For now, more and more work is done during the summer to reroute troublesome sections. In the winter, workers — mostly volunteers from towns and villages along the route — determine the best paths. The idea is to desperately avoid open water, which is increasingly difficult, by steering the trail clear or building makeshift bridges of logs and snow where creek crossings are required.

The question the Iditarod is starting to ask, as other races have already done, is whether it will need to move. And is it still the Iditarod if it is not on the historic Iditarod trail?

“My gut feeling is, no, you don’t move it,” said the musher Brent Sass, an Iditarod veteran who recently won his second Yukon Quest. “We’re all working together to continue keeping the tradition going. And if we’ve got to change some things in the beginning of the race, so be it.

“Now, ask me again in 10 years,” he continued, “and maybe we’ve had Iditarods canceled and maybe they’ve run only 500 miles, and we’ll worry about it.”

Mitch Seavey, who first raced in the Iditarod in 1982 and last won it in 2017, is among those not too concerned, yet.

“Most of these races are in the southern area of the state and the coastal areas of the state,” he said. “But there are vast areas of Alaska that are covered in snow and in a deep freeze right now. We might have to adapt and adjust and move.”

He laughed.

“All I’m saying is that I think the Iditarod will adjust,” he said. “And from where I sit in Alaska, there’s a lot of latitude left to go.”