Coconut and curry on the Iditarod trail: This former ski bum just won $3,500 and a gourmet meal

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Nicolas Petit arrives in Anvik at 5:21 AM on March 9, 2018. He was the first musher to the Yukon River village and claimed a prize of $3,500 and a five-course meal. (Loren Holmes / ADN)

ANVIK — At 5:21 a.m. Friday, a 4-year-old Alaskan husky named Kristy led musher Nic Petit into this riverside village, securing him the First to the Yukon award: a hearty five-course meal, a bottle of champagne and $3,500 cash.

"She's perfect," Petit said about Kristy, as he massaged another dog named Pam. "She's doing awesome."

Petit names some of his dogs after mushers, such as Kristy Berington and Pam Redington. He names others after his neighbors in the Alaska ski town of Girdwood. It's a good way to keep track of his kennel's genetic lines, he said.

"I don't keep notes really well, so it's easier this way," said the 38-year-old musher who placed third in last year's race to Nome.

Petit said he "shoots from the hip" during the Iditarod race. He's the ski bum-turned-competitive musher without a set race plan.

"I don't have a game plan," he said. "I just look at the dogs and decide what to do."

Overnight, Petit and his 14-dog team made the 80-mile run to Anvik from the ghost town checkpoint of Iditarod in 10 hours and 9 minutes. Defending Iditarod winner Mitch Seavey was in second place.

Petit said he gave his dogs snacks — chunks of frozen meat and fish — along the way to Anvik but didn't stop anywhere for long. He wanted the huskies to run through the night, when temperatures dropped, instead of during the heat of the day.

By 5:30 a.m., he was tearing apart a bale of straw, creating beds for his dogs here, in temperatures in the high teens. A small group of people stood nearby.

This is the first time the Iditarod trail has snaked through Anvik since 2013. Typically, the village rings a church bell when a musher is a quarter-mile away. But this morning, when Jason Jones went to the church, which he said is over 125 years old, he found the bell frozen.

So the first sign of Petit was Petit himself.

After feeding and massaging his dogs, Petit walked into the tribal hall for his gourmet meal, flown into the village from Anchorage and prepared by the executive chef from The Lakefront Anchorage hotel.

Petit's closest competitors, defending champion Mitch Seavey and Norwegian musher Joar Leifseth Ulsom, were resting at the previous checkpoint in Shageluk, a village 25 miles away.

Seavey departed Shageluk at 7:28 a.m. Leifseth Ulsom followed 14 minutes later in third place. See full standings here.

Petit invited a volunteer veterinarian, Kimberly Henneman from Utah, to dine with him by candlelight. This is Henneman's seventh year volunteering as a trail vet. Petit said that two years ago in Unalakleet, she helped him with a sore dog named Aliy (as in Aliy Zirkle) and taught him about dogs' acupressure points.

"Without veterinarians, a lot of us would have a hard time getting to Nome or even the Yukon River," he said.

Together, they ate coconut and curry pork tenderloin soup, a mandarin salad, stuffed jumbo shrimp, bison tenderloin and a citrus dessert medley. They split a bottle of champagne.

"I have two hollow legs," Petit said.

[Bison were blocking the Iditarod Trail. This musher went after them with an ax.]