Two-time defending champion Lance Mackey and Canadian musher Sebastian Schnuelle were exchanging the lead Monday in the early going of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska.
Mackey overtook Schnuelle early Monday, and led the first team into the Rainy Pass checkpoint, 224 miles from Anchorage.
But while Mackey rested at the checkpoint, Schnuelle spent only five minutes there after arriving Monday afternoon and was first to leave. He was followed by Paul Gebhardt, a two-time runner-up, and Rick Swenson, the race’s only five-time winner.
Mackey was the first musher to arrive at Rainy Pass after having negotiated one of the steepest parts of the 1,100-mile trail where it descends sharply into a gorge along Happy River.
In years where the trail is icy and fast, descending into the gorge can be terrifying. But mushers were told this year that there was less to worry about on this portion of the trail because there was good snow cover for the sled runners.
Schnuelle recently won the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, a race nearly as long as the Iditarod.
Mackey, who did not run the Quest this year so that he could help prepare an Alaska Native for his first Iditarod, put together back-to-back wins in the Quest and the Iditarod in 2007 and 2008. He is the only musher to win both races in the same year.
Most of the top mushers are entered in this year’s 1,100-mile race, including five former champions.
Thirteen mushers are women, including Aliy Zirkle, a Quest winner competing in her ninth Iditarod.
Zirkle, touted as the female musher with the best chance of matching four-time champion Susan Butcher’s achievement, was in 13th place.
“I think that I am still right on the cusp of winning,” Zirkle said.
The field is down to 67 teams this year, a drop from a record 96 last year. The purse also is down from $935,000 in 2008 to $610,000, a drop that has many mushers grumbling, especially because the entry fee was raised to $4,000.
