Iditarod

Halfway to Nome, the real racing has begun as Iditarod dog teams make their way to Ruby, the first stop along the Yukon River. Somewhere in the next 134 miles, teams must take a mandatory eight-hour layover, but gaps are starting to open up in the field. The challenge for mushers now is how and when they will decide to make their big moves.

The Iditarod Sled Dog race will start from Willow as planned. The Iditarod Trail Committee has been weighing moving the race start to Fairbanks in the last week because of low snow and icy conditions on the 65 miles of trail between Willow and Skwentna.

With the northern lights dancing above, we talked to Iditarod leader Brent Sass as he danced through the Ruby checkpoint and onto the Yukon River, skipping a gourmet five-course meal in favor of more comfortable cold temperatures for his dogs. We'll also hear more from Sass and his fellow competitors on their 24-hour layover earlier, and from the back of the pack, a trio of women, who banded together in a snow storm. Plus we have a dog profile and THREE listeners asking the same question, with an answer straight from the musher in question and a separate listener... answer?

On Monday, the Iditarod Trail Committee announced dogs belonging to four-time champion Dallas Seavey tested positive for a banned substance. But Seavey insists he didn't do it, which is fueling a mystery right beside the ballooning controversy. Listen now

Since the Iditapod left off, after Brent Sass's epic first Iditarod victory, teams have continued to arrive in Nome, including a fun race for 3rd and 4th place, two Yukon-Kuskokwim mushers in 5th and 6th, an impressive 7th place finish for a second-year musher and a Nome local coming home to finish in 8th before stepping away. We're also going to step away, but not before we answer another listener question and bring you one last Dog of the Day.

A couple hundred people packed into the basement of Settlers Bay Lodge last week to commemorate the earlier years of the Iditarod. 

Ryan Redington’s closest competitors are Pete Kaiser and Richie Diehl

The race director has chopped about 20 miles off this year's trail because of too much snow. Also, another musher has dropped out of the competition.

What’s the route this year? How are trail conditions? We answer those questions and more.

Sean Underwood got the surprise of a lifetime last week. The 28-year-old musher found out four days before the start of the 2020 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race that he'd be competing in the event. Long-time musher and four-time Iditarod champion Jeff King had to drop out of the race at the very last minute, and tapped Sean, one of his dog handlers, to fill in.

Tempest is Jessie Holmes’s lead dog. She’s a sweetheart who likes to bark at just about anything, he said. Without a dog like her, he said, “you just can’t pull off what we’re trying to pull off.”

Iditarod mushers and their dog teams are now either in the middle of their mandatory 24-hour layovers or back out on the trail, if they opted to do that earlier. We've got the frontrunners at the Cripple checkpoint, as well as a chat with the folks who 24ed in McGrath, now making up the chase pack. There's also an old-timer for our Dog of the Day, a couple listener questions about how to get into dog mushing and, related, what it means to be a handler.

Iditarod mushers are making decisions about where to stop for their mandatory 24-hour rests, some opting to take that break earlier than planned, as the teams continue to contend with warm weather. The village of Nikolai is also fully open to visitors for the first time in three years of COVID-19 restrictions, and that's where some mushers were dealing with busted sleds and their own bruised bodies. In this episode, we also get into how the race shapes up after those 24-hour layovers and how the weather is expected to change for the cooler. Plus, we have a speedy Dog of the Day -- Matt Failor's Mach 10 -- who's learning to slow down, plus a listener question, a musher answer and a follow-up to yesterday's question about adopting retired sled dogs.

The trail on the Yukon River is reportedly hard and fast making for relatively easy running. But it makes plotting a surge up the standings tricky.