Iditarod musher Gerry Willomitzer might have had a shot at a top-ten finish had he not fallen asleep and toppled off his sled early Sunday morning while headed toward the village of Shaktoolik.

"It was one of those situations where you just doze off for a second," Willomitzer said Thursday from the Airport Pizza restaurant in Nome, where he was enjoying a post-race meal.

Tracking and catching up with the missing team delayed his run by nearly three hours. He placed 13th, just three hours shy of Mitch Seavey's 10th-place finish Tuesday morning.

The Iditarod is difficult enough without having to scour a frozen coastline under pitch-black skies for a runaway team being lead by a ten-year-old female sled dog who doesn't appreciate the comforts of town or people. Willomitzer dropped his main leaders earlier in the race, which allowed the ornery gal to take the lead.

At three a.m., about two miles outside Shaktoolik, temperatures had dipped to 30 degrees below zero, and as Willomitzer was closing in on the checkpoint, sleep deprivation was closing on him.

A veteran of both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod, Willomitzer knows to keep a security line in hand, and he said he usually does, but as fate would have it, at the very moment it would have come in handy, it wasn't within his grasp. He woke up as he was tumbling off the seat of the sled, with his team fading at a good clip into the distance. He tried to run after them, but the heavy clothing mushers bundle into against the harsh cold turned his effort to sprint into futile fumble.

Willomitzer had a high beam light affixed to his sled, which at that moment served only to add insult to injury. "I could see the light and the team in the dark, and the light just disappeared," he said.

He figured the team would head into town, where someone would grab and hold onto it until musher and dog team could be reunited. But he was still miles outside of the checkpoint, which presented problem number two.

Self-powering into the town on foot would mean breaking a sweat beneath all of his arctic gear. Sweat means wet, and in subzero temperatures, wet is a dangerous way to be. He peeled off some layers so he could walk comfortably, but still found himself getting fairly warm.

After half an hour, the first stroke of good luck closed in, descending like a gift from the father of the Iditarod himself. Though Joe Redington, Sr., died years ago, his mushing legacy lives on both in the race he built and in the racers. When Willomitzer needed a hand, it was Ray Redington Jr. -- Redington's grandson -- who pulled up, picked up the musher-turned-hitchicker and shuttled him into Shaktoolik, riding double.

Disappointingly, the team was nowhere to be found. Since mushers are required to carry GPS tracking devices on their sleds, he used the Iditarod Insider's tracking map to get a sense for where the team should be. A blip on the computer screen in checkpoint headquarters showed its position near the beach, close to where the team first ran off. But after traveling by snowmachine to the area, Willomitzer and a volunteer could find no sign of the dogs. Puzzling, since the bright light attached to the sled should have been easy to spot, even from a distance, cutting through the dark night like a beacon.

"We couldn't see them at all, so we went back," Willomitzer said.

Growing increasingly worried about the situation -- tangled lines and dog fights without a human around can cause dogs to get hurt -- Willomitzer had a second encounter with good luck while navigating his very unlucky predicament. One of the checkpoint volunteers, Tyrell Seavey, had a hand-held GPS unit and was willing to help. They punched in the coordinates and drove straight to the location.

But again, approaching the site at a distance from which the sled's light should have been visible, there was nothing in sight. No light, no sled, no dogs.