Just before Midnight tonight, Pete and the Team will have completed their 24 hour layover and adjustment and will return to the Iditarod Trail to Nome.
Quite a few mushers this year have chosen to push on towards Ophir and Cripple for their mandatory layover and it should be interesting to see how these strategies pay out for Team in the coming days.
There is no real weather to speak of in the short term forecast and this might be a race where weather isn’t the prime variable. Mother nature has ways of changing her tune though in a hurry, so we will see what happens. A very large area of stagnant air is forcing storms to follow a southern route away from the 2016 Northern Route and this pattern is expected to remain until the middle of next week.
The way I have it figured, run rest schedules and just common mistakes along the trail will shake up the leaderboard as it has already. A few mushers were injured, a couple are ill– It’s just life on the dog trail and anything can happen. (Remembering Shaktoolik last year of course !)
Richie Diehl will leave just an hour and a half after Pete moving up a few positions after the differential.
Here are my OUT times for the first Ten Teams into Takotna:
