By late night on Saturday, Jan. 24, the Kuskokwim River below Kalskag had filled with dog teams that had completed their 6 hours of required rest before Tuluksak in the 2026 Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race (K300).
For the four mushers at the front of the pack – Riley Dyche, Emily Robinson, Mike Williams Jr., and Pete Kaiser – the race for first was officially on.
Two of the mushers are relative newcomers to the K300, and two are veterans with more than 30 combined finishes. One – Bethel’s Pete Kaiser – is poised to become the winningest K300 musher ever. If he can pull off his 10th K300 victory and break Jeff King’s all-time record, Kaiser would usher in a new era of hometown dominance for the race as it nears the 50-year mark.
But in this year’s race, plenty can change in the stretch before and after the mandatory 4-hour rest at the Tuluksak checkpoint. As of midnight, nearly all of the teams headed for Tuluksak had become clustered along a roughly 25-mile stretch of river. Kaiser said that this appears to be a growing trend.
“It seems like every year this race just gets tighter and tighter, and people just kind of travel for a long ways in just a tight pack,” Kaiser said on the morning of Jan. 24 at the halfway point of the race in Aniak.
The other veteran leading the pack – Akiak’s Mike Williams Jr. – has run the K300 14 times, but has never won it all. He placed second back in 2011, and came in fifth in 2025.
This year, Williams Jr. said that he only decided to sign up at the last minute. He said that extreme weather and extended power outages in Akiak hampered training leading up to the race. But when his closest cousin’s son – 17-year-old Charlie Chingliak – signed up to race, Williams Jr. said that he couldn’t resist.
“I saw Charlie sign up, and that kind of got me excited. After a few weeks I decided I better sign up too,” Williams Jr. said.
Heading into the early morning of Sunday, Jan. 25 on the K300 trail, Williams Jr. and Kaiser had more than each other to worry about. Riley Dyche of Big Lake and Emily Robinson of Nenana played an extended game of leap frog with the veteran mushers.
Dyche took second place in last year’s race, his second time racing in the K300. He said that he’s running nearly the exact same team in the K300 this year, and that he hopes his dogs can build on that experience.
Seventeen-year-old Emily Robinson got mushers’ attention in a big way last year when she placed sixth in her first K300, winning Rookie of the Year. She also won the Junior Iditarod the past four years in a row. But now that she’s an adult, her focus this year is on K300 glory.
“This is the biggest race of the season. We have to go out there and do this,” Robinson said.
To see how it all pans out, catch the finish by tuning in to KYUK 640AM beginning at 7 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, Jan. 25. The K300 Race Committee will be livestreaming the finish, and KYUK will be carrying the livestream and posting updates to our website, Facebook, and Instagram pages. You can follow teams on the race’s online GPS tracker, which will also be pinned to the top of KYUK’s web page.
Nat Herz covered the race from Aniak and contributed reporting to this story.
