Race leader Gavin Hennigan/Instagram
Human-powered Iditarod stalls
Three runner/walker/snowshoers at the front of the race had set up camp at Ophir, a deserted mining camp well short of halfway into the race, while 51-year-old Frenchman Eric Bassett, who’d tried to make the jump from the tiny community of Takotna to Ophir, turned his bike around and pedaled 25 miles back to the city of McGrath, population 300, where there is at least a restaurant and a store.
An Invitational veteran, Bassett has previously skied and hiked the historic winter trail to Nome and is trying to become the first person to complete the journey in all three of the Invitational disciplines – foot, ski and bike.
“…He does not pedal in the semoule,” a French term for pudding or sugar, his mate and ‘sponsor’ posted on his Facebook page from back in France. “He is currently waiting for the mushers’ trail because it is today impractical for both bikes, skis and walkers. So you have to be patient. The race is an achievement and requires a lot of effort, especially this year. But waiting may seem long then, so that he does not lose the pedal, he needs us, our encouragement.”
Sugar would be an apt description for what race leader Gavin Hennigan encountered when he led the race over the 800-foot hill west of the old steamship port of Takotna and on down that hill into Ophir on Tuesday.
Pulling a sled containing food for 10 days, the Irishman then pushed on for 14 miles toward the race’s halfway point at Cripple before deciding the exercise was futile and turning back to Ophir.
Basset, for his part, made a quicker decision, driven by the inability to carry 10 days’ worth of food on a fat bike. He pushed the bike less than two miles down the trail from Takotna before that ‘semoule’ convinced him that there was no hope of reaching Cripple, and his cache of supplies there, in a reasonable amount of time.
There is close to 100 miles of trail between Takotna and Cripple, a nowhere place that exists as nothing more than a point on a map. And because of the condition of the trail, the people on snowshoes in front of Basset were making only 1 to 2 mph, towing their gear-filled sleds.
Pushing a fat bike loaded with gear through snow would be even slower, which put the Cripple checkpoint out of reach by days. This won’t change until that aforementioned “musher’s trail” is put in across what was once the gold-rush-fueled Inland Empire of an Alaska Territory long gone.
Basset’s bike, a big load to push/Facebook
Snowmachines to the rescue
The mushers’ trail will arrive courtesy of the snowmachines that now lead the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race north from Willow to Nome. That race kicks off with a ceremonial start in Anchorage tomorrow before heading north to start in earnest on Sunday from near a small town 70 miles up the road from Alaska’s largest city.
The Iditarod, which began as a race of dogs and dog drivers in 1973, could, of course, hold its snowmachines at Takotna, tell the mushers to get out their snowshoes to break trail for the dogs to Ruby on the Yukon, and return the race to the roots that led English sportswriter Ian Wooldridge and the London’s Daily Mail to label this the “Last Great Race on Earth” in 1976.
Iditarod later usurped the “Last Great Race” label and trademarked it, and then progressively eliminated some of that which led to Wooldridge’s conclusion as to greatness. Wooldridge loved the idea of covering the race, Daily Mail sports editor Tom Clarke observed in 2024, because “it was almost in the footsteps in the snow of one of his heroes, Jack London.”
The race is now a long way removed from anything imagined by London or Wooldridge. It is a race that has become all about a fast track and the fastest dogs, with the dog drivers now resigned to sitting on seats on the sleds behind.
The dog-race competitors are still required to pack snowshoes in their sleds, but some of the veterans of the early Iditarods have pondered whether some of the racers of the modern Iditarod even know how to put on those snowshoes.
Suffice to say, the chances of the Iditarod shutting down the team of trailbreakers in Takotna to institute a return to the days of yesteryear range from zero to minus-1, which is nothing but good news for Basset and three other fat-tired cyclists, two of them women, now sitting in McGrath.
They, plus the group of three on foot in Ophir, are the remnants of the 25 cyclists and hikers who signed up for the 1,000-mile journey to Nome this year. Eighteen have since abandoned either because they didn’t want to wait in McGrath for a trail to be put in ahead of them, or because they feared they couldn’t make the 30-days-to-Nome time limit needed to qualify as an “official Invitational finisher.
Fast-man, tough guy Tyson Flaherty from Fairbanks – a previous winner of the Invitational 1000 and one of only five, fat-tired cyclists able to reach McGrath in under two days since the 350-mile race to that city began in 1997, led the exodus out of the Kuskokwim River city this year.
Fellow Fairbanks cyclist, Jay Cable, another tough guy whose ridden to Nome four times before wasn’t, wasn’t far behind.
‘I had fun,” Cable observed upon leaving. “(But) I just didn’t want to wait in McGrath for a week plus for the dog race to show up.”
Forty-two-year-old Japanese “adventure runner” Takao Kitada was the last to give up. He followed Hennigan, Montanan Herman Watson and South Dakota’s Ryan Wanless to Takotna, camped there for a day, and then hiked back to McGrath to abandon the race. The word from the trail was that he had concluded he would be unable to make Nome in 30 days and thus would not be able to “officially” finish the race.
Australian fat-tired cyclist Troy Nyree Szczurkowski, who has been hanging out in McGrath since his arrival there almost four days ago, believes it will be tough even for the cyclist to now reach Nome before the deadline, but believes it is possible to do so.
Szczurkowski should know. He’s ridden to Nome six times in his 11 Invitational starts, and if he makes it this year, he will be the first cyclist to have completed the course seven times. He said that his times from past years indicate it’s possible to make Nome by 3 p.m. on March 24, but “it’s going to be tight to make the cutoff.”
Trail conditions are the big wild card. At present, he noted, “the snow here has like an eighth to quarter-inch sun crust on it. So it’s hard to push horizontally through it, (you) have to Stairmaster your way forward.”
Given this, he decided the only sensible thing to do was wait in McGrath and save energy untilthe dog-race snowmachines go through to crack that crust. It is possible the strategy could help the 53-year-old cyclist become the first Aussie ever to win the ITI 1000.
“My strategy before the race started and during was to turtle my way up the trail, get to McGrath as late as I could, knowing there was no trail and be waiting,” he said. “I knew JP (Jay Petervary) and Tyson wouldn’t have the patience to wait it out, and the others got some cold damage from fast travel in sustained cold conditions.”
Szczurkowski’s best previous finish in the 1,000 was third in 2019, when he was already at an age that gave him no hope of winning a conventional bike race. But the Invitational 1000 isn’t a conventional bike race.
The Invitatoinal 1000 is a war of attrition waged as much or more against the hostile Alaska environment as against other competitors.
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