Update, 9 a.m. Monday: The first mushers arrived Monday morning at the Finger Lake checkpoint. Richie Diehl was the first in at 6:50 a.m. and decided to stay, and was soon passed by several mushers who continued on, including defending champion Pete Kaiser. From there, musher head into the Alaska Range, with the next checkpoint at Rainy Pass.

UPDATES:

Original Sunday story:

WILLOW — The 2020 Iditarod is officially underway.

The 48th Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race began Sunday afternoon in Willow, where the teams left in two-minute intervals in their 1,000-mile race across Alaska. The first team out was rookie Martin Massicotte and the last was veteran Paige Drobny.

A field of 57 mushers are competing.

The teams left in heavy snow, and onto a trail with deep snow, especially in the early going through the Susitna Valley and into the Alaska Range.

Most if not all teams should make it as far as Skwentna on Sunday. Skwentna, the race’s second checkpoint, is about 70 miles from Willow and about 40 miles away from the checkpoint at Finger Lake, where teams begin their climb up Rainy Pass.

One surprise on Sunday: Former Yukon Quest winner John Schandelmeier stepped in as a last-minute replacement for his wife, Zoya DeNure. It wasn’t immediately clear why DeNure wasn’t running. Schandelmeier (who writes a weekly outdoors column in the ADN) won the Quest in 1992 and ’96 and ran the Iditarod once, in 1993. (He didn’t finish.)

Jeff King, a four-time champ, was on the entry list but had to bow out last week when he had emergency surgery for a perforated intestine. He was replaced by Sean Underwood, who has worked as a handler for King for several years.

Pete Kaiser of Bethel is back to defend his championship, and he’ll face plenty of competition.

Kaiser is one of five former champions in the race, along with three-time winner Mitch Seavey, four-time winners Martin Buser and Lance Mackey and 2019 winner Joar Leifseth Ulsom.

Another dozen or so teams are legitimate contenders, among them nine mushers who finished in the top 10 and 13 who finished in the top 15 last year. The only people missing from that group are sixth-place Matt Hall and 13th-place King.

Jessie Royer of Fairbanks, who placed third last year, said she counted 18 people in the race who have posted top-10 finishes in the last five Iditarods.

Also in the field is reigning Yukon Quest champion Brent Sass, who is back in the Iditarod for the first time since 2016, and Nic Petit, who led each of the last two races in the late going before encountering trouble. Petit finished second in 2018 after losing the trail in bad weather on the Bering Sea coast, and scratched last year after his team refused to keep running on the sea ice near Shaktoolik.

Royer is one of 12 women and 45 veterans in the race. There are 12 rookies.

The race will follow the northern route this year, which puts the halfway point in Cripple. Plentiful snow is expected pretty much from Willow to Nome, and weather advisory issued Friday afternoon said 8 to 16 inches of snow could fall during a 48-hour period beginning Saturday morning in the Susitna Valley, site of the race’s first few checkpoints.



