Nearing The End
According to AND, Mackey, Gebhardt duel for lead on home stretch. They helped each other taking turns leading on the Yukon River run, and now they are sprinting to the end.
Aliy Zirkle has dropped to 19th, making Sigrid Ekran of Norway the leading rookie and leading woman at 17th place.
Susan Butcher, the four-time winner who died of leukemia in August of 2006, was honored by being assigned the number 1 which was carried by her daughters, Tekla and Chisana, as they led the ceremonial start in Anchorage.
Her husband, David Monson, is traveling from their homestead to Nome by dogsled and stopping to scatter some of her ashes at her favorite spot on the trail. Tekla is accompanying her dad with her own sled and team on the 650 mile journey, and hopes to be allowed to pass under the arch in Nome.
2 comments
Don’t know if you saw this — it’s a nice article from the SF Chronicle on how an elementary school teacher is using geocaching and the Iditarod to teach geography.
Alaska certainly has a lot of geography, and traveling about the same distance as a line from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Michigan by dogsled would certainly demonstrate it.