teams must have balked there. Bruce Lee who has just come in from Rohn mentioned that about 75% of the mushers arrived there wet. Some were pouring water out of their boots. Apparently Jim Lanier also lost his team, right at the end of the Gorge. The dogs ended up running onto the Tatlina (sp) river and Lars Monson came to Jim’s aid. Some footage of that should show up on the Insider video at some point. 

Enjoy the shots: