ID: Monday Morning Update

Its 8.00am Monday morning, Alaska Time.

Right now Aliy is on her way to Rainy Pass. The team ran to Yentna Station Roadhouse in 3 hours 38 minutes and went through, stopping only for a few minutes. Her run to Skwentna was just over three hours where they rested a little under four hours before heading to Finger Lake; next is Rainy Pass.

Allen and his team are on their way to Finger Lake. The standings show them having run through both Yentna and Skwentna checkpoints and the tracker indicates they rested four hours somewhere. I've not quite figured out the new tracker well enough to know where exactly they rested but it looks like they camped a little way out of Skwentna. This will, of course, be on purpose. You may know that both Aliy and Allen like to camp out on the trail, sometimes preferring it to the hustle and bustle of a checkpoint. With so many rookies and inexperienced dogs on Allen's team he may have decided they would get better rest away from the other dogs, people, aeroplanes and snow machines that would be at the checkpoint.

Looking at average speeds and run times of the top few mushers the trail is as fast as was expected!

You will see from the current standings on the Iditarod website that Aliy dropped a dog at Skwentna. Please note that we currently have no way to know of sure who the dog is or why they have been dropped. The process now is that the dogs are flown back to Anchorage as soon as possible, they have a thorough veterinarian check then we are contacted and can pick them up. We will let you know as soon as we can! We are just as eager as you are to know.

Last year Mickey, Aliy's Mom, wrote this fantastic post about dropped dogs and this year you may be aware the Iditarod put in place some new protocols for the handling and care of them; here is some information from Stu Nelson, the Iditarod Head Veterinarian.

After getting the teams on to the trail there is not much we can do but watch the tracker and leader board just like you… and, just like you we are having intermittent connection issues to the Iditarod website so we'll do our best to get information to you as fast as we can… refresh, refresh, refresh.

In the meantime, here are a couple more pics from Jen Nelson from yesterday's re-start.