King, Backen also in the hunt as race nears McGrath

McGRATH — Lance Mackey was the official race leader this afternoon, busting out of Nikolai after a relatively short rest of just under five hours as the temperatures hovered near freezing. But the IonEarth tracking system showed Jeff King and Kjetil Backen ahead of Mackey on the trail from Nikolai. Those two took off a half hour or more behind Mackey. So what was really going on?

The answer should arrive by roughly 10 p.m. tonight when the front-runner collects the PenAir Spirit of Alaska award for being first to McGrath. Regardless of who claims that prize, the race is a far cry from decided. There remain a pack of perhaps a dozen dog teams capable of winning the 2008 Iditarod.

Here’s a partial answer to why King and Backen appear ahead of Mackey for those tracking using the satellite web page: the GPS transmitters sometimes don’t get the signal out; it can be blocked (see the paragraph on Jeff King below). On the satellite web page, look at the time of the last reported transmission. Mackey’s signal has been sporadic leaving Nikolai, sometimes a half hour old while the others are more frequent.

Trail conditions up to this point have been generally outstanding, including the run from Rohn to Nikolai. Trail breakers said the trail was normal to good all the way to McGrath. Run times back that up. Rick Swenson posted a time of just under 9 hours in a straight shot from Rohn to Nikolai, which is always a very fast time through that terrain. Dee Dee Jonrowe made it in 8 hours and 23 minutes.

Speculation is cheap at this point, but if the warm and wet spell continues, creek crossings could open up and water could begin seeping to the surface creating overflow on top of ice on some river trails. Alaska is enduring a heat wave with temperatures pushing 40 Fahrenheit in some regions. (While I wish I could have been in Nikolai, I was lucky to find a pilot who was able to dodge the wind and snow squalls to land at Rainy Pass. He got me and a race judge off Puntilla Lake and took us on a wild ride through the Alaska Range, dropping us off at McGrath by 5 p.m. I was able to catch back up to the front of the race, but it meant that I missed one of my favorite places — Nikolai. There, you get a good hint at who’s got the team, or teams, to beat. I’ll have to check out the Insider video to learn a little about the scene back in Nikolai.)

Joe Garnie scratches, and back of the pack notes
Joe Garnie was cheerful but resolute at Rainy Pass, where he’d originally opted to take his 24 but knew in his heart that he would be scratching. The race didn’t start out well for the 54-yar-old mushing legend from Teller, Alaska. Misplaced food drop bags had him scurrying before the race start. Garnie actually started the race with minimal supplies up the trail, not knowing if he had enough batteries, boot liners and other supplies. He started out exhausted after patching together some minimal food drops. Then his dogs, accustomed to the arctic climate of his home, overheated in the sweltering, moist air of southcentral Alaska. He had 13 dogs at Rainy Pass and said he would leave with nine if he were to continue. The clincher may have come overnight Monday, when he flopped his boot liners on a heat stove in the musher cabin. The stove was turned off at the time. Somebody fired it up while Garnie napped on a bunk, and his boot liners melted and filled the cabin with black smoke.

One of the last teams to reach Rainy Pass, Kim Franklin of England, had one of the only broken sleds of the race so far. Her big, old-fashioned toboggan with classic wooden runners was splinted together by one of this year’s Belgian mushers, Dries Jacobs, after Franklin lost the sled at the top of one of what was either the Happy River steps or another steep descent. Amazingly, her dog team — leased from 1984 champion Dean Osmar — stopped on its own in a straightaway not far up the trail. She jogged up and hopped back on her sled. But somehow in the middle of it, her stanchions (the vertical wood pieces that support the handlebar) were shattered. Jacobs pulled up and helped lash narrow tree branches to Franklin’s stanchions. She was considering borrowing Garnie’s sled for the rest of the way to McGrath.

King dogged the GPS unit
Way back at the start of the race, anyone watching along with the IonEarth satellite tracking would have noticed that Jeff King appeared to be stalled out only 19 miles out of Willow while the rest of the race passed him by. Truth is, King stopped and loaded a dog there; actually he had two dogs in the sled, by design, resting them for hours as he likes to do. Turns out the dog was on top of the transmitter, blocking the signal. King reappeared on the radar screen when the dog was put back in the team.