Iron Dog racers encounter harrowing snow storm

A severe blizzard hit western Alaska just as Iron Dog racers reached the coast, making their progress slow and eventually halted the pro class at Kotzebue.
The raging blizzard stranded several Expedition Class riders Monday night in a mountainous area just before Golovin. 
The first expedition riders made it to Nome on Tuesday afternoon. Iron Dog officials said on Tuesday that the pro class would be held in Kotzebue with the plan to let them depart on Wednesday at 6 a.m. Wrench day at Nome is postponed to Thursday, and Iron Dog officials still planned to hold the Nome Halfway banquet on Wednesday, starting at 5 p.m.

Still in the race
Team 3, Nomeite Steffen Booth and his teammate Evan Barber, made it to the Kotzebue checkpoint late Tuesday afternoon.
Booth and Barber did well on the early sections of trail and were in the lead pack at points but ran into some trouble. Barber broke his brake handle near the Poorman checkpoint. Later, the team was on the Yukon River and Barber hit a chunk of ice and rolled his machine. Steffen’s father Evan Booth, said that the crash cost the team a lot of time and did some damage to Barber’s gear. “A track and studs got into his jacket, and his helmet was smashed and visor smashed,” Booth said.
The team had a parts plane in Galena and were able to fix the snowmachine. Still, their troubles weren’t over. North of Shaktoolik, Booth crashed and broke his windshield and caused a stress fracture on the inside of his machine. “The fasteners were stretched or came loose in that crash, and things wobble around in there and wore a hole in the heat exchanger,” said the elder Booth.
Then, between Selawik and Kiana, a rear torsion spring broke on Barber’s machine. “They had to ride all the way to Noorvik with one spring, which is challenging,” said Evan Booth. “You’re trying to save your machine and not thrash on it too bad.”
Afte fixing the spring in Noorvik, the team departed, but the hole in Booth’s heat exchanger soon caused overheating issues and they had to turn around and head back to Noorvik. After spending all of Tuesday in Noorvik fixing the machine, the team departed for Kotzebue just after 2 p.m. and arrived in Kotzebue just after 4 p.m.
The National Weather Service reported wind gust reports of up to 70 mph in Kotzebue, 55 mph in Golovin and 52 mph in Golovin.

Scratches
  Prior to encountering the harrowing weather on the coast, Mike Morgan and his teammate Bradley Kishbaugh as well as Nome father-son duo Chugie Farley and Kevin McDaniel Farley scratched in the early days of the 2026 Iron Dog race. Two-time winner Mike Morgan scratched on Saturday when his teammate hit a tree stump and wrecked his snowmachine. The Farleys scratched in Ophir.
The Farleys scratched just before 2 a.m. on Monday in Ophir. McDaniel-Farley said that the team had a rough start to the race. Their shocks wore out early on and had to be replaced. Then, heading towards Poorman, they took a wrong turn and Farley ended up getting stuck in the water.
“Our shocks were good at the start, and then once we got to Skwentna they were just completely gone. We were basically just riding on the springs,” said McDaniel-Farley in an interview with the Nugget by phone Tuesday morning.
After riding from Skwentna to McGrath on worn out shocks, the team had to wait for new shocks to arrive by plane and ended up extending their layover a few hours. They left McGrath around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday.
The problems didn’t stop there. The team heard Ophir was out of gas, so they filled up their tanks in Takotna, and headed towards the Poorman checkpoint. They ended up taking a wrong turn and had to backtrack. While on the wrong trail, they got stuck upwards of ten times. Their fuel reserves started to run low. When they finally got pointed on the right trail, Farley ended up in the Innoko River.
McDaniel-Farley said it took around an hour and a half to get the sled out. They tied a rope to the back of the snowmachine and attached it to the other one, slowly backing the machine out of the water and maintaining tension to get the rear of the downed machine out. “Then we got the skis out of the water, but Chugie had to go in and lift it,” he said. “Then we had to pull it over, get it on the snow. Eventually we were able to get it out.”
With Farley’s legs soaking wet and dropping fuel reserves, the team knew that they had to scratch. “After I got wet, it’s like, ‘We have to turn back. We know where there’s a warm place,’” said Chugie Farley. “It was a no go.”
After deciding to scratch, they still had to make it back to Ophir in the cold and wind. “We were the only ones out there. There’s no other teams coming,” said Farley. “It was just us out in the middle of nowhere.”
The team ended up scratching at 1:50 a.m. in Ophir, before snowmachining back to McGrath, arriving around 4 a.m. They flew from McGrath to Anchorage on Monday and caught Tuesday morning’s flight from Anchorage to Nome, but that also ran into issues. “We got to Nome and they said the weather was bad. Then we ended up turning around and coming back to Anchorage,” said McDaniel-Farley.
McDaniel-Farley said that the decision to scratch was probably the right one. “The new suspension we put in, we couldn’t really tell if it was doing any better or not,” he said.
Still, he does not regret racing. “I check it as a valuable experience,” he said. “Learned how to swap out shocks pretty fast. Learned pretty good skills on how to get a snowmachine out of the water that’s just nose down. And how to get unstuck.”Team 6, Mike Morgan and Bradley Kishbaugh, scratched in Nikolai after Kishbaugh crashed into a tree in the Farewell Burn around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.
“He [Kishbaugh] clipped a frozen tussock on the left side of the trail, and it shot him over to the right side, where a tree was waiting for him,” said Morgan, reached by phone on Tuesday morning. “It took the whole right side of the sled off, did significant damage to the bulkhead of the machine, which is basically the structure that holds everything together.”
Morgan said repairing the damage would have been hard. “We pretty much knew we were out when we saw the big hole in the bulkhead,” said Morgan.
To get into Nikolai, about 40 miles ahead, the duo had to do some trail engineering on Kishbaugh’s sled. “We took the ski and we rigged it up underneath the belly pan of the machine,” said Morgan. “He rode all the way to Nikolai on one side, trying to keep the machine upright with one only one side left on it.”
Morgan said that he and Kishbaugh were heartbroken after having to cut their race short. The team had been in the front of the pack in the early hours of the race. “We were looking really good. We were feeling really good. We weren’t taking any crazy chances. We weren’t riding stupid or crazy. We were just cruising,” he said. “That’s the thing that hurts. It’s not like we were doing anything reckless or crazy.”
According to a report from KSRM Radio, Kishbaugh was carrying the ashes of Skye Rench, a former Iron Dog racer who died in 2025 when his ATV fell through the ice on the Susitna River. Rench’s ashes were passed on to Tyler Gurley and Kristofer Sindorf to be taken to Nome.
Kishbaugh flew out of Nikolai on Sunday. Morgan waited. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to head north on his own or south, back towards Big Lake. He made the decision to head south after seeing that a severe winter storm was about to hit western Alaska. “The storm up on the coast didn’t sound too appealing to me,” he said. “Why go through that when you don’t have to?”
Morgan said this unfortunate scratch hasn’t soured him on the Iron Dog. “We’ll be back. I’ll be back in some capacity,” he said. “I’m not going out like this.”