It’s weird looking at the race standings and seeing two groups of mushers in the same checkpoint, but heading in opposite directions–especially when the front-runners are probably at least a day ahead of their trailmates. And speaking of front-runners, Hans Gatt’s team doesn’t seem to have left its get-up-and-go between Eagle and Dawson.
The top three […]
After the mushers leave Dawson, the handlers have a break of two or three days while the mushers travel through “the black hole.” This is the 200 miles of trail between Dawson and Pelly Crossing without any resupply points or road access. The trail runs through a thickly wooded area called the Black Hills. It […]
Healy musher Regina Wycoff and Yukon musher Kyla Boivin left Eagle together early Friday en route to Dawson. Boivin has been suffering from serious back problems since the start of the race and said she has been treating herself with Algyval and DMSO, both canine liniments, although she has been laughing through the pain.
Wycoff, a […]
The news Friday that the trail was being drastically rerouted didn’t come as a huge surprise. All the way up the Klondike Highway, we talked to residents and some of the Canadian Rangers who put in the trail. They all said the conditions were terrible and they had been busy rerouting the trail, filling in […]
Dawson City is where the handlers take charge. It’s one of the reasons they are so important in the Yukon Quest.
After mushers leave Circle in Alaska, handlers jump back in their trucks and drive to Dawson. It’s our 1,000 mile race because we have to get to Dawson to set up camp for the dogs […]
It’s about a 20-hour drive from Fairbanks to Dawson, Yukon–if the roads are good. Thankfully, this year, they weren’t bad. We drove to Whitehorse on Wednesday and spent the night and drove the rest of the way to Dawson on Thursday.
On the way, I figured out that handlers on the Yukon Quest put about 2,000 […]
After watching the first part of the race from the back of the pack, I’m heading off to see it from the front.
Rod and I are getting ready to drive over to Yukon to pick up the food and gear in our drop bags that the Quest shipped over for the second half of the […]
There seems to be a lot of debate in the mushing community about the rescue of the Yukon Quest mushers from the storm on Eagle Summit.
As the wife of a musher who was lost for nearly a week and was widely thought to be dead during a race a few years ago, my perspective is […]
Sunday’s storm on Eagle Summit highlighted a perennial issue on the Yukon Quest trail. Although everyone is entered in the same race, on the same trail with the same rules, they are often competing in two different contests.
First are the front-runners, the mushers who are going for the victory and the purse. These men […]
Hurrah for the race supporters. In the midst of his concern about the mushers stranded in the storm Monday, Rod told me about some of the highlights of the first 150 miles of the race. People were lined up along the river for miles along the course. Many of them handed out food and drinks […]