Iditarod 2010

Oh, how I love the Iditarod!  It is the perfect distraction to get us through the month of March.  I doubt the original organizers thought about this, but the race comes at exactly the right time of year.  January and February are dark and cold, obviously winter months.  Spring doesn't really come until April.  March is lighter, but not significantly warmer.  We are done with winter, but winter isn't done with us.  We need something to carry us through until the ice starts melting.

My class always tracks the Iditarod.  I provide a list of mushers and a map of the trail, each student chooses a musher, and we update where each musher is each day.  The kids really get into it, especially because the list I provide is composed of mushers who finished well the year before.  There were times when all they did was stand and contemplate the map posted on the wall.

This year's race was a close one.  Lance Mackey and Jeff King kept flip-flopping as leader.  Mackey took the lead in Kaltag, and never relinquished it.  Usually, the front-runner camps out in Koyuk for the better part of a day, and then comes through Elim in the middle of the night.  With such a close race, though, nobody was camping out anywhere.  Mackey left Koyuk Monday morning, and we expected him sometime in the early afternoon.  At lunch, I heard that he was about 10 miles out.  When my kids came back from lunch, we bundled up and headed for the checkpoint.  I love spontaneous field trips!  About 5 minutes behind us, came the rest of the school.  It was like a school-wide field trip.  Even the principal was out there, taking in the sight.  The kids were running around in the beautiful sunshine, climbing up and falling down the snowdrifts, enjoying being outside in such wonderful weather.  They claimed this snowdrift as having the best view of anybody coming down the hill.

Luckily, we didn't have to wait longer than about 10 minutes.  As Mackey came around the bend at the top of the hill, a cheer rose up and we cheering him into the village.

If you look closely, you can see the team coming down the hill. 

It was obvious that he wasn't going to spend much time here.  He came down the line, checking each dog and dropping a food dish in front of each one, and then came down the line again, putting a ladle-full of food in each dish.  About 5 minutes later, he came through picking up each dish, dumping out any uneaten food.

Mackey looked beat, but the dogs didn't look too bad.  The dogs are better taken care of than the mushers.

Mackey packed himself back up and prepared to head out.  He spent a grand total of about 15 minutes in Elim.

That trip was the only thing my kids talked about for the rest of Monday and all of today.  They were bubbling over with enthusiasm and smiles.  It was exactly what we needed to get through the last two days before spring break.

We figured that Mackey pretty much had the race sewn up, but it wasn't over until it was over.  At that point, the first three mushers were a possible 4-time Iditarod champion (Mackey), a possible 5-time Iditarod champion (Jeff King - good musher, but not very nice), and this year's Yukon Quest champion.  (Yukon Quest is a race run less than a month before the Iditarod, is almost as long, and is seen by mushers as a harder race.)  Whatever Mackey's strategy was, it paid off in the end.  He was the first musher down Front Street in Nome, becoming the first musher ever to win 4 consecutive Iditarods.