“I want to get through this next, tough trail,” DeeDee Jonrowe says of the Iditarod route past Takotna, where her dog team took its mandatory 24-hour layover on Wednesday.
“(In the past,) I’ve had a bad run on the Yukon, and it is SO not fun, for me or the dogs.”
The Willow, Alaska musher has a number of goals for Iditarod 2013, and chief among them is: “I don’t intend to have a bad run on the Yukon.”
KNOM caught up with Jonrowe in the Takotna checkpoint, where the pink-parka-clad musher talked with trail reporter Laureli Kinneen while attending to her (sometimes-loudly-barking) dogs.
“Everybody runs (the Iditarod) with different objectives,” she says. “My objective is to win… (but also) to have a competitive finish with a good-looking dog team.”
Jonrowe said she was hesitant to push her team too hard this early in the race: not just because her dogs are “a little stiff,” but also because she’d like to avoid dropping dogs unnecessarily.
“I really enjoy my dogs,” she said, “and that’s what keeps me coming back (for) 30-some years.”
As of 7:30pm Wednesday evening, DeeDee Jonrowe is in 14th position, concluding her 24-hour layover in Takotna. She arrived at 11:21pm Tuesday night with a full string of 16 dogs; factoring in her starting differential (from the Willow re-start on Sunday), Jonrowe will be eligible to depart Takotna at 12:39am, early Thursday morning.
