SPK Dog Log

It’s 10.30am Alaska Time.

Aliy and the Red Team are still resting in Takotna, they’ve been there more than 15 hours so I think it is safe to assume they will see out their entire mandatory stop there. But then again, you just never know!

Allen and the Black Team pulled in to Taktona at 7.19am and it sounds like he has “declared his 24” there also. Allen spoke with Joe Runyan this morning when he came in to the checkpoint – here’s what Joe said:

In the early morning night I notice a musher wearing white wind pants distributing straw to beds. It’s Allen Moore, 2013 Yukon Quest champ and the husband and kennel partner with front running Aliy Zirkle. I kind of caught him at one of those times in early light when humans are just becoming alert and talk quietly so they don’t wake up the rest of the world. He has spent all night traveling and just putting his dogs on a 24 hour rest. He must be, has to be, finally ready for a good nap.

“Yeah, I spent a lot of time repairing.” He told me his run across the Alaska Range was a repair mission. His sled has only two main stanchions and he replaced three, which meant he replaced both the originals and then replaced one of the replacements. After having run the Yukon Quest in February for a thousand miles and now finding himself on the Iditarod, this is a very trail hardened musher.

In this picture below from the meet-and-greet last Friday evening you can see the difference between a more traditional sled with two stanchions (the uprights) in the front sled and the sled Allen has built with just one. One stanchion makes the sled very flexible and manoeuvrable but I guess, not quite as robust? Although, in saying that, many different types of sleds are suffering breakages so it is difficult to say what would be the ideal type for that kind of trail.

The 24 hour layover will be busy for Aliy and Allen. They will have a well planned routine of feeding, massaging, walking and stretching out the dogs. They will pay particular attention to feet, shoulders and wrists and try to get plenty of calories into the team. They will also ensure they themselves are well rested and nourished so they will fit in a few naps and meals around the routine.

It will be nice for Aliy and Allen to have some time to catch up with each other there too to discuss how things have been so far and what happens next.

We’re aware Allen has dropped a dog in McGrath so we are awaiting news of who it is and why. We will let you know as soon as we have the information. As I mentioned last evening, with so many teams scratching around Rohn and Rainy Pass there will be a huge load of dogs waiting to be returned to Anchorage so it could be some time before we get to see them. They will be in the great hands of veterinarian and volunteer staff while they wait so don’t worry.

It’s nearly 2am Alaska time.

Watching a recent Iditarod Insider video of the Red Team coming in to Takotna we were pleased to see the team still looking fantastic! They were alert and happy (except when the siren went off to announce their arrival – I don’t think Biscuit had ever heard such a thing!) When asked how everyone was doing she replied that she could do with some Ibuprofen herself but the dogs are good. The nearby vet, there to check out the canine team members, jokingly suggested Rimadyl!

Aliy has “declared” her mandatory 24 hour stop. Her stop will actually be 26 hours taking in to account the time differential from the re-start in Willow. How that works is the musher that left the staring chute last has to stop for 24 hours and for each bib number before that, two minutes is added to the time of the musher. Sonny Lindner (wearing bib 70) will have to stop for 24 hours; Aliy wearing bib 10 will stop for 120 extra minutes.

If she stays her full time (mushers can declare their stop but change their mind and stay 24 hours elsewhere) we can expect her to leave Takotna at 9.06pm tomorrow evening, Alaska time, and mush into the night.

In the meantime, Allen and his team left Nikolai and are almost to McGrath. I’ve been waiting for a number of hours for the current standings to update so we know how many team mates Allen has with him but that hasn’t happened so I’m assuming some sort of comms failure out there. I guess we will catch up with that information when the team arrives in McGrath.

As we haven’t seen any pictures or video of the Black Team out on the trail I thought you might like to meet all the sweet faces of the team in this video taken on Sunday.

Music: Acoustic Sunrise by Apple Inc.

It’s 6.30pm Alaska time.

Aliy is out of McGrath and on her way to Takotna! We’ve seen and heard several interviews with her in Nikolai and you can almost hear the disbelief in her voice about how bad the trail was. Seeing photographs and video of her pulling out of Nikolai and in-and-out of McGrath it looks like her sled is in one piece and the dogs look terrific. The trail has snow which will make everyone happy.

I’ve stolen this pic from Sebastian Schnuelle of the team coming in to McGrath (click the pic to link to his story).

Aliy is driving a new sled this year – Allen made new sleds for them both this season and it is a testament to his sled-building skills that it looks to have held together. Good job Allen!

We are very happy and relieved that Allen and the Black Team are in to Nikolai! We’ve been willing him on all afternoon and we’re all so pleased they have made it. You can guarantee he will have some great stories from that piece of trail and we’re looking forward to hearing them and sharing some of them with you.

Those of you who have the opportunity to hear Allen tell trail stories will know what I mean. He can be describing a situation that will make your hair stand on end but he’ll tell it in his laid-back southern drawl and a big smile that it will sound like nothing at all. Two of his favourite phrases are “there’s always something” and “it’s never easy” and he goes in to races knowing that. Boy, there was definitely “something” and it wasn’t easy there today!

We still haven’t heard anything about the dog dropped from Allen’s team. With the number of teams that have scratched in Rohn and Rainy Pass there are now a large number of dogs that need to be flown back to Anchorage so it is likely to be tomorrow or even the next day before we get to pick them up. It could be that they fly them forward to McGrath where they can bring a larger plane back to Anchorage. We will just have to wait and see. At each checkpoint there are volunteers and vets who are prepared to care for dogs for as long as they are there so we know they will be in good hands.

Have you all seen Terrie Hanke’s article about Aliy and Allen? It’s a great read.

Its 12.30pm Alaska time.

Aliy has left Nikolai with 15 team mates on the line. We’ve just seen the Insider video of the Red Team coming in Nikolai and they look great! She had Waylon back up in lead with Quito, Chica with Nacho, Boondocks with Olivia then everyone else still in their same starting positions as they came in.

Take a look at this Anchorage Daily News article where Aliy described the trail – “No snow. Zip. Zero. None.” Apparently her sled, brake and drag mat broke but she was able to fix them out on the trail. She said she “bit it a few times. More than a few times.” and she told Joe Runyan that she hurt her hip on one of the falls. Edit: check out knom.org’s interview with Aliy!

There certainly have been some horror stories come out from the Rohn to Nikolai run but as difficult as it was on mushers and sleds take a read of this snippet from Joe Runyan’s report after talking with Nic Petit: He was quick to point out that the trail was good for DOGS, just not humans. With solid footing, the dogs were just as they were in the fall time training before the snow falls. ”Oh yeah, the dogs were having lots of fun. They love it because its not boring. The trail is changing all the time.”

Here is a photo from our fall training to give you an idea that the dogs know how to run low snow conditions. Obviously though, it is not the same as what they are facing out there. Note also that we ride 4-wheelers!

Fall training in Two Rivers

There’s been some questions about hydrating the dogs in these conditions. The mushers will be carrying water and, listening to Martin Buser’s and Hugh Neff’s interviews, it sounds like there are areas of water (rivers, glacier etc) along the trail where they can stop to let the dogs drink and restock their supplies.

Looking at the tracker analytics it seems Allen and his team are have a stop-start time of it on this section. There are currently a few other mushers clustered around the same area and a quick check of their details shows it looks like they are a little stop-start also. We’re not sure what’s happening in that particular area so will keep an eye on the action.

As you may know, in 1973 the Iditarod sled dog race began. Several reasons are quoted as to why the race began, one of which is to commemorate the role sled dogs and the Iditarod trail played in the 1925 diphtheria outbreak in Nome. You will have heard the famous stories of Balto and Togo and the mercy dash carrying vaccines.

This year Aliy is carrying 10 doses of the Tdap vaccine in her sled to Nome as part of an vaccines awareness campaign organised by the Norton Sound Health Corporation (NSHC). Tdap is tetanus, diphtheria, acellular pertussis vaccine and is designed as a booster for those patients age 7 years old and older. Tdap is also given to every pregnant woman during every pregnancy to prevent disease to the mother and unborn child. Tdap is required by Alaska state law for students to attend public school.

There will be a week of vaccine awareness events in Nome where people can go to the public vaccine clinic and receive the Tdap vaccine and influenza vaccine at no charge. The Nome UAF will hold two informational speaking events by Dawyn Sawyer, PA. Dr. Karen O’Neill is the physician at NSHC who is the administrator of the vaccine program and will be receiving the Tdap vaccine. Rod Gordon, R.Ph. is the Pharmacy director and Lisa Schobert is the Vaccine Coordinator for NSHC (Nome and 15 villages) and who came up with this idea to help bring vaccine awareness to the community.

Martin Buser and Robert Sorlie are also carrying vaccines to Nome – Martin the DTaP which tetanus, diphtheria, acellular pertussis vaccine designed for children 2 months to 6 years old and Robert is carrying Td, which is tetanus and diphtheria vaccine for adults.

Another part of vaccine awareness is the “I did it by Two” campaign. You may have seen some of the dogs in the Ceremonial Start wearing dog jackets – ours are modelled below by Schmoe, Biscuit and Dingle.

It’s 7.45am Alaska time.

Good morning! As I catch up with what’s been going on overnight the first thing is that we are aware that Allen as dropped a dog from his team at Rohn. The same thing applies here as yesterday: we have no way to know what dog or why and we will bring you that information as soon as we can. We’re anxious to know but with fewer pictures and videos of the teams further from the front we can’t even take a guess at this point so we will have to be patient!

Aliy and the Red Team have just arrived in to Nikolai! Their run time from Rohn was 14 hours, 12 minutes. You will notice this is 2.5-3.5 hours longer than those ahead of her but from the analytics section of the tracker I can figure she stopped and camped for around 4.5-5 hours somewhere between Rohn and Nikolai. As I mentioned yesterday, both Aliy and Allen enjoy camping on the trail so this stop would have been planned. Seeing the videos from the others who arrived in to Nikolai before her it sounds like the trail was rough so we look forward to hearing from Aliy about that section.

Meanwhile Allen and the Black team are between Rohn and Nikolai. They left Rohn at 2.43am this morning after a just over six hour rest there. You can see now that Aliy and Allen are on different schedules as Aliy didn’t stop in Rohn; with more rookies and inexperienced dogs Allen will be slowing the pace and resting longer.

With all this talk about the GPS trackers I thought you’d be interested in these pics I took on Sunday. Each musher is carrying two trackers, one fixed at the bottom of the sled, the other up near the handlebar. These trackers work together (somehow, please don’t ask me how) to bring us the information we see on the screen. Here is some information from the Iditarod website about the trackers.

L-R: Ray helps officials attach the trackers to Aliy’s sled; the trackers ready to go!

Come behind the scenes at the Restart in Willow.

Music: East Ender by Apple Inc.

It’s 9.00pm Alaska Time.

Aliy and the Red Team left Rohn at 5.22pm and are currently sitting in second position. This early in the race and before anyone has taken their 24 hour mandatory rest it really is too early for that to mean anything too significant. It just means everyone is running their own race and her schedule happens to put her in the front two at this point in time. Basically, what I am saying is – there is still over 780 miles to go and anything can happen!

We watched an Iditarod Insider video of the team leaving Rainy Pass earlier this afternoon looking great. We saw Olivia getting a belly scratch as she was bootied and an adoring look on Clyde’s face as Aliy tended to him. The dogs all looked sleepy lounging in the sun until they were lined up ready to go and they were lunging on the line. It looks to us like she has moved Waylon back to run with Scruggs and Quito is running in single lead.

The run from Rohn to Nikolai includes “landmarks” such as the Buffalo Chutes and the Farewell Burn. The Buffalo Chutes are so named because a local herd of several hundred wild bison that wanders through the area and grazes in some of the small pothole marshes and lakes in the woods. The Burn was the site of one of Alaska’s largest forest fires, a million and a half acres in the summer of 1977. In this Anchorage Daily News article is a fantastic picture of Martin Buser’s team crossing the Farewell Burn – there is not a scrap of snow on the ground!

Allen and the Black Team are on their way to Rohn after a 4 hour 47 rest in the sun at Rainy Pass. Resting in the sun is great for the dogs because they can stretch out and really relax all their muscles. We haven’t seen any pictures or videos of the team yet, we hope to soon!

We’ve just watched a weather forecast and it calls for widespread persistent light snow tomorrow and overnight temperatures around -8F.

UPDATE: Scout is very happy. He’s just eaten a big dinner, had a walk around the nearby park and is now sleeping in a big straw bed in the truck. Thank you to all the volunteers who looked after him and to Dr Lee Morgan, a volunteer vet from Washington D.C. who is using up a week of his vacation time to be here and worked with Aliy and Scout in Skwentna.

Dana, one of the Iditarod Dog Dog Volunteers with Scout at the Millennium; Meghan and Scout