After the ceremonial start, the race will resume on Sunday at a colder location. Warm weather has forced organizers of the 43-year-old race to fiddle with that location in recent years. (Images on Google Street View have showed some pretty mushy conditions in the past.) Last year, the starting line was moved 225 miles north, to Fairbanks from Willow. This year, the official restart of the race will be take place in Willow on Sunday. The course will snake northward for over 900 miles, until the finish line in Nome.

Unseasonably warm weather — along with volcanic activity, wandering buffalo and, of course, too much snow — has impacted parts of the trail for decades, but mushers must persevere. (One of the main rules of the Iditarod is that the race will be held whatever the conditions.) But in recent years, climbing temperatures in the state have created difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions for mushers and their dogs, resulting in the cancellation of other races. In January, organizers were forced to cancel the Tustumena 200 Sled Dog Race because of a lack of snow and “way too much open water,” officials said on Facebook.

The larger races continue, but not without concerns. In February, patches of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest trail were free of snow, which could affect the safety of sled dogs.

“The warm weather’s going to be quite something,” one musher, Luc Tweddell, told Canada’s CBC News. “It’s hard on the dogs. On the musher, it’s fine, but on the dogs, it’s harder to get food into them and stuff like that.”