With mushers charging out of 24-hour rests, a real race firms up on Iditarod’s middle stretch

A knot of highly competitive mushers was speeding north through the historic mining district of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race’s middle section on Wednesday. With most of the front pack done with their mandatory 24-hour rests, teams were hoping to maintain enough power to gain an advantage over Dallas Seavey, who arrived first at the checkpoint of Cripple — 425 miles into the course — on Wednesday evening and promptly declared his 24.

Seavey had a two-hour penalty tacked on to his 24-hour mandatory rest after a panel of race judges determined he’d insufficiently gutted the moose he dispatched with a revolver as it attacked his dogs early Monday morning, about 14 miles up the trail from the Skwentna checkpoint.

That meant the earliest Seavey could resume racing was after 11 p.m. Thursday, taking into account his 24-hour rest, his two-hour penalty and the time added to offset his starting position back at the Willow restart. By that point, the large chase pack will be trying to gain as much of a lead over the five-time champion as they can along the 70-mile slog from Cripple toward the next checkpoint at Ruby, along the Yukon River.

As of 7 p.m. Thursday, three mushers with their 24s behind them had already departed from Cripple: Travis Beals, Jessie Holmes and Paige Drobny.

One wild card, perennially, is Nicolas Petit, who had not yet taken his 24-hour rest. He took off first from Cripple on Thursday morning with the goal of getting to Ruby.

“I’ve been wanting to try something different. I’ve always said I want to 24 as far as possible,” Petit told Iditarod Insider in Ophir on Wednesday before departing after about seven hours of rest.

He managed to make the 73-mile trek through the flat, dull leg of the trail heading from Ophir into the spartan Cripple checkpoint in 13 hours and 21 minutes, only pausing to rest for a little more than an hour along the way. As of 7 p.m. Thursday, he had about 20 miles to go to reach Ruby.

Though the strategy of pushing all the way to the Yukon before giving the dogs their big rest is extremely rare, it’s not without precedent. Not only did Kasilof’s Paul Gebhardt do it in the 2006 race, where he ultimately finished in third place, but so did four-time champion Jeff King in 2022, with Petit’s dogs. That year, King filled in driving Petit’s dogs to Nome after Petit tested positive for COVID-19 the week of the race.

During his interview in Ophir, Petit said the long trip to Ruby was what he’d trained his dogs for, and they were well-conditioned for it this time around, too.

“I wouldn’t say I’m out of it,” Petit said of his prospects.

[Iditarod mushers care for dogs, sleep, eat and repeat during their 24-hour breaks]

Behind Petit are half a dozen teams capable of winning the race who opted for more conventional rest strategies, taking their 24s in Takotna and Ophir.

Heading that chase pack on Thursday evening was Beals, who still has a team of 16 dogs on the line.

“They are looking really good,” Beals said in an interview Wednesday with Iditarod Insider during his 24 in Takotna.

The weakest link on the team, in his case, was the musher, having started the race with a bug he was treating with antibiotics.

“It’s kinda kickin’ my butt a little bit,” said Beals, who up until Takotna — 329 miles into the race — had not rested. “I haven’t gotten any sleep up to this point … I just couldn’t shut my mind down, I was afraid to sleep.”

Behind Beals, Holmes and Drobny were former champions Ryan Redington and Pete Kaiser, who had joined Seavey in Cripple. Matt Hall and Hunter Keefe also reached Cripple by Thursday evening, as a group including Wally Robinson, Jessie Royer, Jason Mackey, Aaron Burmeister and Matthew Failor trailed behind within 20 miles of the checkpoint.

Seavey recounts what happened leading up to his penalty

Since the Iditarod Trail Committee announced its decision to penalize Seavey for not gutting Monday’s moose thoroughly enough, there’s been criticism from some observers that he stayed just 10 minutes at the kill site before mushing his team forward 11 miles, followed by a rest on his way to the checkpoint at Finger Lake. Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, demanded that the race eject Seavey for what she described as his prioritization of winning over his dog’s well-being, and she criticized Seavey for moving forward on the trail instead of returning to Skwentna.

Seavey told Iditarod Insider on Thursday that immediately after the moose encounter, he was in a state of shock and had it in his mind that he had “to get to Finger Lake as quick as possible.” “It never even occurred to me that Skwentna is closer than Finger Lake,” he said in the Insider video.

He said he’d been checking on his injured dog, Faloo, while his team was moving forward, and that the dog showed some signs of improving and stabilizing as the bleeding stopped.

He “got her to Finger Lake and handed her off to the vets. It sounded like they did some incredible work there, thank God,” Seavey told Insider on Thursday. (The injured wheel dog ended up flying to Anchorage for emergency surgery and returned home Wednesday, according to Seavey’s kennel.)

His team continued on, and Seavey told Insider he’d tried to focus on his dogs and keep them on track rather than revisiting what happened outside Skwentna. Later on, the musher — who’d thought any issues with the moose carcass had been resolved quickly, which wasn’t the case — spoke to race marshal Warren Palfrey in McGrath.

Iditarod officials informed him of the two-hour penalty after he arrived at the checkpoint in Cripple.

“As far as the penalty, they made the right call,” he said in the Insider video. “I feel terrible ... The moose was not properly gutted, I can guarantee that.”

“Ten minutes of shock brain, and we pretty much screwed ourselves,” he told Insider, adding that in retrospect, he saw that there were a few things he could’ve done differently.

He said his team would keep going and “doing what we’ve been doing, which is take care of the dog team, mush down the trail, try to do that well. And as long as I have the ability to think, I think we’ll do all right,” Seavey told Insider.

He apologized to many people for the incident, including his team, the race’s fans and other competitors.

While fatal encounters with moose are rare during the Iditarod, another happened as recently as 2022, when race veteran Matt Failor dispatched an aggressive moose along the Yukon. That year he received the award for the race’s most inspirational musher, for what an Iditarod blog described as, “His support of other mushers in the face of a moose threatening the teams. Matthew dispatched the moose and field dressed it for the residents of Galena.”

No dogs were hurt in that incident. In a significant event decades earlier, though, a moose during the 1985 Iditarod killed two dogs on four-time champion Susan Butcher’s team, injuring 13 others and prompting her to scratch despite an early lead on the trail that year.

Daily News sports editor Chris Bieri contributed.

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Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Dallas Seavey’s earliest departure time from Cripple would be after 11 p.m. Thursday, and not at 10:09 p.m.