The relative quiet of Nome’s Front Street on Tuesday evening belies the flurry of activity throughout Iditarod country: both among those competing in the race and those excitedly preparing for its conclusion.
We are, almost certainly, mere hours from a championship finish in Iditarod 43. But when will that happen?
Here’s a (hopefully reasonable) guess: sometime between 4:00 and 5:00am.
A good rule of thumb is that the last two legs of the Iditarod Trail — the 55-mile run from White Mountain to Safety and the final, 22-mile stretch that ends at the Nome finish line — take about 10 hours to complete.
Dallas Seavey, last year’s Iditarod champion, certainly looks well-poised to repeat his victory in 2015. He arrived into White Mountain with a 4-hour, 11-minute lead over his closest competitor, father and fellow multiple-time-champion Mitch Seavey. There are few who would disagree that it’s the younger Seavey’s race to lose at this point.
Dallas Seavey departed White Mountain, having finished the mandatory, 8-hour layover that all Iditarod competitors must complete, at 6:10pm.
Adding 10 hours to a 6:10pm departure puts Dallas under Nome’s Burled Arch just after 4:00am (which, interestingly, would make his 2015 finish time virtually identical to last year, when he arrived at 4:04am).
As of 8:30pm Tuesday, Dallas’ activity on Iditarod’s GPS tracker shows him mushing around 7 or 7.5 miles an hour on the trail to Safety. If this speed continues — and especially, perhaps, if he feels no need to make a final push, since his nearest competitor is a relatively safe distance behind him — we might expect his arrival in Nome slightly later, perhaps around 5:00am or thereabouts.
But we need look no further than just a year ago for evidence that the final 77 miles of the Iditarod Trail sometimes hold surprises — occasionally, race-changing surprises — in store. The ground storm that led to Jeff King’s scratch and Aliy Zirkle’s delay at Safety was but the latest example of the fierce weather often experienced in the very last few miles of the race; the “Blowhole” region near Safety is notorious for being calm and easily passable one hour and dangerously stormy the next. The takeaway of 2014’s weather-related race upset — the upset that set the stage for Dallas Seavey’s own Iditarod championship last time — is that his victory in 2015 is not yet certain, even in these final hours. (It’s a somewhat-ironic lesson that Seavey says certainly isn’t lost on him. “It’s not over ‘till it’s over,” he said in Koyuk.)
But, all things being equal, it’s likely we’ll see a championship finish in Nome around 4 or 5 Wednesday morning. And unless something strange happens — in other words, something on the magnitude of last year’s epic upset — that champion will be Dallas Seavey.
