CRIPPLE - Checkers huddled around the inflatable palm trees set up as a joke at this remote tent camp on Wolf Kill Slough were expecting Paul Gebhardt as dawn broke this morning. Instead, they heard a woman’s voice chirping across the snow-covered swamp speckled with black spruce.
It was DeeDee Jonrowe, and nobody was more surprised than she to be the winner of the GCI Dorothy Page Halfway award, which comes with $3,000 in gold nuggets. A stunned Jonrowe reportedly was thrilled, saying today was her husband Mike’s birthday and she hadn’t gotten him a gift yet. The gold would do fine.
“This is probably the first time in the history of the Iditarod that the award was won by a person who didn’t even know they were in first,” said Bruce Lee, the Yukon Quest champion, former Iditarod musher and current Insider analyst following the race.
If Jonrowe was jubilated, her competitor, Paul Gebhardt, was crushed. “That was the worst run of my life,” he said. He’d been leading the race but ran into a series of problems. First, he had to pack a 60-pound male dog only a few miles beyond Ophir. Then wet snow started falling, soaking everything in Gebhardt’s sled. It was taking so long to reach Cripple that the tired musher thought he must have overshot the incoming trail, and he backtracked about a mile before running into Jonrowe. By the time Gebhardt arrived here, he’d been on the runners for 20 hours, starting in Takotna. He’d camped only three hours on the trail. The 17-hour slog in warm weather effectively takes him out of the hunt for a win, he said. “I really, really hurt my dog team doing that. They’re not quitting, but it took so much weight off them. I pretty much took myself out of contention.”
Gebhardt wasn’t the only one traveling slow, or the only musher here feeling a little dispirited, questioning their judgement. It’s par for the course. The fastest times so far, posted by Martin Buser and Cim Smyth, were 11 hours from Ophir. Two years ago, Jeff King made the run from Ophir in about eight hours. Cim Smyth put it this way: “It’s like somebody stretched the ground in the two years in between.”
Sylvia Willis, perhaps a surprise front runner, was pretty happy with her run, saying her dogs looked good and ate well when she got in. Willis broke the run from Takotna into two seven-hour chunks, with a two hour campout to refresh the dogs in between. “I wasn’t going to risk it, even going into my 24. I was afraid it would take too much out of them,” she said.
She and Aliy Zirkle had 14 dog strings to work with, good for this stage of the race. Zirkle said her dogs were doing fine, too.
Martin Buser proved to be a practical joker, for anyone watching the satellite tracker and wondering why Buser was suddenly shooting around the terrain at unreal speeds. He took the two pound tracking device off his sled, handed to a pilot and asked him to fly around for awhile. Just for laughs. Buser was wearing a loud, red Hawaiian shirt and plaid green and blue pajama bottoms for comfort while taking his 24. Son Rohn looked remarkable, coming here just three hours behind his father.
The question now is, which of the other front runners are going to try to run straight here from Takotna. Can they eat up the trail after their 24 and gain a lead? Or will they suffer the same woes as the first teams to arrive here? Some of the first teams to get here may yet push on this afternoon, preferring to take their 24 in Ruby.
Jon sent this story via satellite phone to his home e-mail address. I’m (Jon’s wife, Bree) posting this story for him. Due to the low baud rate connection of the satellite phone Jon is not able to post photos from Cripple.