“I’m loving it right now,” Richie Diehl says of the Iditarod trail through Takotna.
After days of terrible trail – wrought by this winter’s unseasonable warmth and lack of snowfall – the route from Nikolai to McGrath and on to Takotna, Diehl says, was better. Much better.
Despite the accident-prone conditions of the trail earlier in the race, Diehl and his team – and his sled, which he built himself – are holding up well. “I think I just got lucky, more than anything,” he told Laureli Kinneen in Takotna. “I had some bad spills, but we popped right back up and got going.”
The Aniak, Alaska musher is taking his 24-hour layover in Takotna. Going into Rohn was a “long night,” Diehl says, and “the dogs deserve this break.”
