Brent Sass wins Yukon Quest 550

Brent Sass won the Yukon Quest 550 on Wednesday, finishing at 7:45 p.m. to earn his fifth victory in a Yukon Quest race. Sass finished the race in four days, eight hours, 58 minutes, crossing with 12 dogs.

The Quest, traditionally 1,000 miles through both Alaska and Canada, split in 2022 and is running two separate race programs this year after a disagreement in rules between organizers on both sides of the border. The Canadian Yukon Quest will start Saturday in Whitehorse.

Sass said the 550-mile race was a riddle itself — a distance mushers rarely tackle.

“This is a very unique race,” he said. “You know, you go into it thinking it’s gonna be a mid-distance race because it’s not 1,000 miles. But then you get into it 200 or 300 miles, and you realize that you’re not even close to the finish line, so you employ a different strategy. We all kind of had to make it up as we went just because we had never run this distance, and really no one had ever run this distance as a race.”

Sass, who earned his first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race victory last year, was the Quest champ in 2015, 2019 and 2020. He won last year’s 350-mile Quest race, which only four mushers completed.

This year, Sass raced the Quest with nearly the same team he won the Iditarod with, and said the race was also perfect prep for next month’s 2023 Iditarod, where he is set to defend his title.

“I think this set us up really nice for the Iditarod,” Sass said. “I feel like it was a perfect warmup. It was a race in itself, I don’t want to ever call the Quest just a warmup. But the race itself was definitely a really good precursor to the Iditarod. I feel like dogs came out great.”

Sass earned his win this year on a course that ran from Fairbanks northeast to Circle and back to Nenana before returning to Fairbanks for the finish. That meant going over the fabled treacherous pairing of Eagle Summit and Rosebud Summit twice in one race.

“Going over Eagle and Rosebud one time is generally enough, but doing it twice in the race made for a lot of adventure,” Sass said. “I’ve been over those summits 17 times over the years, and this year’s conditions up there were the best that I’ve ever seen. There was so much snow and no bare rocks like there usually is. That made it very doable and less crazy for all of us mushers.”

Sass earned $40,000 for the win.

Amanda Otto placed second, crossing the finish line on Wednesday at 11:23 p.m., less than four hours after Sass. Wade Marrs finished third.

Otto said the unique race distance allowed her to take a measured approach, following a strategy based on how the dogs were running.

“You’ve got to run what’s in front of you,” Otto said. “You can’t have a race plan based on what the dogs looked like yesterday or even how they’ve run previously or what you expect them to be. ... They look great.”

Otto, racing a team of veteran musher Jeff King’s dogs like she did in the 2022 Iditarod, had competed in the 200-mile race last year on the Quest trail. She, like Sass, said that running a 550-mile race was a new experience, and she took an eight-hour rest in Circle — which she said surprised some Quest onlookers.

“I did want to be competitive but the 550 mileage thing was kind of new,” she said. “I’ve run 300-mile races and I’ve run the Iditarod, but 550 miles on the Yukon Quest trail, it’s just an entirely different beast.”

She compared the run to the first 550 miles of the Iditarod, in which most mushers would have taken potentially a 24-hour rest and an eight-hour stop.

“I was not afraid to back them off a little bit and just take our time and the first half of the race and by the time we got to Two Rivers, I had a jazzed dog team,” she said. “They were not tired whatsoever.”

The Canadian version will include three Yukon races: a 100-mile race to Braeburn, a 250-mile race to Pelly Crossing and a 450-mile race to Dawson City.