Last year it was a herd of caribou blocking the trail that stopped some teams at the end of the Quest and this year the Daily News Miner reports that Wolves and Moose are being annoying.

Note, the wolves are not attacking anyone, they are just stealing the trail markers.

They are probably not as dangerous as the media cars on the Tour.

Michael Telpin is bringing up the rear for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that neither he, nor his dogs have any experience moving through trees. He and they are from the high Arctic, and there are no trees up there. There are grasses and reeds in the summer, but lichens are the main plant life.

He makes his own harnesses using the traditional Chukchi pattern which distributes weight differently that the diamond web pattern that most teams use. You can’t change the harness design without training the dogs to accept it, and to ‘grow into it’ from puppies.

It isn’t stated in any of the interviews [he doesn’t speak English, so there haven’t been many] but he probably took the animals that provided the skins for his outer gear, as he is a subsistence hunter at home. People who live in the Arctic don’t waste anything, because there isn’t a lot to begin with.

Hugh Neff arrived at the Scroggie Creek Dog Drop first, followed by Lance and Allen, but they left in reverse order, so Allen Moore is still officially leading.

Marcelle and Michael are probably in Canada and approaching Dawson, but after you get off the mountain and into the Yukon River valley GPS gets flaky. Live Tracking shows Michael ahead of Marcelle, but her last position is from hours earlier.

Standings at 11PM CST:

Beyond Scroggie Creek
1 Allen Moore (1)
2 Lance Mackey (16)
3 Hugh Neff (6)
4 Jake Berkowitz (13)^R
5 Brent Sass (10)
6 Sonny Lindner (3)
At Scroggie Creek
7 Joar Leifseth Ulsom (17)^R
Beyond Dawson
8 Abbie West (21)
9 Kristy Berington (2)^I
10 David Dalton (4)
11 Kyla Durham (7)
12 Gus Guenther (20)^R
13 Trent Herbst (22)^I
At Dawson
14 Paige Drobny (12)^R
15 Yuka Honda (19)^R
16 Brian Wilmshurst (11)^R
17 Misha Pedersen (5)^R
18 Marcelle Fressineau (15)^R
Beyond Eagle
19 Michael Telpin (24)^R

These are the official standings. That means they are official, not that they are correct. Things jump around a lot as people decide to update the standings. This problem is especially bad in the back of the pack, as no one bothers to update those standings when the lead is changing.

The Mushers in bold are former winners of the Yukon Quest, the numbers in parentheses are their Bib numbers, the small “I” indicates a Quest rookie who has competed in the Iditarod, and the small “R” indicates a total rookie.

Note: This post will be updated during the day, and the map changed on all posts to reflect the current situation.

All posts on the Yukon Quest can be seen by selecting “Yukon Quest” from the Category box on the right sidebar.