Ryan made it to Checkpoint #2 (Yentna Station) at 3:40pm CST. Course conditions must be good, because buddy was movin'! A quick recap from the start...
The start at Knik Bar was at 2pm AKST, where he spent most of the afternoon and evening in good company with friends Lars, Faye, Jeff, and Chris. Lars apparently started the race in shorts! He called a few hours in to make sure his tracker was on (thanks for looking out for us lowly dot watchers!).
Took 5 minutes to pick a route (more on routes in a second), took 23 minutes at Checkpoint #1 (Butterfly Lake, mile 26.9) and cruised through the night. After hopping on the Yentna River, he kept about a 3mph pace until a quality 2.5 hr. bivy nap at 4:31am...meaning he got moving again just in time for sunrise (per Ryan, it was "amazing!").
Upon arriving at Yentna, he had a burger, "got a nice sleep," (maybe not as good as Lars...see below) had one last burger, and as of 5 minutes ago (7:08 CST), headed back out to tackle the next 31 mile section to Skwentna (mile 87ish).
Meteorologist/pilot with advanced weather app Rick Orchard informs me that the next few days should be good weather: Calm winds, high 32-33, low19-21, chance of occasional snow flurry with light accumulation. He went as far as to call it "pleasant". We like hearing that!
I won't likely have much to report until mid-morning, as his ETA (assuming no trail naps) is 6:45am AKST. If that changes, I'll be sure to update.
Regarding routes...you may have noticed there were a lot of different routes taken (especially if you applied the tracks layer on Trackleaders.com).... The red line is the official "Iditarod Trail", but that trail is different every year. Racers also don't have to follow any specific course; rather, the rely on acquired intel, personal preference, current conditions, where snowmobiles, etc. have broken the trail, and if you're Ryan or any racers near Ryan, the tracks laid by others. All the racers have to do is get to the required checkpoints...how they get there isn't important (unless you chose wrong, in which case it's probably important to the suck factor)...part of the fun I suppose. The further along they get, the more remote the trail, the less options there are. The important thing at this point is that the weather gods are playing nice and it appears most of the overflow has refrozen (whoop!).
In case anyone is wondering, we're experiencing the opposite of frozen in SD with temps in the 50s for the second day in a row. While great for this single dog parent in terms of leaving the back door open while at work, it's not so great for cruising the local dog romp field...all the dead animals discovered under the melted snow, including our unfortunate Mr. Skunk. That was fun to depose of 😑
Shorts? In Alaska...damn
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