Dozens of Yukon Quest checkers, veterinarians, and spectators were gathered at an old schoolhouse in Eagle on Tuesday evening, waiting for the first musher to arrive. Outside the building, dog handler Willoe Maynard smoked an American Spirit by the campfire. She’d flown to the checkpoint at the last minute to surprise her partner, musher Joey Sabin.
“I gave him a big hug in Circle and said, ‘See you in Tok!’ Maynard said. “Hopefully I'm going to steal a checker bib and check him in and have him sign my paper — see how far we get before he realizes it's me.”
But it was a race against time — she didn’t know exactly where on the trail Sabin was, and Maynard’s flight would leave in a few hours.
Inside the musher’s station, locals had piled mountains of cookies, brownies and casseroles on tables on one side of the room. In the middle, a big wood stove kept the shelter cozy and warm.
Mushers have to rest at Eagle for at least eight hours. The checkpoint is 473 miles into the race, and teams have to negotiate a grueling, 160-mile stretch of trail from Circle to get there.
In the schoolhouse, a few veterinarians lay sprawled in front of the wood stove, taking a quick nap before they would have to jump into action. The vets examine every incoming dog.
But Jaime Martinez was wide awake. Originally from Barcelona, he got into working with sled dogs during races in the Pyrenees. Martinez said his most meaningful moment on the trail this year was helping to rescue musher Ashley Franklin and her dog team when they got stuck on Rosebud Summit.
“I was with experienced snow machine drivers,” he said. “We went to rescue the team because the musher pressed the help button. The first goal was to provide care to the musher and the dogs. In the end, they were fine. It was a happy end. It was fantastic!”
Eagle checkpoint manager and local school principal Christie Robbins paced around with a clipboard. It’s her first time working the Yukon Quest.
Raised in Key West, Florida, Robbins never thought she’d wind up helping manage a sled dog race. Before she moved to Alaska, she was enchanted by the novels of Jack London and the biography of Iditarod champion Susan Butcher.
Robbins said managing the checkpoint has been stressful, but also a dream.
“There are more dogs in Eagle than there are people,” she said. “We have a lot of recreational mushers here, so we've actually taught dog mushing in our school for about four years. It means a lot to us, and dog care means a lot to us.”
Suddenly, vets and checkers queued up by the trail after a volunteer sighted a musher’s headlamp. A crowd of spectators screamed “Welcome to Eagle!” as Jeff Deeter’s team pulled into the checkpoint. After bedding his dogs down in the woods outside the station, he hung his gear by the wood stove and wolfed down a plate of chicken parmesan served to him by student volunteers.
The frontrunner said he felt nervous about the trail conditions from Circle to Eagle, but he was pleasantly surprised.
“This is my first experience with jumble ice,” Deeter said. “But honestly, the dogs handled it pretty well. The trail crew really did an impressive job in this race with making some pretty safe passages through some stuff that looks like it's very unrunnable.”
Six mushers trickled in through Wednesday morning. Two others, the father-son duo of Jason and Patrick Mackey, scratched.
Musher Keaton Loebrich said he and his dogs had a harder time on the trail than Deeter.
“We're going over these crazy ice ridges and end up on this huge ice cliff,” he said. “Then it was just like this sharp, thin ice everywhere, and then they stopped. I didn't know where we were, and I couldn't see any reflectors or anything, and the wind was going crazy.”
Loebrich said he managed his nerves by listening to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast, “StarTalk.”
And Willoe Maynard? Her partner, Joey Sabin, made it just in time.
“He showed up in the daylight, so he recognized me before he even got to the checkpoint,” she said. “I asked him, ‘What’s your bib number?’ And he just said, ‘shut up’ and gave me a hug.”
Jeff Deeter is the winner of the 2025 Alaska Yukon Quest, crossing the finish line at 2:49 p.m. on Thursday. It took him five days, three hours and 49 minutes to complete the trail.