Iditarod front runners reach the coast

Conventional Iditarod Trail Sled Dog races see a finish in Nome by Tuesday, but not so this year.
A 130-mile longer trail, rerouted from the Iditarod trail to Fairbanks and thus mostly run on the Yukon River, and a later start contribute to the fact that this year’s Iditarod won’t see a winner mush into Nome until late Thursday, long past press time for this paper.
Along the Yukon, the field of 33 starting teams has thinned out by Tuesday from 33 to 26 dog teams. They encountered glare ice, a hellacious sandstorm between Nenana and Tanana, sugary-type snow and rutted and refrozen overflow, making for tough going on the Yukon.
Mushers have to complete a loop from Kaltag, south to Anvik and Shageluk, and backtrack up to Kaltag. This section of the trail is not regularly traveled, making for tough trail conditions and slow going.  
As of Tuesday night, the front runners Jessie Holmes and Matt Hall have reached Unalakleet and the Bering Sea coast. This much-feared stretch, infamous for strong north winds, blowing and drifting snow, showed mercy — at least for the first teams to arrive at the coast. Clear, bluebird skies, mild temperatures and no wind to speak of greeted the mushers.
Jessie Holmes arrived in Unalakleet a few minutes after 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, with 11 dogs.
He was greeted by a crowd, and a constellation of cameras, of both the professional and iPhone variety.
“Race now is against yourself and Mother Nature,” said Holmes, during his brief stop in town. He corrected himself: “Not against, with.”
As the first musher reaching the Bering Sea coast, Holmes won the Ryan Air Gold Coast Award. Mayor Wade Ryan, Dorothy Ivanoff and Jerilyn Alakayak presented him with an ounce of gold nuggets, and two wooden carvings of loons.
Holmes didn’t linger long in Unalakleet. He stopped to snack his dogs, collect his drop bags, some straw and to accept the award – all in just 12 minutes. Holmes’ dog team, animated, barking and ready to roll, left the checkpoint eagerly toward Shaktoolik.
A pizza ordered for Holmes arrived just after he left, and the deliverer hopped on a four-wheeler and chased Holmes down the trail.
In Unalakleet, at Peace on Earth restaurant, Iditarod fans call in pizza orders from thousands of miles away. Some of them order for specific mushers, while others donate pizzas to volunteers or to any musher who didn’t get an order. The real draw is getting to leave a message with the musher, says Davida Hanson, who owns and runs the restaurant with her husband Bret.
“I can’t figure out if Abu Dhabi or Sydney, Australia is the furthest away,” said Bret Hanson, who collects the old orders from year to year to remember them. “There’s a little princess from Abu Dhabi or something who calls all the time. She was, like, seven when she first called.”
At the Unalakleet checkpoint, Glen Ryan peered at the standings on a big computer screen, watching the progress of his nephew Ryan Redington, the 2023 Iditarod champion, as he mushed toward Kaltag.
As the leaders ran towards Unalakleet, at times just a few miles apart, members of the trail crew fried sourdough pancakes in bacon grease and chatted about past Iditarods. Some were rookies; others had come back year after year to volunteer as veterinarians or dog handlers or poop scoopers; others were multigenerational Iditarod volunteers.
Co-chief veterinarian Dr. Greg Closter worked from Unalakleet while his partner Dr. Erika Friedrich, answered questions from her home in Virginia. Closter said that while he wished his co-chief was there, there were advantages to the distance.
“What I’ve found is there’s a four-hour time difference, and that’s been really helpful, because if it’s three in the morning here and it’s seven there, if for whatever reason they can’t get a hold of me, they can always get a hold of her, basically,” Closter told the Nugget on Monday.
Closter has been an Iditarod veterinarian for ten years, ever since he was eligible to become one. He and Friedrich became co-chiefs after the death of longtime Chief Veterinarian Dr. Stuart Nelson last fall.
At the Unalakleet checkpoint on Tuesday, volunteers waited for the first mushers to come in, watching on screens as Matt Hall briefly pulled ahead of Jessie Holmes on the river run from Kaltag on the morning of March 11. Paige Drobny is also in the front runner group, within striking distance of both Hall and Holmes. At this point, all have taken their 24-hour mandatory layover, and most their 8-hour mandatory rest at one Yukon checkpoint. The next mandatory rest of eight hours is at the White Mountain checkpoint, 77 miles east of Nome.
On Tuesday afternoon, Teacher on the Trail Maggie Hamilton chatted with Teri Paniptchuk, Unalakleet’s cultural studies and home economics teacher, and made plans to attend a practice for Unalakleet’s NYO team, which Paniptchuk coaches.
“All of my students are following a musher, and so they keep tabs on that individual musher,” Hamilton, who teaches fifth grade in southern Indiana, told the Nugget. She had started using the Iditarod to teach math and science during her first year of teaching. Her fifth graders learn mean, median and mode averages by looking at run and rest times and speeds, and they learn about maps by exploring Alaska through the mushers. 
By Hamilton’s second year teaching, the practice was spreading. “All the teachers in my school teach with the Iditarod this time of year,” Hamilton said.

A dog death
Ventana, a four-year-old dog in musher Dan Klein’s team died on March 7 outside of the Galena checkpoint. An Iditarod press release states that attempts to revive the dog were unsuccessful. According to a rule that prohibits a musher to continue the race in the event of a dog death, Klein scratched. The dog’s body was taken to board certified pathologists who tried to find the cause of death. According to the Iditarod, the only “unexpected finding” was that the dog was pregnant. “Further testing at the laboratory is being performed as per race protocol for thorough investigation to complete the necropsy study,” reads an Iditarod press release.