RUBY — Mushers Jessie Holmes and Paige Drobny are in a tight competition at the front of this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. It’s similar to last year, in which the Denali Highway residents were neck and neck for much of the trail before Holmes ultimately won.
“That’s my closest neighbor, 26 miles away. It’s hard to root against her,” Holmes said shortly after pulling into the Yukon River checkpoint at Ruby just before 5 a.m. Friday.
Both Holmes and Drobny are improvising, tossing out their predetermined race strategies to adapt on short notice.
Holmes has twice switched up where he’d planned to take big chunks of rest, first in opting to take his 24-hour rest in Takotna rather than Cripple, and again on Friday, scrapping plans to push farther downriver to Galena for his mandatory Yukon River eight-hour rest and choosing Ruby instead.
“I planned on getting here first and keeping going,” Holmes said as he poured boiling water into a metal cooker stuffed with frozen meat discs for his dogs.
The adjustment started 70 miles back in Cripple, where he took a longer rest than he’d planned — in part, he said, because he’d been too discombobulated to rest himself.
“I had like, six (drop) bags there. I planned on doing my 24 there, and my sled was just loaded with junk. I dunno, I feel like I’m really disorganized this year and not that efficient,” Holmes said.
And despite worries that the trail heading into Ruby might be drifted or buried in deep snow, the conditions were good enough that he decided to forgo rest and push all the way to the checkpoint. It’s the second time he’s made that gamble. Earlier in the race, he abandoned plans to camp on the way over Rainy Pass, worrying that the strong headwinds and cold would worsen if he stopped. Though it was chilly Friday morning, with temperatures around Ruby somewhere south of 15 below zero, mushing conditions were good, his team was pulling strong, he said. Rather than stopping for a break, he ran from Cripple to Ruby in 10 straight hours.
“If you’re gonna make a move, easier to do it on good trail,” he said.
He’s logged the least sleep he can recall from any of his recent Iditarods, and planned to conk out in Ruby for a bit. But, as the first musher to reach the Yukon, Holmes was entitled to a five-course meal prepared by a chef from Spenard Roadhouse in Anchorage. The restaurant group behind the Roadhouse and several other popular eateries is an event sponsor, sending out two cooks and several camp stoves.
A tea drinker, Holmes ignored the burbling coffee pot in Ruby’s community hall and opted instead for two packets of bergamot Earl Grey as he took his seat behind a folding table set for two.
“You can never have enough Bergamot,” he said after briefly freshening up, having corralled his shocks of musher hair into a neat bun.
As he chitchatted with chef Rob Smith about the menu, Holmes confessed to being excited for the change of fare. Normally on Iditarod he cooks and packs his own meals, most of which consist of moose.
“I’m a Dutch oven kind of guy,” he told Smith before smearing salmon spread over a toasted piece of baguette.
The Yukon feast is a race tradition, but Holmes said he’d tried to ignore the temptation and take rests purely based on strategy. This, though, was a happy accident, he explained as he munched beside longtime Ruby race volunteer Billy Honea.
Before Holmes had moved on to the soup course, Drobny pulled into Ruby. She was about two hours behind Holmes but with dogs more recently rested from a break along the way from Cripple. Drobny had leapfrogged over Holmes Thursday, but then he leapfrogged her in turn during the night. More leapfrogging will ensue as the two balance shorter breaks and longer runs trying to build up an advantage over one another in the next several hundred miles of mushing.
When she arrived, Drobny wasn’t yet sure if she’d take her mandatory eight-hour rest in Ruby, but was leaning toward it. The option afforded the best chance of missing warmer daytime temperatures and sticking to cooler night runs.
“I want to maximize daylight for the eight hours, and I think this is the only place I can do that,” Drobny said.
She’d spent more time at rest than she’d initially hoped for during the last leg, she said. The gap between her and Holmes had nudged wider since they both got to Takotna for their 24s.
“All of my stuff has been breaking,” she said after strawing her team at the dog lot in Ruby. She’d had no clock and had to borrow a wristwatch from another musher to use as an alarm. A canister of fuel emptied out inside her sled bag. “Things have been going great.”
Last year, when Holmes and Drobny were likewise jockeying for the lead throughout much of the race, they both stuck to disciplined, conservative run-rest schedules. This year, jockeying once more, they are both adjusting as they go.
If Holmes wins, it will be his second victory in as many years. If Drobny prevails, it will be her first Iditarod championship, and the first time a woman has won since 1990, the year of Susan Butcher’s fourth win.
“I was thinking about it, I was like ‘man, I got every woman in Alaska rooting against me right now,’” Holmes said.
The third musher closing in on Ruby Friday morning, he noted, was Mille Porsild, with Jessie Royer and Michelle Phillips likewise close behind in the chase pack.
This story originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.
