Anderson chases Mackey out of Eagle
By day four of the 2008 Yukon Quest, it appeared that Lance Mackey was once again in the driver’s seat, a position he’s become increasingly comfortable with since he first won the race as a rookie in 2005. He’s won the last three. Just looking at the numbers of dogs, Mackey is having a good race and his runs are classic Lance Mackey: Long, steady with good speed, and he’s taken one or two shorter breaks than the competition.
There is one exception: Ken Anderson. Mackey’s neighbor from Fox, Alaska, is hanging right in there, though he’s down to 11 dogs. The pair pulled out together from Eagle, a remote community on the Yukon River, at just after 7 a.m. Alaska time on Wednesday, Feb. 13.
The two are making long, but not too long, runs and sometimes taking diminished rests - Anderson took four hours at Central and four hours again at Slaven’s cabin - creating a one-two punch that most teams can’t match. Those run-rest schedules have been expertly crafted by each musher to position their team to take best advantage of the time of day. It’s long been known that dog teams travel best between 6 a.m. and noon, and again between 6 p.m. and midnight — dawn and dusk; it’s a predatory instinct. Take a look at the times of day Mackey and Anderson are moving. None of the other teams seem to be in sync with that natural pattern.
The next 150 miles between checkpoints has one initial challenge; American Summit. They ran immediately uphill out of town, following a snow-covered road for several miles that would lead them up and over the summit, a wind-blown, largely treeless knob that can be pretty tricky at times. The wind sculpts snow up there, creating nasty sidehills. From there, they descend back down hill until they once again wind up on rivers. They’ll be in Fortymile country until hooking back into the Yukon River into the halfway point of Dawson City.
The four to five hour gap opened between Mackey and Anderson and the next pack of mushers out of Eagle - Brent Sass, Michelle Phillips, Hugh Neff and David Dalton - is considerable but not insurmountable.
Anderson was docked for a two-hour penalty for not signing out of the Chena Hot Springs checkpoint (three others also failed to sign out), but he got lucky. There’s a mandatory four-hour rest at Eagle, but he and Mackey stayed seven hours anyway, which more than covered Anderson’s two-hour penalty. It had taken them 19 to 20 hours to travel the 100 miles from Slaven’s cabin to Eagle, which means they’d done a couple of six-hour runs and taken a relatively long rest along the way.
Anderson has said he’s keeping his mind set on Iditarod, hoping to run many of these same dogs in that race, a tactic Mackey has perfected over the last few years. Mackey pulled off the unimaginable, winning the Quest and Iditarod back to back last year.
It will be interesting to see how the pair respond to each other on the way to Dawson, and beyond. Will they run together for a while before racing to the finish? Or will one of them go for a major run, hoping to pull away?
Kaduce sacrifices time to care for sick dog
Meanwhile, the early rabbit, Dan Kaduce, had problems that set him back drastically. If he’d left on schedule, he would have showed up in Eagle three to five hours behind Mackey and Anderson, by 6 a.m. Feb. 13 Alaska time at the latest. As it was, he got there by 5 p.m. According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Kaduce had to turn around two hours after leaving Slaven’s cabin because he had a seriously ill dog.
Ten miles down the trail from Slaven’s, a four-year-old dog in his team vomited, twice, and appeared to have ulcers. He turned back so he could get the dog back to a veterinarian staffed at Slaven’s. Vets there later said Kaduce’s dog would be fine. Kaduce wisely sacrificed eight hours to the leaders in order to care for his dog. He left Slaven’s for the second time at 2:20 p.m. Feb. 12 with a string of 10 dogs.