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There’s a parade of mushers running to the ghost town of Iditarod this morning, where Aliy Zirkle and her team are sleeping. The Two Rivers musher was awarded the Dorothy Page Halfway award when she arrived there at 1:39 a.m. on Thursday, March 7. This year it’s a choice between a gold iPhone with a year of free service or $3,000 in gold nuggets. 

Every Iditarod musher has a harrowing story to tell, and Aniak musher Richie Diehl has a doozy and a black-eye to prove it. He ran face first into a tree while mushing from Nikolai to McGrath. The impact knocked him off the sled.

Bethel musher Pete Kaiser took the lead in the Iditarod early this year. Bib number 9 says that it’s because he wanted to take advantage of being one of the first teams on the trail over the Alaska Range.

“I kind of made a point of trying to stay out in the front," he said in the Nikolai checkpoint. "I got a good bib number, and I wanted to stay out in the front in case that trail went to [heck] with a bunch of teams going over it. So I don’t know what it was like for everyone else, but I had a pretty good trail."

It’s relatively quiet on the Iditarod Trail. Many mushers are taking their required 24-hour rest, with one significant exception: Aliy Zirkle is making a run for it. Her team left Ophir a little after 8 a.m., leaving behind former front-runner Nicolas Petit, who is doing his 24-hour layover, along with Jesse Holmes and Aaron Burmeister. In the history of the race, others have made that push. Time will tell if it will benefit Zirkle when she is stuck staying put while others who have completed their 24-hour rests mush by her.

Nicolas Petit from Girdwood is consistently turning in faster running times than his rivals and is consistently up in the front of the pack. When others do overtake him he comes back and establishes a bigger lead, as he did last night, coming into Ophir by 1:08 a.m. and making the run in three hours.