Iditarod Update

The mushers and their beasts (14-16 per sled at this point) have all made it to the mighty Yukon River at or past Tanana.

This is an all-gender race, just as I think all sports should be, and a woman is in the lead: Maggie Hamilton. She’s got a “T” bib for “Teacher on the Trail” and, I think, is traveling by air taxi. Three out of the five dog-pulled leaders are women:

The musher currently in 2nd place is Mille Porsild, listed as from Denmark but the bio later says “Mille lives in Alaska with her sled dogs” so I guess the dogs didn’t have to endure air freight before their big race. She’s dealing with a broken sled, according to Facebook, and meeting up soon with a new one that has been airlifted in. Bad news for our trade war: Michelle Phillips, the leader, is from Canada and lives halfway between Skagway and Whitehorse. Hope for the U.S. comes from Alabama in the form of Jessie Holmes, currently in third place.

Following the Iditarod via the site/video isn’t as much fun as I had hoped. It’s tough to get power and connectivity so the only video comes from checkpoints and we don’t get to experience a musher’s-eye view from the trail. It’s too bad that there aren’t any drones with Starlink and 100-mile range.

In this image from Dave Poyzer, the terrain isn’t the snow-blanketed landscape that you might expect (everything in Fairbanks was covered in snow last week!).