It’s Going To Be a Sprint To Nome!

What we’re seeing here along the coast with the dog teams is that Lance Mackey seems to have pulled off a pretty incredible run to gain the lead. Everyone here, including myself was impressed with how perky Lance’s dogs looked and how well they ate both of their meals here.

They actually seemed unfazed. After their rest they marched right out of town on their way to Shaktoolik just like it was any other run. It will be interesting to see what he pulls next.

Lance himself seemed extremely tired when he arrived here but ate a good meal and was chatty and friendly to all the race fans.

The rest of the top four mushers, Jeff King, Hugh Neff and Hans Gatt, all have teams looking extremely strong at this point of the race and all were eating well. This is a sign of the dogs not being overly tired.

With the front four teams so far ahead of everyone else now, I really haven’t seen much of the others coming up behind them as these guys sprint on to White Mountain

You can get more details on rest and travel times in the race current standings.

If you’re wondering why their travel times were so long between Kaltag and Unalakleet, it was because all four front runners reported really soft fluffy snow that slowed their rate of speed most of the way here.

All of them seemed a little frustrated with that and reported that the first 28 miles out of Kaltag took 5 hours because of the trail conditions