Mackey, Anderson jockey to front

Before the 2008 Yukon Quest started, mushers were speculating about which team was going to challenge three-time defending champ, Lance Mackey. Dan Kaduce was among those mentioned as a contender, along with Brent Sass, Hugh Neff and Ken Anderson. By day one of the Quest, Kaduce obviously was the first to make a move, by running almost nine hours straight from the starting line in Fairbanks to Chena Hot Springs.

In the press, Kaduce has said he was surprised nobody else tried running long right off the bat, considering mushers were faced with a 10- to 15-hour rest break once they got to Chena anyway. The long rest is the result of a last-minute detour: Racers loaded their dogs into trucks and bypassed the Rosebud section of trail – a long string of treeless ridges largely windblown of snow and riddled with sharp rocks.

Unlike Kaduce, the others opted for short snack breaks, breaking the roughly 90-mile run to Chena into two chunks.

The bottom line is that Kaduce held a two-hour lead arriving at Circle over Mackey and Sass. That lead is hardly insurmountable as teams enter the third day of what will likely be an 11-day race. Mackey and Anderson leapfrogged ahead of him by leaving Circle City at 1 p.m. Alaska time. But this has been a good start for Kaduce.

Going long early is usually a big gamble, and one that rarely pays off. But this was a unique situation. The conventional wisdom (and it is wisdom) is to start with shorter runs and get the dogs into a pattern before launching into eight-, 10- or 12-hour jogs by the race’s mid-point. But Kaduce is just the guy to take that gamble on day one. He’s long had a fast and seasoned dog team and has built a program that has been recognized by other mushers even if he’s not yet known well by the public.

Kaduce realized that his team would have a nice break after the long initial run. Given that he arrived at Circle, some 200 miles into the race, with all 14 dogs in harness, is evidence that Kaduce didn’t hurt his chances to win. (I’m home at in Kasilof, Alaska, simply watching the updates and news stories from a distance. So I don’t have on-the-trail insight into what’s going on. I did talk to one veteran musher from Two Rivers who said both Kaduce and Mackey looked great on the first day.)

With notorious Eagle Summit behind them, teams will depart from Circle City on the first of three long stretches of 150 to 200 miles, broken up by the checkpoints of Eagle and Dawson City. The next leg is a flat one, along the broad Yukon River to Eagle. Temperatures, which started out in the 40-below range, have moderated to minus 10 or so – very comfortable for dogs and drivers. Keep in mind as you watch the race unfold on the update page, that this (just like the Iditarod) is a chess match played out in numbingly cold temperatures by players operating on minimal sleep. A miss-step early can be costly later, in terms of a dog team slowing down and getting passed.