Mackey blows through Kaltag to make up lost time
KALTAG — Lance Mackey wasted no time here, grabbing a few bottles of fuel, dog food and half a bale of straw, posing for a few photos, putting old reliable lead dog Larry at the front of the team, and boom, he was gone.
“I’ve got to make up some time I lost a while back,” he said as he busied himself with the work, which took all of seven minutes to complete. He hurried, but didn’t panic. His dogs did their customary thing, barking and lunging in their harnesses. They didn’t look at all tired after more than six and a half hours covering a mere 38 miles from Nulato to Kaltag. “Soft and slow,” Mackey called the trail.
“The dogs seem to be enthused, so I better take advantage,” he said before driving off into the dark night under a sliver-thin new moon. “It’ll keep Jeff guessing anyway.”
Mackey had reason to blow through. King has been gaining ground on him since the pair left Cripple, slowly chipping away with slightly faster run times. The difference at Kaltag was down to 56 minutes — not much at this stage of the game. Mackey pulled in at 9:29 p.m., and King’s team of 16 dogs trotted down the street to the checkpoint at 10:25 p.m. He checked in and quickly parked his team.
The two are playing different games, a kind of cat and mouse chase with Mackey attempting to throw King off. But King said he wasn’t biting. “He’s hiding out, and there’s wisdom in that,” an exhausted King said after feeding meat snacks to his team and heating water in his cooker for a larger meal. “We have different styles,” King said, pausing to choose his words, which comes with difficulty after so many hours on the trail with little sleep. “I’m guessing he needs me to play his style to have a better chance. I don’t do it the way he does it.”
King has been breaking his runs into measured chunks, stopping at checkpoints. Mackey has been resting on the trail — and, in doing that, made one mistake today which he regretted. Mackey parked for two to three hours on the trail on the way to Nulato, believing the checkpoint to be still far away. It turned out he was only minutes from Nulato, but he pulled in and stopped there anyway, resting an additional five hours.
That was the “lost time” Mackey referred to. After pulling out of Kaltag, Mackey was likely heading up through the Nulato hills to a cabin at tripod flats about 28 miles from Kaltag, a third of the way over to Unalakleet.
Mackey’s gambit to skip Kaltag could well work. He took essentially eight hours of rest near Nulato, so a long run over to Tripod Flats cabin for a short rest then a short run down to Unalakleet isn’t much different than King taking a rest at Kaltag then a long run over the portage to the Bering Sea coast. They both wind up taking a break; King’s is just earlier than Mackey’s.
For King, it was a no brainer to come inside the eight-sided community center and warm up while veterinarians spent extra time looking over his dogs. The straw is here, the water is here, he pointed out, saying it would be harder for him to give his dogs what they need if he camped on the trail at this point. He didn’t plan to rest too long.
King had minor issues with one or two dogs, some scuffs on their feet, but he said, “I think I’ll probably leave here weith all 16 and make the decision (to drop any) at Unalakleet.” It seems rare that a musher competing to win an Iditarod would still have all 16 dogs running at this point of the race, but King felt it was no big deal. He said Rick Mackey raced 20 dogs to Unalakleet one year (back when the Iditarod allowed larger teams). The big numbers help on this trail, where several inches of snow and warm weather has made for hard pulling, he said.
The trail apparently began to set up the closer the two teams got to Kaltag as temperatures fell somewhat. King said he hoped the trail would set up more for him as he headed over to Unalakleet overnight. Despite the softness and slow run times, King said he was still an hour faster than his run here in 2006, when he won the race.
In the hour break between seeing the two mushers, the moon was soon overshadowed by a brilliant display of the northern lights. Curtains of green light, mixed with violet and dabs of orange, danced across the sky for several minutes, which surely caught both mushers’ eyes. King described the auroral light show as “the most spectacular northern lights I’ve ever seen.”
The teams, like the mushers who drive them, are so different. Mackey was his usual garrolous self, cracking jokes and fielding questions as he moved about; his dogs were just as outgoing. King’s team was quieter on arrival, but still that loose group that bedded down, licked their paws and chowed down on the several pieces of frozen tripe and beef King handed out.
The next teams in would be three to five hours off the lead pace, but could gain some time by benefiting from cooler weather and a trail set up by the two dog teams that went over it earlier. It would be tough for Mitch Seavey, Hans Gatt or Kjetil Backen to catch the frontrunners, but not impossible. Martin Buser, Paul Gebhardt and Rick Swenson were all moving extremely well but had slimmer hope of staging a dramatic come-from-behind victory. They appear to be about six hours off the pace, at least. The front teams would have to fade severely.