Iditarod Background
The real race has begun in Willow, with teams signing out at recorded times to provide space along the trail. It started at 2PM Alaska Standard Time which is -9 UTC, or 3 hours earlier than my time. You have to check the Official Race Site to find out who is winning because it is based on actual times for team, not their place on the trail and there are mandatory 8 and 24-hour layovers during the race. There is 10 and a half hours of sunlight with sunrise at 8AM, but the teams will gain about 6 minutes a day during the race, and the moon is waning from the last quarter, so it’s no help.
The Weather Underground has a special page for Iditarod Weather, which has a map where you can see the current weather at the check points when you put your cursor on them, and the distance between the points when you put your cursor on a trail segment. Currently there is light snow falling at the beginning of the course.
The USGS has an Alaska earthquake map for the current week, and Alaska constantly has earthquakes, but most of then are small.
You might want to check out the Wikipedia entry on sled dogs where you will find out that the majority of the Iditarod dogs are specialty mongrels, and not purebred anything. Long distance pulling is not part of any breed standard. Most of the recognized sled dog breeds get too big and are much better at sprints than marathons. The breeds that are the best for marathons tend not to have the coats for the arctic environment of the Iditarod. The consistent winners are those that have succeeded in breeding dogs that want to run long distances and have the coats to be comfortable doing it. Make no mistake, the dog has to want to do this.
Josh Rogers at IditaBlog has started profiling some of the leading mushers, and promises to continue the series. The Sled Dog site is another resource for news about the Iditarod, and all sled dog races.
They have announced that ionEarth is providing GPS tracking on many teams in the race, enabling people to follow their progress on the ‘Net. Here’s the list:
2 Cim Smyth
3 Jessie Royer
6 Lance Mackey
8 Bruce Linton
9 Ken Anderson
11 Jeff King
13 Martin Buser
14 Aaron Burmeister
17 Aliy Zirkle
20 Rick Holt
24 Sigrid Ekran
32 Ed Iten
33 Mitch Seavey
39 Dee Dee Jonrowe
41 Jason Barron
42 Kjetil Backen
63 Sam Deltour
67 John Baker
81 Darin Nelson
Now, this is great, and will really help in the future when the equipment is mandatory, but I don’t see 55-Rachael Scdoris on this list. The one team that would benefit most, in the sense of getting race officials off her back, and she’s not on the list – why?
7 comments
i was thinking the same thing. apparently it’s being billed as a pr thing this year, and so the popular mushers / past years’ leaders apparently were the ones asked to participate in the pilot project.
at least with this introduction of technology into the race, maybe they’ll eventually break down and allow racers to carry their own gps units in the future.
as far as i can tell, you need to pay the $19.95 subscription fee to follow the satellite tracking. i’ve been dithering all day about whether to do that.
There is a subscription service that includes a lot of extras, including video, but I just checked the basic tracking site and all I’ve provided is an e-mail address.
I’m not ready to pay for anything, like a constant update, because I don’t have the time to monitor it.
ah, thanks for the tip. if you start from the ionearth site, you get sent to the ‘subscribe’ page if you ask about tracking the race.
Your kitties must have attacked your keyboard as I had to retrieve and edit your comment header.
It’s amazing how many people have shown up from around the world on this.
i see that, now that you mention it. most of them have generalized human at computer table = paws off keys, but this is a new size, shape and color keyboard, so a couple of them are starting over from scratch: what? you mean small gray square = large black rounded? how were we supposed to know that? they also found the power and sleep buttons on this one before i did. oh well, given that their human also learns by the what does this button do? method, i can’t really fault them.
back on topic, how could people not show up for this? the iditarod holds any number of romantic associations for a lot of us mere mortals: alaska is still ‘the frontier’; the gold rush; the diphtheria serum run to nome; and dog sleds… they’ve got horse-drawn carriages in central park, but how many people in the whole wide world have ever traveled even a few hundred yards by dog sled? not many, though it’s gaining in popularity — as competition, as recreational travel, as another mode of sightseeing, as one more fun activity to do with your dogs.
in one of my english classes years ago, we had to pick out one book as ‘the great american novel’ and defend our choice. as might be obvious, i chose the call of the wild.
also, it was just plain idiotic to send a few people and their dog teams out into the cold frozen nothingness to travel 1000 miles as fast as they could. we love that kind of challenge, and that kind of nuttiness.
With the current price of gas, mushing will become a lot more popular in northern climes.