Husky News

Woman from Chatanika wins 200-miler over icons Mackey, King.Lance Mackey may have won four straight Yukon Quests and back-to-back Iditarods, but he can’t seem to take the measure of a rugged 30-year-old woman from Chatanika, who seems to get faster as conditions worsen.

Jodi Bailey guided her 10-dog team through bitter cold and winds so fierce they blew team after team into a ditch off the side of the closed Denali Highway to win the Gin Gin 200 Sled Dog Race from Paxson to Maclaren River Lodge and back just before midnight Sunday.

And this was no powder-puff field of 46 starters. Among Bailey’s victims, in addition to Mackey: four-time Iditarod champion Jeff King of Denali Park, who scratched because of the weather; 2004 Iditarod champion Mitch Seavey of Seward; 2008 Quest runner-up Ken Anderson of Fairbanks, 2000 Quest champion Aliy Zirkle of Two Rivers and Sebastian Schnuelle of Whitehorse, 10th in the last Iditarod.

“I am totally honored by my dogs,” Bailey said by phone from Paxson on Monday. “They were so amazing for me. Even when my sled was blown into the snow off to the side of the highway, my dogs … stayed right on the road.

“I consider myself very lucky,” she said. “There were times I was just hanging on.”

Considering the conditions, that’s no surprise. In addition to temperatures that plunged to minus-45, fierce winds smacked the racers early and late in the race.

Yukon Quest veteran Mike Ellis of New Hampshire scratched to protect his team from the weather.

“There was a stretch of 8-12 miles where there was no snow on the road and the wind was probably blowing between 30-50 mph,” Ellis told the Fairbanks News-Miner.

Near Tangle Lakes, Ellis said, he had a hard time keeping his sled on the trail.

“Most of the time I was running beside the sled, holding onto the snow hook so that the sled would stay on the trail,” Ellis said. “There are spots along part of the road where you don’t want to go off the edge because it’s pretty steep and the culvert is filled with rocks and willows and stuff like that.”

Mushers had a six-hour layover at Maclaren River Lodge before returning to Paxson, and they continued to finish all day Monday.

Bailey got there first, with nine of her 10 dogs still in harness. Brent Sass of Fairbanks crossed the line in at 1:58 a.m. Monday, second overall and first among the men. Colleen Robertia of Kasilof was third, with Anderson fourth and Mackey, who finished at 10:44 a.m., eighth.

While Mackey has ruled the distance mushing world for at least the last two years, the little-known Bailey has now beaten him three straight times — at last year’s Gin Gin 200, when she edged him by 20 minutes, and at the Two Rivers Dog Mushers Solstice 100 race earlier this month, where she won by two minutes.

“It’s kind of funny because we’re really good friends,” she laughed. “I don’t think he’s really worried about me.”

Bailey and husband Dan Kaduce live in Chatanika, a small community on the Steese Highway north of Fairbanks, not far from Cleary Summit. Bailey, whose share of the $5,000 purse is $1,250, works as an instructor for UAF’s College of Rural and Community Development.

In February, Kaduce will start his sixth Yukon Quest with many of the same dogs that ran to victory late Sunday. He finished eighth in the last Quest.

The couple has been breeding dogs about 10 years. They’ve bred every dog in their kennel except a dog named Jodi, an acquisition from Fairbanks sprint musher Curtis Erhart.

Two blue-eyed dogs named Jake and Elwood — the “Blues Brothers” — were particularly determined at the front of Bailey’s team on Sunday.

“They’re just wonderful,” Bailey said of the two. “They’re the ones that brought me home last night for the win.”

And Bailey wasn’t the only musher impressed by her team.

“Those teams (Bailey’s and Robertia’s) were just screaming hot,” said race judge Zoya DeNure. “I like seeing dogs finish excited. This is a hard 200 miles. It’s pretty tough.”

Originally started as a race exclusively for women mushers, the Gin Gin 200 last year added a men’s division, though men and women race against each other head to head.

“It was originally something small for the girls to come out and play for the weekend,” said DeNure. “I remember the first time I saw the field at Sheep Mountain, I got intimidated. I thought, ‘There’s got to be other women with their own dog team. Let’s start a race to encourage women to come out and race.’

“But then I got, ‘Why can’t the men race?’ ‘What if I show up in a skirt?’

“I felt like nobody really got it, so we started a separate men’s division.”

And since then, no man has claimed the overall championship.

Source: The Anchorage Daily News