Paul Gebhardt (69) had a six-hour lead going to Cripple and everyone assumed he would be there first, but as Bobby Burns wrote: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”. Apparently he became disoriented and wandered off the trail, losing about 6 hours and $3,000.
DeeDee Jonroe (39) was surprised to discover when she arrived at Cripple that she was the first team in and had won the Dorothy Page Halfway Award and $3,000 in gold nuggets.
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3 comments
grrrl power!
This is part of what’s so much fun about the Iditarod, isn’t it? You know, “stuff just happens”! Everyone knows the front runners (so to speak), there’s GPS chips everywhere, but still….you never know…
We’re still laughing about the team that went almost to someone’s cabin door (while we keep in mind that we’re not worthy to shine this musher’s snowshoes, and in his position would have been lost forever and never found again).
This is DeeDee’s second bit of luck this year, to make up for what happened last year. Earlier she got knocked off her sled and the dogs kept on going. Fortunately the sled got snagged and she was able to catch up with her team, or it would have been a long cold walk to a checkpoint, and time spent looking for her dogs.
Cripple is in the middle of nothing with no obvious landmarks, so if you drift from your compass heading, you can get into trouble following snowmobile tracks. All you can do is backtrack and try to find the trail.
It would be nice if the race trail markers were a bit more distinctive, but then people might pull them up as souvenirs.