Iditarod musher Brent Sass and his 12-dog team raced out of Kaltag at 10:36 a.m. Saturday, holding onto the lead of this year’s race.
Alaska Public Media’s Tegan Hanlon reports:
Katag is about 630 miles into the 1,000-mile Iditarod. Sass is headed on a roughly 85-mile trail to the next checkpoint of Unalakleet.
He’s fresh off his mandatory eight-hour rest in Kaltag. He arrived first to the Kaltag checkpoint at 2:36 a.m., winning the Bristol Bay Native Corporation Fish First Award: 25 pounds of fresh Bristol Bay salmon fillets, $2,000 and a wood burned art piece by artist Apay’uq Moore.
Sass is gunning for his first Iditarod win.
The closest team on the trail is five-time champion Dallas Seavey.
Seavey and his 10-dog team raced into Kaltag two hours after Sass left. Seavey stopped for just nine minutes before dashing back onto the trail at 12:44 p.m.
Sass and Seavey have both completed their mandatory 24-hour and eight-hour breaks.
Seavey took his eight-hour stop in Nulato, the checkpoint before Kaltag.
Behind Seavey on the trail are Jessie Holmes and Aaron Burmeister.
The rest of the Iditarod teams are stretched across the trail, all the way back to around race mile 400, just outside of Cripple.
Image at top: Brent Sass races into Ruby at 5:57 a.m. Friday, under the northern lights. He stays for just five minutes, holding onto the lead of the race through the next three checkpoints of Galena, Nulato and Kaltag. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)
