By Mike Campbell and Alice Rogoff | Feb. 20, 2012

RAINY PASS -- Some 350 miles into the world's longest and toughest snowmachine race -- or a long afternoon of riding for these sledheads -- the top three Iron Dog teams paused in McGrath Sunday night to recharge. The time difference between them?  A scant four minutes. 

Anchorage plumber Ryan Sottosanti, 34, and Wasilla truck driver Andrew Zwink, 22, had their Polaris machines at the front of the pack, arriving in McGrath at 7:40 p.m. The veteran duo of Marc McKenna of Anchorage and Dusty VanMeter of Kasilof  -- with five championships between them -- were just three minutes behind. Another team with championship chops, Todd Minnick of Wasilla (2009 winner) and Nick Oldstad of Eagle River (victories in 2009 and 2005), were another minute back, and they'd just notched the fastest speed in the 52-mile run from the previous checkpoint of Nikolai at the northern end of what once was the Farwell Burn. They'd average nearly 57 mph.

By 9 p.m., seven teams had arrived in McGrath, including the duo of Tyler Huntington of Fairbanks and Tre West of Anchorage.  Huntington, a two-time defending champion, is racing with a new partner this year even though West has never finished higher than 14th. 

Earlier Sunday, young speedsters Tyler Aklestad and Aaron Loyer roared from the back of the pack at the start to snatch the lead up the Yentna River over the first section of the brutally long race course. They clocked a pretty amazing average speed of nearly 91 mph on their Ski-Doos. They were moving more than 30 mph faster than the slowest teams in the field.

Aklestad may be the "Heatbreak Kid" of the Iron Dog with a runner-up finish to his credit and a number of tough crashes that knocked him out of several races. This year he and longtime partner Tyson Johnson have gone their separate ways, and Aklestad has paired with fellow 26-year-old Loyer. Loyer scratched in his only Iron Dog start, but he's one of the best motocross drivers in the state with several Alaska State Motocross championships to his credit.

It didn't take long for more bad luck to find this duo, however. On the way to Puntilla Lake just below Rainy Pass -- the highest point of the 2,000-mile race from Big Lake to Nome and onto Fairbanks --  Loyer went into a creek, dousing driver and machine. At Perrin's Rainy Pass Lodge, Aklestad described a an off-camber section of trail with a series of "S" turns that proved disastrous.

"It drops off at an angle'' toward the water, said Aklestad, and Loyer went in. He was got wet but was uninjured.

The Iditarod Trail runs beside several creeks between Red Lake just north of Finger Lake and the Happy River. Even a small driving error can leave a racer in the water – facing no small chore hauling his machine out. The duo took one of their mandatory eight-hour layovers at Rainy Pass to regroup. They were back on the trail by 8:18 p.m.

Leading the early section of the Iron Dog was considered important this year. The faster the leaders climb through this country, the more the churning tracks of their sleds and the inevitable airborne launches off snow drifts combine to tear up the Iditarod Trail. Bad trail, in turn, slows and beats up the racers behind them.

Back-of-the-pack racers typically face the worst trail -- rutted and cratered by the frontrunners -- and one of them, 53-year-old Raymond Wells of Fairbanks, encountered trouble somewhere between Shell Lake and Rainy Pass.  Several members of the Perrin family left Rainy Pass Lodge to look for him Sunday night after he was reported in difficulty, but eventually, Wells and his partner, 26-year-old Norman Sheldon, made it to the checkpoint. 

One team, however, didn't get an inch down the trail. The veteran duo of Race Price and Eric Watson from Wasilla, the 12th-place team last year, had problems with their Arctic Cat Sno Pro machines.

Alice Rogoff of Alaska Dispatch contributed to this story. Contact Mike Campbell at mcampbell(at)alaskadispatch.com