Dog teams in the Yukon Quest Alaska 750 are well into the second half of the race, resting where the Dalton Highway crosses the Yukon River.
The race’s two frontrunners have parked their teams at the Yukon River Bridge checkpoint, where they're catching up on sleep and consuming calories during a mandatory 24-hour layover.
Soon after Josi Shelley pulled into the dog yard, her husband JJ walked into the lodge to fill a bucket with water — the first step toward preparing some of the 10,000 to 14,000 calories each that dog consumes daily.
“What we do when we get in is we start up a cooker, and pretty much the first thing we’ll do is we’ll go get water, start the cooker up, boil this, and then this is what thaws out the meat and cooks it for the dogs,” he said.
Josi said she hadn’t planned to take advantage of the rules that allow for JJ’s help. This race is her last big training run before the Iditarod, so she wanted to tackle the tasks on her own, like she’ll have to during that race. But she changed her mind.
“For the musher, it’s kind of cush," she said. "This is the only checkpoint where they’re allowed to do anything.”
Shelley reached the checkpoint off the Dalton Highway after logging more than 200 miles on the snaking, braided Yukon River since departing Circle City three days earlier. She and the other mushers visited other checkpoints on the river along the way, including Fort Yukon, Beaver and Stevens Village.
But mushers said the route to the 24-hour rest wasn’t always clear. Shelley said sections of the trail after Beaver were blown in and didn’t have visible markers. She searched around for a while on Wednesday evening before opting to wait for daylight and improved conditions.
“It was a really good test of my leaders, and they did a fantastic job," she said. "We definitely did some extra miles, and then the visibility just got so bad at that dusky hour, and we’d been out there for like eight hours, so we were like, ‘Alright, we’ll wait until morning.'”
The wayfinding and waiting narrowed the gap between Shelley and fellow Fairbanks musher Jeff Deeter, who’s been in second place most of the race.
Deeter, last year’s Quest champion, briefly overtook Shelley while she was camped on the river early Thursday, but she regained the lead before the Yukon River Bridge checkpoint.
Deeter and his 9-dog team made it to the 24-hour layover about an hour and a half behind Shelley and her dogs.
“Her team’s just way more powerful, so she caught me,” he said.
Deeter said he also struggled to find and stay on track on the Yukon, and that he commiserated with Shelley when they crossed paths. He said there just weren’t enough trail markers to navigate around jumble ice, cracks and other obstacles on the river.
“We were one marker per mile at best on most of the miles that we’ve mushed on the Yukon, and that’s not a marked trail," he said. "That is a marker to let you know that you’re on a river, not tell you where to go on the river.”
Deeter says his team is depleted. With an eye toward the Iditarod, he’s not sure it’ll be worth it to finish this year’s Quest.
Shelley and Deeter are eligible to leave the Yukon River Bridge at 1:40 and 3:25 Friday afternoon, respectively.
There are significant gaps back to Jonah Bacon in 3rd place and Jason and Patrick Mackey, at the tail of the race.
After the Yukon River Bridge, the Quest trail traces the river for roughly another 130 miles to the community of Tanana. From there, it's over 190 more miles to the finish in Fairbanks.