Jeff Deeter was the first into the Chicken checkpoint last night shortly after 9:00 p.m., covering the 94 miles between Eagle and Chicken in about 18 hours.
Jason and Patrick Mackey both scratched before Slaven’s Roadhouse when they faced daunting wind. They returned with their teams to meet their handlers back in Circle.
The other five teams will make it to Chicken today.
All six remaining mushers trickled in and out of the Eagle checkpoint yesterday (Wednesday) after completing a grueling 150-mile stretch of trail. They used their layover there to recover from two days of racing over chunky ice and past sheer cliffs on the Yukon River.
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Dozens of Yukon Quest checkers, veterinarians, and spectators are gathered at an old schoolhouse in Eagle, waiting for the first musher to arrive. There’s a kind of structured, suspenseful community party vibe.
Outside the building, sled dog handler Willoe Maynard smokes an American Spirit by the campfire. She flew 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!’ And hopefully … I'm going to steal a checker bib and check him in and have him sign my paper. You know, see how far we get before he realizes it's me!"
But it’s a race against time — Maynard’s flight out of town leaves in a few hours. The race standings are reported infrequently, so it’s anyone’s guess if she’ll be able to surprise Sabin in time.
Inside the musher’s station, locals have piled mountains of cookies, brownies, and casseroles on tables on one side of the room. In the middle, a big wood stove keeps the shelter nice and cozy. A few veterinarians are sprawled out on the floor in front of it, taking a quick snooze before they have to jump into action and examine every incoming dog.
But veterinarian Jaime Martinez is wide awake. Originally from Barcelona, he got into working with sled dogs during races in the Pyrenees. Martinez says his most meaningful moment on the trail this year was helping rescue musher Ashley Franklin and her dog team when their sled got stuck on Rosebud Summit.
I was with experienced snow machine drivers. We went to rescue the team because the musher pressed the help button.
And at the end, it was a happy end. It was fantastic!"
Eagle checkpoint manager and local school principal Christie Robbins paces around with a clipboard. It’s her very first time working the Yukon Quest.
Raised in Key West, Florida, Robbins never thought she’d wind up helping manage one of the world’s biggest sled dog races. Before she moved to Alaska, she was enchanted by the novels of Jack London and Iditarod champion Susan Butcher’s biography.
Robbins says managing the checkpoint has been stressful, but also a dream.
"This is huge for us! There are more dogs in Eagle than there are people. 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, a volunteer down the trail sights musher Jeff Deeter’s headlamp. Vets and checkers get in queue by the trail, ready to receive the dog team. It’s showtime.
Deeter climbs out of his sled, leads his dogs to bed down in the woods outside the station, and hangs his gear by the stove. High school volunteers serve him a plate of chicken parmesan that he wolfs down. The frontrunner says he was nervous about the trail conditions on the 110-mile stretch from Circle to Eagle. But he says he was pleasantly surprised.
"This is my first experience with jumble ice. But honestly, the dogs handled it pretty well, there was just some kind of banging around. The 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. It was overall pretty smooth."
Musher Keaton Loebrich reached Eagle Wednesday morning. He says he had a harder time out there.
"We went way off trail. We're going over these crazy ice ridges and end up on this huge ice cliff. And then it was just like this sharp, thin ice everywhere. And then they stopped, and I didn't know where we were, and I couldn't see any reflectors or anything, and the wind was going crazy…"
Loebrich says he managed his nerves passing through that perilous terrain by listening to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s popular podcast, “StarTalk.”
Six mushers in total trickle in through the morning. Two other competitors, father-son duo Jason and Patrick Mackey, scratched.
Oh! And remember Willoe Maynard? She got to surprise her beau, Joey Sabin, just in time.
"He showed up in the daylight, so he recognized me before he even got to the checkpoint! I asked him what bib number and he just said, “shut up” and gave me a hug."
The six mushers doing the full, 550-mile version of the race will make their way into Chicken, where the digs are a lot more quaint. They’ll rest for at least six hours in metal shipping containers. Then they’ll be in the home stretch, to the finish line in Tok.
