71 teams on the trail

Under mostly beautiful blue skies and with unseasonably but crowd-pleasingly warm weather, 71 mushers, including 22 rookies, hooked up their teams and hit the trail for Nome on Sunday. Willow Musher Linwood Fiedler's team was the first to leave the chute, heading toward the broad Susitna River and then over North America's largest wall of mountains, the Alaska Range. Behind Linwood came a veritable roll call of Alaskan mushers, some of the top names in long distance sled dog racing, including several past champions, multiple champions, near-miss champions, and hopeful future champions. But amongst that stellar collection were even more who were there simply to run a good race, to get their teams safely across Alaska and to the finish line in Nome.

It takes a lot of hard work to make it to the start of the Iditarod, and it takes championship courage, stamina, determination and a large measure of good luck to reach the finish line. In the 38-year history of the Iditarod only 671 individual mushers have crossed under the burled arch in Nome. This year there are 16 women and 55 men on the trail, 46 mushers from Alaska and 25 from either Outside or from one of several countries which are represented this year.

Iditarod Insider Bruce Lee reported midafternoon on Monday that his aircraft was grounded at Finger Lake due to snow, but the teams were still moving up the trail. He wrote, "Most mushers reported soft trail conditions that slowed their planned travel time here and threw a few mushers off their game plan. Some rested at Finger Lake when their original plan was to go further up the trail before resting."

Bruce Lee also noted, "A number of teams looked very strong as they left Finger Lake. Noteworthy were Sebastian Schnuelle, Aliy Zirkle, Martin Buser and Warren Palfrey. Check the Insider video clips for footage of these teams coming into and leaving Finger Lake."

Iditarod veteran Eric Rogers commented this afternoon, "Wonder why the front runners are holding up at Rainy Pass Checkpoint? Must be slow trails and bad weather -- they are waiting out the heat of the day -- plans are changing and adapting! Sure enough -- check out the FAA camera from Puntilla Lake."