After nine days of racing the 2006 Iditarod is drawing to a close. Jeff King pulled in to White Mountain around 6:30am local time with Doug Swingley about three hours behind him. Swingley has as good as conceded the race to King. There’s a mandatory 8 hour layover in White Mountain and then it’s about a 9 or 10 hour mush to Nome, so I expect the winner to cross the finish line sometime late tonight or early tomorrow morning.
Still, anything can happen. The weather along the coast has been pretty harsh. Here’s what Cabelas columnist Jon Little had to say about DeeDee Jonrowe’s arrival in Unalakleet yesterday:
DeeDee Jonrowe had a rough go of it in the blistering winds and drifting snow from Kaltag to here. An exhausted Jonrowe took care of her dogs and quickly fell asleep soon after she got in at 5:47 p.m. She sprawled on the hard floor.
But before her deep sleep, Jonrowe told a few people gathered here that her run got bogged down, literally, in the drifts near Tripod Flats. Her team went off the trail, losing its bearings as a tail wind tore across the barren landscape. Snow up there is incredibly deep, but the trail itself has a good base. Once her team left it, they foundered in a bottomless mess.
Jonrowe tried crawling through the stuff, which is a sure way to sap what remaining strength a musher has at this point in the race. Then she realized she had snowshoes – it’s mandatory gear, so every musher has a pair. She strapped them on, and in the tradition of Iditarods gone by, she slowly carved a trail for her wallowing team. It must have been exhausting. But at least she knew which direction to go. She’d seen snowmobiles going by.
Jonrowe was passed out by the time I got over to the checkpoint to talk to hers, so I got these details secondhand by talking to others here, and specifically to Roxy Wright-Champain, who is covering the race, like me, for her son Ramy Brooks’ Web site, www.ramybrooks.com.
