What They Won
Lance Mackey won the Spirit of Alaska Award by being the first into McGrath. PenAir gave him a spirit mask and a $500 credit on his air freight bill.
DeeDee Jonroe won the Dorothy Page Halfway Award as the first team into Cripple and $3,000 in gold nuggets.
Lance Mackey won the First to the Yukon Award in Ruby, worth 5,000 one-dollar bills and a gourmet meal.
Jeff King won the Gold Coast Award as the first musher to reach Unalakleet and received a trophy and $2,500 in gold.
As the overall winner Lance Mackey gets a new pickup truck and $69K.
The other top finishing mushers get some cash; everyone who finishes gets a belt buckle; and the last team gets the Red Lantern.
4 comments
32 days! that’s a long time.
Now that’s a hard way to earn money and food! The prizes are of course more interesting than those in just about any other event in the world. Stella spent a few weeks in Alaska some years back (not as a musher, of course; she camped her way across southern Alaska), and she is not the least bit surprised at anything that has happened. (Well, she was crestfallen at the untimely death of the dog.) Sometimes I think she’d move up there if I’d go with her. Sometimes I think I would, if I were younger and sturdier.
Thanks, Bryan, for bringing us both the facts and the entertaining details.
(“…death of the dogS“.)
You need a gun. Unlike what people believe, the bears aren’t a problem with a minimum of effort to avoid them, it’s the moose that are apt to kill you.
Susan Butcher had to scratch one year when her team was attacked by a moose. Two dogs killed and six injured before another musher with a rifle arrived and shot it.
A guy in my squadron had his car destroyed by a moose. The moose was in the road and he stopped. The moose didn’t appear to want to move so he blew his horn and the 1500 pound moose stomped his VW to pieces. Moose are totally weird and big enough to be very dangerous, especially if there is a calf around.