ID: Monday Morning Update

Its 7.00am local time. Feeling: relaxed the dogs are settling into routine.

Overnight Aliy and her team rested three hours at their camp spot on mile 74 before moving through Skwentna checkpoint and on to Finger Lake, arriving around 5.30am. There she and the team are currently resting. Teams are leapfrogging each other, and will do for the entire race, as each musher has a different run/rest plan for their dogs. Some will run longer and rest longer while others will take shorter runs and rest shorter, and you’ll notice some stay mainly at checkpoints while others choose to camp out on the trail. Strategies will vary widely and for that reason it is near impossible in the early stages to answer the question “who’s winning?”

Aliy will camp the team both in checkpoints and out on the trail. There are pros and cons to each option and Aliy sometimes prefers to camp out, especially in the early stages of the race, to give the dogs and herself better rest. There is a general ‘hubub’ in the checkpoints as teams and visitors come and go that can be distracting for the dogs, particularly the younger ones, and also the humans. There are only three mandatory checkpoints stops – one a 24 hour rest at any checkpoint along the way, an eight hour stop on the Yukon River (checkpoints Shageluk to Kaltag), and an eight hour stop at White Mountain.

From Finger Lake the trail becomes tricky as the team navigates what Donald Bowers Jnr describes in his trail notes as “some short stretches of extraordinarily difficult trail”. From his notes: “After leaving Finger Lake, the trail climbs steeply over a ridge to Red Lake, … then follows a series of climbing wooded shelves interspersed with open swamps. About ten miles from Finger Lake, the trail drops down a series of wooded benches toward Happy River, then onto the river itself via the dreaded Happy River steps. Then it’s down the river to its mouth, up the Skwentna River for a few hundred yards, and back up a steep ravine to the plateau on the south side of the Happy… There are two nasty stretches of sidehill trail in the last eight miles.” Our team thrives on ‘tricky’.

The trail report the mushers received at their meeting mentioned some sections of overflow (water) after the Rainy Pass checkpoint. For this, Aliy packed Allen’s waders! She took this selfie for me to share with you while the team is moving through that section. Lookin’ stylie!

If you have the Insider check out the first “Run Dogs Run” from the Ceremonial Start featuring Mismo and Spark right at the start, rearing to go!

To find out more about the trail click here to link to the Trail Map then click on each leg description to link you to Donald Bower Jnrs trail notes for each section.