Into Rainy Pass & The GPS Impact
03. Mar, 2008 
2 Comments
As the first few mushers approach Rainy Pass, its hard to hold back the wild speculation that can come from looking at the leader-board. We are SO early in the race that as fans we are almost no better off than we were on Friday before anything started. There is a little bit of information that we can learn from the current standings, Gerry Willomitzer is about an hour ahead of Lance Mackey who is currently in 2nd place, however there are 10 other mushers that all left the Finger Lake checkpoint within an hour of Lance, so Lance’s lead isn’t that strong. German rookie Benedikt Beisch left just 9 minutes after Lance did, so there is no telling where they are on the trail as they approach Rainy Pass. However, once we get the reports from Rainy Pass, I’m guessing the top ten will look completely different than it does now.
This year the Iditarod is trying out a new program with the mushers, and with the fans and media on the Iditarod website. There are about 19 mushers who have a GPS system hooked up to their sleds, these devices every 15 minutes send out a ping that lets everyone on the Internet know where they are. These pings are entirely one way, there is no information being given to the musher about where they are, or where the rest of their competitors are. This technology has created some controversy among both spectators and mushers themselves as now you can see exactly where a musher is resting on the trail, and see exactly how long they were there… that precious information about a team’s schedule and strategy can be very important. Regardless, if things go well this year, it is assumed that we can expect to see every team outfitted with this technology next year. There have been times when I’ve been on the trail reporting and you’re sitting there for hours waiting for a musher to come in and you’ve got no idea when they will show up or where they are. Kaltag to Unalakleet is a long 90 mile stretch of the race and its usually pretty safe to say that the first musher will reach the coast sometime on Sunday morning, but depending on the trail there is a huge time window when I’ve been hanging out in the village all day long and the only information you get is from people on snowmachines who ride up the trail and can guess at about how many miles away a musher is. This new technology can come in handy. To track a musher on the Iditarod website (click here).
The GPS is now showing that Martin Buser has passed Lance, and that Cim Smyth, Mitch Seavey and Jessie Royer aren’t to far behind those two… What the GPS isn’t telling us this year is who is in between all those mushers that aren’t outfitted with a GPS tracker. Analyzing the Iditarod just got quite a bit different this year!
I love your blog and am so glad you are writing it! I like that you tackle a different nugget of interest in each blog, I’m learning a lot. About the GPS units – I don’t think they will change too much about the race or the strategies because they aren’t recording data which can be reviewed, they only give a current reading. So, what I am finding is that in order to see where a musher rests outside of a checkpoint and for how long, I have to be camped out in front of my computer and checking their GPS dot while they rest. If there are people with enough time out there to watch every GPS dot for the entire race and record it, they probably have the time and know-how to extract that info from the checkpoint records anyway. Just a thought.
Great blog, yes, I second that. Blogs are perfect for reviewing topics, like the new GPS information. Everyone should chime in.
I like GPS tracking information. I can check into the Website and get up the second (actually 15 minute) locations of mushers. When I ran the race in ‘97 my friends, family and especially my wife would have liked to have known my location. Yet I can foresee complications.
Several mushers are not taking the GPS units for a variety of reasons chief of which is they want to fly under the radar. They fear being monitored. There is value to stealth in competitive mushing. If GPS is made mandatory, the temptation is there for a musher to carry a cell phone and get up to the minute updates from someone sitting at a computer screen in a hotel room in Anchorage. This could be a huge competitive advantage. Knowing that your nearest competitor is resting behind you or just slowing down could break open a race and shut down someone else’s. Watching the GPS tracking on the burn today I was impressed at how easy it would be to use this information in this way.
This is the similar problem presented in the past with mushers having “sponsors, family and friends” tagging along on the trail by snow machine and in the checkpoints. Certain well-heeled mushers were benefiting from timing information not available to others. Iditarod had to institute all kinds of rules in an attempt to level the playing field. The problem was never eliminated but rule restrictions make it possible for Iditarod and the mushers to keep close tabs on one another’s rendezvous.
From a spectator’s viewpoint, I’d like to see GPS tracking. If they mandate it rules would have to be in place to keep the information from becoming a competitive advantage. Perhaps mandatory cell phone scans entering or leaving checkpoints are in the future. It could be done discretely during mandatory gear checks.
In any case, GPS tracking makes the race more spectator friendly, especially for all those thousands of school kids across the country that follow along on the Internet and dream of what it would be like to mush a team of huskies across the Alaskan wilderness.