Checkpoint Unalakleet awaits Iditarod mushers
Both 120 miles longer and with a later start due to rerouting the trail to start in Fairbanks, the usual timing of mushers arriving in checkpoints is at least two days later than the usual Iditarod routing. At the Unalakleet checkpoint on Tuesday, volunteers waited for the first mushers to come in, watching on screens as Matt Hall briefly pulled ahead of Jessie Holmes on the river run from Kaltag on the morning of March 11. As it stands on Tuesday afternoon, the first musher is expected to arrive in Unalakleet Tuesday late afternoon.
At Peace on Earth restaurant, Iditarod fans call in pizza orders from thousands of miles away. Some of them order for specific mushers, while others donate pizzas to volunteers or to any musher who didn’t get an order. The real draw is getting to leave a message with the musher, says Davida Hanson, who owns and runs the restaurant with her husband Bret.
“I can’t figure out if Abu Dhabi or Sydney, Australia is the furthest away,” said Bret Hanson, who collects the old orders from year to year to remember them. “There’s a little princess from Abu Dhabi or something who calls all the time. She was, like, seven when she first called.”
Holmes pulled back ahead in the late morning, and Paige Drobny caught up as Hall rested.
At the Unalakleet checkpoint, Glen Ryan peered at the standings on a big computer screen, watching the progress of his nephew Ryan Redington, the 2023 Iditarod champion, as he mushed toward Kaltag.
As the leaders ran towards Unalakleet, at times just a few miles apart, members of the trail crew fried sourdough pancakes in bacon grease and chatted about past Iditarods. Some were rookies; others had come back year after year to volunteer as veterinarians or dog handlers or poop scoopers; others were multigenerational Iditarod volunteers.
Co-chief veterinarian Dr. Greg Closter worked from Unalakleet while his partner Dr. Erika Friedrich, answered questions from her home in Virginia. Closter said that while he wished his co-chief was there, there were advantages to the distance.
“What I’ve found is there’s a four-hour time difference, and that’s been really helpful, because if it’s three in the morning here and it’s seven there, if for whatever reason they can’t get a hold of me, they can always get a hold of her, basically,” Closter told the Nugget on Monday.
Closter has been an Iditarod veterinarian for ten years, ever since he was eligible to become one. He and Friedrich became co-chiefs after the death of longtime Chief Veterinarian Dr. Stuart Nelson last fall.
On Tuesday afternoon, Teacher on the Trail Maggie Hamilton chatted with Teri Paniptchuk, Unalakleet’s cultural studies and home economics teacher, and made plans to attend a practice for Unalakleet’s NYO team, which Paniptchuk coaches.
“All of my students are following a musher, and so they keep tabs on that individual musher,” Hamilton, who teaches fifth grade in southern Indiana, told the Nugget. She had started using the Iditarod to teach math and science during her first year of teaching. Her fifth graders learn mean, median and mode averages by looking at run and rest times and speeds, and they learn about maps by exploring Alaska through the mushers.
By Hamilton’s second year teaching, the practice was spreading. “All the teachers in my school teach with the Iditarod this time of year,” Hamilton said.
Laura Robertson is reporting from the checkpoint in Unalakleet.