Dog teams in the Yukon Quest Alaska 750 are well into the second half of the race, resting where the Dalton Highway crosses the Yukon River.
The race’s two frontrunners parked their teams at the Yukon River Bridge checkpoint, where they're catching up on sleep and consuming calories during a mandatory 24-hour layover.
Fairbanks musher and last year’s Quest runner-up Josi Shelley maintained her lead over fellow Fairbanks musher and defending Quest champion Jeff Deeter into the Yukon River Bridge checkpoint.
Shelley held onto first place as Deeter’s team advanced, and wind and snow obliterated portions of the trail.
Shelley’s husband JJ stands near the base of a sloped trail which connects the Yukon to the checkpoint, where the Dalton Highway Bridge crosses the massive river. His head starts bobbing as he runs up followed by wife Josi and her 11-dog team.
“I found like this really cute musher on the trail. I should run faster.”
He’s yelling to a small crowd which gathered Thursday at about 1:40PM to see Josi Shelley arrive first at the Yukon River Bridge Camp, about 450 miles into this year’s race.
The Quest allows handlers to help mushers with chores during the 24-hour rest, and shortly after Josi’s pulls into the dog yard, JJ walks into the nearby lodge to fill a bucket with water: a first step toward preparing some of 10,000 to 14,000 calories each sled dog consumes daily.
“Me being the husband, I’m the legally bound handler. So, right now, I’m just getting some water for food. So, what we do when we get in is we start up a cooker, and pretty much the first thing we’ll do is we’ll go get water, start the cooker up, boil this, and then this is what thaws out the meat and cooks it for the dogs.”
Josi Shelley says she hadn’t planned to take advantage of the rules that allow for JJ’s help. She says this race is her last big training run before the Iditarod, so she wanted to tackle the tasks on her own, like she’ll have to during that race. But she changed her mind.
“I feel like it’s kind of nice – for the musher, it’s kind of cush. This is the only checkpoint where they’re allowed to do anything.”
Shelley reached the checkpoint off the Dalton Highway after logging over 200 miles on the snaking and braided Yukon River since departing Circle City three days earlier. She and other mushers have visited other checkpoints on the river along the way, including Fort Yukon, Beaver and Stevens Village.
But mushers say the route to the 24-hour rest wasn’t always clear. Shelley says sections of the trail after Beaver were blown in and didn’t have visible markers. She says she searched for a while on Wednesday evening before opting to wait for daylight and improved conditions.
“It was a really good test of my leaders, and they did a fantastic job. We definitely did some extra miles, and then the visibility just got so bad at that dusky hour, and we’d been out there for like eight hours, so we were like, ‘Alright, we’ll wait until morning.”
The wayfinding and waiting narrowed the gap between Shelley and fellow Fairbanks musher Jeff Deeter, who’s been in second place most of the race.
Deeter, last year’s Quest champion, briefly overtook Shelley while she was camped on the river early Thursday, but she regained the lead before the Yukon River Bridge checkpoint. Deeter and his 9-dog team made it to the 24-hour layover about an hour and a half behind Shelley and her dogs.
“Her team’s just way more powerful, so she caught me.”
Deeter says he also struggled to find and stay on track on the Yukon, and that he commiserated with Shelley when they crossed paths. He says there just weren’t enough trail markers to navigate the river’s expanse, and around jumble ice, cracks and other obstacles.
“Literally, we were one marker per mile at best on most of the miles that we’ve mushed on the Yukon, and that’s not a marked trail. That is a marker to let you know that you’re on a river, not tell you where to go on the river.”
He says that was frustrating. Deeter says his team is depleted, and with an eye toward the Iditarod, he’s not sure it’ll be worth it to finish out this year’s Quest.
Shelley and Deeter are eligible to leave the Yukon River Bridge at 1:40 and 3:25 this afternoon respectively.
There are significant gaps back to Jonah Bacon in 3rd place and Jason and Patrick Mackey at the tail of the race.
After the Yukon River bridge, the Quest trail traces the river for roughly another 130 miles to the community of Tanana. From there it's over 190 more miles to the finish in Fairbanks. (Patrick Gilchrist)
