TAKOTNA -- Sled dogs slept on beds of straw here Wednesday afternoon as mushers napped, cared for their teams and gathered in the community center to munch on hamburgers, macaroni salad and the town's well-known pies.
Some mushers, most on their mandatory 24-hour rest, made two things clear: The real racing has yet to begin, and it's too soon to say how the standings will play out.
"I always feel like Takotna is really early. We still have to figure out a lot of stuff," said Aliy Zirkle, as she dished out food for her dogs on a snowy hill at the checkpoint just over 300 miles into the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. "You can try to keep track of things, but it doesn't shake out yet."
She said stopping in Takotna for a full day allows mushers to give their teams a good look.
"A lot of us do 300-mile races and we know what our team should look like after a 300-mile race," she said. Zirkle said her dogs looked good, though they're not a "perky, peppy, I'm-going-to-kick-your-ass team." They're just tough and solid, she said, having recently run the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race with her husband, Allen Moore.
Mats Pettersson, of Sweden, who arrived here around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, spent his time "sleeping, feeding, feeding, feeding, sleeping." He sat at a long table designated for mushers, eating a piece of chocolate pie. "You come here and the race starts," he said.
[Full Iditarod 2016 coverage: Stories, videos, photos, standings and more]
Jessie Royer of Darby, Montana, who has finished in the Iditarod top 10 five times with a best of fourth last year, said she looked at a printout of the standings for her first time here to see how many dogs other teams had dropped. She also looked at teams' speeds. Still, she said, she didn't know how long mushers had rested on the trail and "it's just way too early" in the race.
"There's a lot of teams that are really close together right now. But it will open up once we hit the (Yukon) River, and certainly by the coast" she said. Though she said she tries to not pay too much attention to the what other mushers are doing, "I'm going to run my team to Nome as fast as I can."
Two-time Iditarod champion Mitch Seavey also declared his 24-hour stop in Takotna. There's warm water here for his dogs and food for mushers.
He said the standings didn't matter much, but the general range did. His dogs were parked Wednesday near the teams of Zirkle, the three-time runner-up from Two Rivers, and Pete Kaiser, the Kuskokwim 300 champion. Once the teams reach Kaltag, the final checkpoint on the Yukon and 350 miles from the finish line, "we start paying attention to position."
:quality(70)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-adn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NPXSSYWLBRBWNDDKOGKZZWB4A4)
"Takotna is a great place, and I don't think you could ever go wrong if you 24-hour here," said Seavey, who parked in Takotna Tuesday night. "Those people going on (to checkpoints down the trail) are on an adventure and it could pay dividends or they might have blown it." His son, Dallas, was one who pressed on, reaching Cripple in the lead at 3:31 p.m. Wednesday. Seven other mushers, including a four-pack of Iditarod champions -- Lance Mackey, John Baker, Robert Sorlie and Jeff King -- gave chase.
In Takotna, Richie Diehl of Aniak, was eating a cheeseburger Wednesday and said he planned to just keep running his dogs, but also planned to start paying more attention to other mushers.
"We still have a long way to go," he said.