Mackey and Buser Take Lead thru Dalzell Gorge
The Iditarod can now define a leader. Lance Mackey (”The Incredible Lance Mackey”) arrived in Rohn Checkpoint at the head of the Iditarod column of leaders at about 4PM Monday afternoon. Forty-five minutes later, Martin Buser arrived in gray dusk, the air almost misty with spindrift kept airborne by forty mile winds.
Our helicopter crew followed Lance through the mouth of Rainy Pass and down the glacier blue ice, open water, and bare ground of Dalzell Creek Gorge. It’s worth a description.
We found Lance crossing a broad valley approaching the divide of the Alaska Range at Rainy Pass, our GPS indicating 3400 feet. About 45 miles earlier the mushers are at 700 feet above sea level. Rainy Pass is an obvious notch in the imposing serrated Alaskan Range. Once the trail enters the mouth of the pass the route continues uphill following a willow and tundra bound creek. Finally, the trail crests the summit and drops down the north side of the range and this is where we find Lance Mackey and team dropping rapidly to the floor of Dalzell Gorge. Strong winds channel through the gorge and pound the helicopter. Therefore we focus our Wescam camera from a high altitude and watch Mackey negotiate a snake of a trail on glare ice.
Several times Lance stops the team, deep blue open water just ahead, slips and slide on glare ice and grabs the leaders, doubles back to a sharp turn in the trail and continues. Luckily, his dogs are easy to handle, many of them just two weeks off the Yukon Quest trail and —its daylight and he can see the trail.
An hour later, we land at Rohn at talk to Lance and he confirms what we saw from the air. The trail is abysmal and he is certain that mushers traveling in the dark will find it a gorge of mushing horrors. For Lance, it is another success. He arrives with sixteen strong dogs, quickly parks in the protection of tall spruce, feeds the dogs, and contemplates the view from the front of the Iditarod pack.
Later, still in daylight, Martin Buser arrives with his exquisite set of sixteen pullers and seconds the motion. The trail will be very problematic and dangerous for mushers following in the dark who must decipher a myriad of snow machine scratch marks on glare ice and sort out a trail with a narrow beam headlight searching the dark. Intent of breaking his 26 minute record at Skwetna, he quickly grabs a plastic sled and jogs down to the river about a 150 yards from the checkpoint, dips two buckets of water, beds the dog, feeds snacks, and is the first one to the small Rohn cabin, quite prepared for two hours deep sleep. He is fast on the trail and fast in checkpoints.
Macky and Buser announce they will stay for a substantial rest—-around 6 or 7 hours.
On the Trail
It is confirmed that Doug Swingley, the 4X champ and race favorite, has scratched from the race at Rainy Pass. I saw Doug in Rainy Pass and it is a no brainer. No way he could have continued racing, not to mention the challenging trail he would have faced, with busted ribs near his backbone. About three miles from Rainy, Doug and team hit an angular glacier and ricocheted into spruce trees. The dogs are OK, but Swingley is nailed with a game ending injury. For reader information, the Iditarod Trail Committee will arrange to fly Doug’s dogs back to Anchorage and volunteers along the trail will assist if Doug needs it. When I saw him this afternoon he was slowly moving with some snacks for his dogs, then said he was going to lay down in a warm cabin at the checkpoint and collect his thoughts. Lot of pain and bad luck.
Later this Monday evening Toleff Monson tells me about a huge tangle of sled dogs on a glacier section of trail just before Rainy Pass with Dee Jonrowe’s team. After forty five minutes dissembling dogs and repositioning them on tow lines, Dee remarks that she may have broken her hand. Early Tuesday Morning, I hear confirmation on Rohn River radio traffic that she has in fact scratched from Iditarod 2007.
To emphasize the difficulty of the trail, Sigrid Ekran rises from a nap in the warm checkpoint cabin of Rohn, an eye shiner beginning to develop. Well, she explains, it doesn’t hurt that bad, but she has broken her nose. Good news is the nose is back straight, but the bad news is her sled his radically out of alignment—but good enough, she reckons, to get she and team over the next 75 miles of trail to Nikolai village.
Lost on the Trail
Gut wrenching but a typical mushing screw up. AliyZirkle continued on the Iron
Dog Snowmachine race trail to Ptarmigan Pass and missed the turn-off to Rainy Pass. Eventually, she discovered her error and returned to fix the trail with markers. An hour later, John Baker did the same thing lost an hour and a half despite Aliy’s precautions.
Besides the hour and a half in travel time lost, also figure that the dogs must be compensated.
IN the dark, the fork in the trail which leads to Rainy Pass (the Iditarod trail) and the fork which follows the Iron Dog Snowmachine trail to Ptarmigan Pass continues to befuddle numbers of following mushers, including the defending champ Jeff King, who also loses a good hour and a half.
First on the Trail to Nikolai
Jason Barron, embracing a schedule different from Mackey and Buser (our titular leaders for the evening), led out of Rohn in direction Nikola at about 9:30. However, he was packing extra straw and it was clear that his intentions, and others on his same schedule, planned to camp on the trail.
Therefore, I’ll take the license, to identify the race leaders as Lance Mackey, who left about 10:30PM this Monday evening, followed minutes later by Martin Buser. These clearly intend to make the traverse to Nikola in the darkness of Tuesday morning.
Both teams left with a surge of power. Buser’s dogs, frisky after nearly seven hours of feasting and sleeping, barked and whined and hammered their harness, a clear indication of team strength. Temperatures at the checkpoint were recorded at minus 22F with a solid breeze.
Buser still had the tug lines of his towline snapped to a ring located at the shoulders of his huskies. Of course it made sense to harness them this way so that he could stop them more easily on glare ice, so I was curious when he would snap the tug line further back towards the hips for more power. Martin told me that it was working well and felt sufficient power with his present tow line. He’ll let his chargers enjoy the freedom of his shoulder harness until he needs the power. When would that be? Answer, heavy trail breaking, for example, through fresh snow.
Mackey impresses members of the musher pack remaining here at Rohn with his vibrant team of even trotting huskies, but it seems the consensus that Buser, for the moment, is the fastest traveling on the trail.