Aliy in Takotna and Allen Found!

Aliy is at Takotna for her 24 hour. I talked to her briefly this morning once she arrived. She sounded very up beat. She had a good run to McGrath. She thinks it was one of the fastest times she has ever had. From what I could tell, the trail was much better and she finally could enjoy herself a bit. I will be talking to her again in a little so I will do more of an update later on her.

Allen is on his way to Nikolai. I expect he will get there sometime in the next hour or so. Yesterday, I got very frustrated with the information coming out of Rainy Pass. They had Allen still there hours after he should have been gone. Finally, I went over to the Race Headquarters to find out what I could. Although the Iditarod people couldn’t help, I spoke to a vet that had just come from Rainy. She said that there was near white out conditions leaving Rainy and that many mushers were waiting it out. So I figured that Allen may really still be in Rainy Pass.

Since I was already down near the dropped dog area, I decided to go look and see if Venus, Aliy’s second drop dog, was in yet. She wasn’t, but this handsome face looked up at me and started wagging his tail and jumping. Peterbuilt, one of the two year olds running with Allen, was there. Since I didn’t even know he had dropped a dog, this told me two things. Allen had definitely left Rainy Pass and of course, he only had 15 dogs with him.

So, they never actually had Allen out of Rainy Pass, but they finally did sign him into Rohn. I don’t know how long it took him or if he took the same wrong turn Aliy did. Hopefully he will call from Nikolai when he gets there.