Largely unnoticed, the Iditarod Trail Committee has slipped what could be a significant game-changer into the rules for the running of The Last Great Race.

Mushers headed from Willow to Nome will, for the first time, this year be allowed to use GPS position indicators to keep track of where they are along the 900-mile trail, race spokesman Chas St. George said Thursday. While the Iditarod uses GPS to track teams along the trail, the use of GPS by competitors themselves has been hotly debated for years.

Some have argued that using modern technology to find the way north in a race that celebrates the old Alaska is sort of cheating. Others contend that the race shouldn't be decided by someone getting lost and losing precious time, as has happened on occasion in the past.

The use of GPS last year, for instance, might well have meant the end of Lance Mackey's run as Iditarod champ. John Baker from Kotzebue was hours in front of the competition in Iditarod 2010 when he left Ophir for the isolated Cripple checkpoint that marks halfway to Nome on the northern Iditarod route. But after hours and hours on the trail, the sleep-deprived musher started wondering if it was possible he'd missed the checkpoint.

He finally convinced himself he had and parked his team just a few miles short of Cripple. Tim Hewitt, a hiker in the Iditarod Invitational human-powered race, happened to meet Baker there walking the wrong way on the trail in the dark at 50 degrees below zero. The two men had a conversation. Hewitt told Baker that the musher was on the trail short of Cripple. Baker refused to believe it.

Instead of pushing on, he went back to his sled and stayed there until musher Dallas Seavey, who'd been almost five hours behind Baker leaving Ophir, showed up. Seavey told Baker what Hewitt had told Baker, and then took off for Cripple to arrive first and collect $3,000 in silver. Baker came in just behind, steamed at what he thought was an inadequately marked trail.

He was still in Cripple in a funk when Seavey left, followed not long after by Mackey and four-time champion Jeff King from Denali Park. By the next checkpoint, Mackey and King were at the start of what was to be 400-mile duel for victory. By the time Baker got to Ruby, he'd lost so much time he was back in 18th place -- nine hours behind Mackey.

Baker couldn't close that gap, but he was two hours faster than Mackey from Ruby to Nome, which begs the question of "what if?"

What if Baker had been carrying a GPS that showed him the Cripple checkpoint only a couple of miles ahead? He would surely have collected the halfway silver that went to Seavey, and odds are good he might well have been able to secure a lead big enough to seal his first Iditarod victory.

Instead, Mackey won his fourth Iditarod in a row, and Baker is still hoping for his first. Both will be back on the starting line when the Iditarod starts March 5. King, however, has hung up his mukluks. The only musher over 50 ever to win the Iditarod, he's finally concluded he's too old.

Seavey, in the view of some, is too young. He's only 23. But he is a two-time top 10 finisher, and he this week became the youngest musher ever to win the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, Alaska's other big distance competition.

Could he make it two in a row? Or could technology give Baker the edge he really needed to win last year? Or could Mackey, a cancer survivor who already done the Iditarod impossible several times over, notch another impossible by winning five in a row?

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.