13:03 this afternoon Jeff King arrived into the checkpoint of Timber (67 miles from Nome), while Mitch Seavey and Lance Mackey were resting in Council (85 miles from Nome). At that time, Seavey had been resting for 3 hours, and Mackey had been resting atleast 2. Because there are no outbound times from each checkpoint, we don’t know if they continued to rest after 13:00, or if they shortly after headed out on the trail.

Jeff has been pulling further and further away, but doing so by using Lance’s Iditarod strategy, take shorter breaks. Has he learned from Lance, or are Lance & Seavey planning on the fact that King has got to let up sometime. Something important to note is that while trail into Timber was pretty tough (tougher for support teams & snowmachines than it was for dog teams). Once teams leave Timber, they will be joining up on where the Iditarod Trail meets the Sweepstakes trail, both mushers and dogs know this area well, and the trail will be perfect for running.

Also interesting is that while weather is pretty nice right now, we’re expecting a mini-storm to hit some of the teams that aren’t in the lead pack, slowing down their time into Nome.

Now, I want to clarify a correction that we’ve mentioned in a few audio podcasts, and briefly in a written one, all regarding Hugh Neff scratching from the race. We earlier reported from the Race Director that Hugh’s scratch wasn’t due to an injury to himself, or to his dogs, but because of harsh trail conditions. That information was early, and ended up not being correct. Official communication coming from the judges has been so sparse that it took even the race director quite a while before getting word on the scratches. In fact, there was no press release issued on Hugh’s scratch until over 24 hours after it happened. Mike Santos’ release took over 12. Hugh’s partner, Tamra was on his support team and wanted to set the story straight as to exactally why their team isn’t racing anymore.
She said first off that it wasn’t because of a tough trail, Hugh signed up for this race because he was looking forward to a tough trail, and was in 4th place when he scratched. We had reported later that it was issues with his support team, and she was more than happy to elaborate on what those problems were. She said the trail between Telephone and Haven on the way north was tough, just like everyone was expecting…what they weren’t expecting was that because of the lack of snow, it would be tougher on snowmachines than it was on the dog teams, most mushers beat their support teams into Haven. Tamra, along with a hired local musher got into some trouble on their snow machines on the trail, and after a period of time had passed, they were diverting teams up a steep hill through these stuck machines. The hired local musher all of a sudden then decided that he was going to help another musher’s crew, got his machine going, and left Tamra in the middle of nowhere. She was finally able to get free and took her machine (without supplies) to met Neff in Haven. When Neff learned of the loss of one of his crew members, he didn’t see how he would be able to compete. He is now running his dogs back on the trail into Nome and we will attempt to speak with him once he returns.

Posted by admin on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 2:25 pm.