(Updated 1:25 p.m.) Lance Mackey was about nine miles from Nome at 1:25 p.m. He's expected to finish between 2:30 and 3 p.m.

(Updated noon) Lance Mackey left Safety at around 11:40 a.m. today and is now just a few hours away from Nome.

He spent only four minutes at the Safety checkpoint, leaving with 11 dogs.

It's taken Mackey an average of three hours to make it from Safety to Nome during his past three Iditarod victories.

Expect him to pull up at the finish line at about 3 p.m. today.

(Update 5:33 a.m. AKDT) Apparently in high spirits, Lance Mackey slid feet-first on his rear end down the snowy hill where the checkpoint sits toward his team on the frozen Fish River. As Mackey lined out his team for the start, he encouraged his dogs, "Alright, gentlemen, up, up!"

(Update 5:56 a.m. AKDT) Then he made his way to his lead dogs, Maple and Rev, and said, "We can do this," holding their faces and nuzzling their heads, "We've got a little ways to go, and then you can sleep forever, I promise."

As Mackey looked over his sled's equipment before departing, making sure he had shoes, booties, a cooler and snacks, he noted that all the resting and eating may have weighed his team down: "They're so fat they'll probably wobble out of here like a bunch of pigs." He said that for his part, he was "excited and ready to get this over with," but that his dogs seemed "fat, lazy and lethargic," adding that he would probably "poke around" to begin with and give them a chance to get warmed up. And since Mackey and his team have about a two-hour lead over second-place musher, Hans Gatt, they have that luxury.

"I'm not worried. (These dogs) always seem to stand strong when need be," he said.

As Mackey left the White Mountain checkpoint, heading toward Safety with a firm lead in what seems likely to become his record fourth-straight Iditarod championship, he had some parting words: "See you in Nome."

(Update 6:49 AKDT) After Nome, no matter how the final standings turn out, Mackey has a vacation planned for May to balmy Jamaica. The trip is "a bonus" for working with and lending a team of dogs to Jamaica's lone Iditarod musher, rookie "Hootin'" Newton Marshall. No doubt Mackey's frostbitten feet will approve of the Carribbean climate.

As Mackey pulled out of White Mountain, Kotzebue's John Baker had recently pulled in, and four-time Iditarod champion Jeff King, currently sitting in third place less than an hour behind Hans Gatt, was up early fiddling with his sled, appearing to replace the plastic strips beneath its runners.