The race clock for the 2015 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race will start ticking in Fairbanks, not the usual takeoff point in Willow.
Members of the trail committee’s board of directors met Tuesday and voted unanimously to change the course due to low snowfall in some of the most treacherous sections of the trail’s roughly 1,000 miles.
Similar conditions forced the race’s restart to move from Willow to Fairbanks in 2003, bypassing the Alaska Range but keeping it roughly the same distance. The move to Fairbanks was considered in snow-starved 2014, too, and after the board’s decision kept mushers on the traditional southern route, the bruised and beaten up dog drivers criticized officials for not avoiding what some of them described as a catastrophe.
This year’s Iditarod will be 19 miles shorter — 968 miles versus 987 — than the traditional northern route that teams would have taken in an odd year and will pass through two new checkpoints in the Interior: Huslia and Koyukuk. In 2003, mushers had to backtrack on the Yukon River to make more miles, so the jaunt north to the villages means a snaky yet flowing route that still goes about 1,000 miles total to the finish in Nome.
First, though, Iditarod’s ceremonial start is scheduled for March 7 in Anchorage in an 11-mile untimed trip through the city’s party atmosphere, on streets and trails. Then it will restart in Fairbanks on March 9, a Monday instead of the usual Sunday restart in Willow, to allow kennels enough time to drive dog trucks north 360 miles.
Trail Committee board member Rick Swenson, the winningest Iditarod musher with five first-place finishes, said the Dalzell Gorge coming out of Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range was passable when the board made its decision in 2014 — a week closer to the race than this year — but that it was too dangerous based on the look he got at it Tuesday. The troublesome areas had half as much snow as in 2014, and the bad spots were twice as long, Swenson said.
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