Alaska Dispatch

Iditarod fans are burning up telephone lines and jamming airwaves Saturday with speculation after Lance Mackey bolted from the Yukon River checkpoint of Kaltag to lead the Iditarod pack to Unalakleet and the Bering Sea coast for the last third of the race.

It appears that Jeff King -- the accomplished four-time champ who is now driving 13 dogs -- along with Lance Mackey, Hugh Neff and Mitch Seavey, are more or less equally matched. Pundits may offer that King appears to have the slightly stronger team, but the difference is barely perceptible at this stage in the race.

What is dramatic is the symbolic development in strategy unfolding now. Often the leader of the Iditarod is given the silently agreed option to rest his or her team and then lead the way out of a checkpoint. Contenders trailing behind will then mirror the leader and hope that changes in the team's dynamic will give them a new ascendancy over the frontrunner. The goal, of course, is to make time on the leader to the next checkpoint or rest stop.

That's one way to run a race.

In this year's race, however, Mackey declared no truces, no silent agreements, and no clarity. Mackey's strategy has always been a consistent history of being the master of uncertainty. In fact, he begins in August by training his dogs to expect uncertainty by harnessing them innumerable times. Day or night, he will harness his dogs to his four-wheeler, train with them on dry-land trails, rest, and then go again. The distances and the rests can be long or short and are completely random. The result, Mackey likes to report, is that his dogs develop a calm confidence in his unpredictability.

Mackey's move Saturday out of Kaltag may have been the moment he trained for so deliberately for in the fall.

The roughly 80-mile portage from Kaltag to Unalakleet will now presents a new and significant test to Mackey and other teams because they may encounter brutal winds off the Bering Sea as they travel across treeless tundra to the west coast of Alaska.

In sixth place, we can report an improbable development. Earlier this week, John Baker of Kotzebue floundered in the dark as leader of the race into Cripple and lost five hours. His loyal fans thought his race was over. However, he and his team have reappeared on the Yukon River near Kaltag, running in the top echelon.

Joe Runyan won the 1985 Yukon Quest and the 1989 Iditarod.

Name

Email

Title

Comment

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

Post