As of 10:35 pm (AKST) last night Keaton had crossed the finish line in Tok! I stayed up and kept refreshing the tracking feed until I was sure he was there.
To see Keaton and his team’s arrival in Tok, here’s a link to the video posted on Star Gazer Racer’s FB page.
Congratulations to Keaton, his dogs and the team of folks who all made it happen. It was fun to watch!
Tok, Alaska 5:05 am (AKST) Temperature 9 Degrees
Sunrise: 8:46 am Sunset: 4:46 pm (a full 8 hours of daylight today!)
Elevation: 1635 Feet
Population: 1355 (2022)
Best place for a burger, beer, and a slice of pie: Fast Eddy’s MP 1313
By the time I checked the Yukon Quest leaderboard at 5:05 (AKST) this morning, Jeff Deeter had won the race with three other mushers coming in a few hours later (Shelley, Eklund, Bacon). For more details, here’s a story from KUAC’s Robyne & Shelby Herbert.
Deeter wins 2025 Yukon Quest 550 | KUAC.org
Meanwhile Keaton Loebrich (Bib #3) and Joey Sabin (Bib #8) were both in Chicken taking the required six-hour break before hitting the trail again.
At 2:55 pm (AKST) Keaton was at mile 519.5. Less than 40 miles to go!
Wishing Keaton and his dogs a smooth run into Tok. Hope you make it in time for dinner at Fast Eddy’s–they close at nine!
Here’s the link to Keaton’s Star Gazers Racing Facebook page.
Chicken, AK Mile 477.9 Sunrise: 8:49 am Sunset: 4:33 pm
Elevation 1677 Feet Today’s High 8F with a low tonight of 1F
Wow–how did it get to be Thursday? I’m guessing out on the trail the mushers and dogs are feeling every minute and every mile of the last five days. They must be happy to see the end in sight.
Here’s a screenshot I took about 8 am (AKST) today which puts the Yukon Quest in perspective in terms of the vastness of Alaska. It also shows the leaderboard with six mushers at that hour still on the trail, one was already on his way out of Chicken. Three were at the checkpoint making the required 6-hour stay. Two, including Keaton, were still on the trail north of Chicken.
If you’re wondering how this town of less than 20 folks on the Taylor Highway got its name, here’s one story that may or may not be true.
Just now (about 5:30 pm AKST) I checked the current standings and one musher, Jeff Deeter has finished the race. Keaton is at mile 453, with 24 miles remaining before he reaches the Chicken Checkpoint.
This link will take you to the Yukon Quest’s Facebook page where you can see photos from the trail. Make sure you keep scrolling down. There is a video of the winner crossing the finish line.
Wishing Keaton and his dogs safe travels, happy trails, and a good rest in Chicken tonight!
Eagle Checkpoint – Mile 377.7 – Sunrise: 8:55 am Sunset 4:23 pm
Elevation 853 Feet Average February Temperatures 9F high/-11F low
Musher Keaton Loebrich Bib 3 is back on the trail this evening after resting for a few hours in Eagle. Here’s a look at that checkpoint in a cool story with photos from Alaska Public Media.
As of 5:43 pm (AKST) this evening, Keaton had departed from Eagle and was headed to Chicken about 100 miles down the trail. For the most up-to-date information, check out Keaton’s current location.
To learn more about Keaton check out the story linked below. It was published in his hometown (Midland, Michigan) newspaper a few months ago.
Midland native Keaton Loebrich has qualified for the 2025 Iditarod
As Day 4 of the 2025 Yukon Quest comes to an end, I wish Keaton and his team a safe run tonight. Happy Trails!
Eagle Checkpoint – Mile 377.7 Sunrise: 8:57 am Sunset: 4:19 pm
I made myself a map to try and get a better understanding of the 2025 Yukon Quest Alaska route. The start is in Fairbanks and the finish is in Tok. Now if you drive the Alaska Highway 2 as I did with Dave and Dad last summer it’s a pretty easy three-and-a-half-hour drive. About 200 miles.
The route the mushers take is nothing like that. They headed northeast out of Fairbanks and have stops at checkpoints (I only have a few of them marked on the map with pink highlighter) at Pleasant Valley (39.2 mi.), Mile 101 (112.7 mi.) and further on in Central (139.6 mi.) and Circle (216.6 mi.) before turning to the southeast.
The next stop is Slaven’s Roadhouse (275.4 mi.) on the Yukon River at the mouth of Coal Creek. When I checked this morning about 6 am Alaska time it was -9 degrees. My musher Keaton Loebrich (Bib 3) stopped there last night and maybe spent a few hours resting his dogs. From there the route continues to Eagle (377.7 mi.), Chicken (477.9 mi.), and finally to the finish line in Tok (557.8)
Much better than my highlighted road map is the official Yukon Quest Alaska map linked below.It is a live map showing all of the mushers’ positions real time along the trail.
2025 Race Standings – Yukon Quest Alaska
As I write this it’s shortly after seven in Alaska and Keaton is at mile 338 with just under forty miles to go to the Eagle Checkpoint where it’s -2 degrees.
For a fun look at the Eagle Checkpoint and everything that goes into a Yukon Quest checkpoint, take a look at this article published by Alaska Public Media.
Eagle is hosting Yukon Quest mushers for the first time in 4 years
Safe travels and happy trails to Keaton and his dogs!
Back in July while in Fairbanks I visited the Yukon Quest Headquarters and made a small donation to the race. In return I was given a dog bootie and a sharpie.
After I returned home, I forgot about it until last week when I received an email with my musher information. Bib #3 Keaton Loebrich https://yukonquestalaska.com/yqa-550-keaton-loebrich/
The race started on Saturday, February 1st in Fairbanks where the days are getting longer. Sunrise on Saturday was 9:34 am and sunset was at 4:35. Seven hours of daylight!
Checking on Monday night at about 11:30 pm (9:30 pm in Alaska) Keaton was in third place and had covered more than 265 miles. Here’s the map with current standings. 2025 Race Standings – Yukon Quest Alaska
I’ll be checking in again tomorrow morning to see how Keaton and his dogs are doing. Safe travels to everyone out there on the trail!
Valdez, AK. Elevation 98 feet. Monday July 22, 2024-High 50s/Overcast and rainy. Sunrise: 4:55 am/Sunset: 10:46 pm. 17 hours and 50 minutes of daylight.
The small boat was painted greenish blue with an outline of a seal sketched in black on the starboard side. It was docked in a slip at the Valdez harbor and at 23 feet was a little longer than the Shasta trailer we camped in when I was a kid. We found this unusual lodging on Air BnB and booked it for two nights. It slept three and didn’t have running water.
Before we boarded the boat, we took in the view and checked out the harbor facilities. It was late Sunday afternoon, and the fishing boats were coming in. Most seemed to be personal or charter boats.
Near the harbormaster’s office was a public area with long counters and overhead water hoses with spray attachments for fish cleaning. Heads, guts, and bones were washed onto a slide area that ended in a chute that emptied into a container in the harbor. A row of attentive gulls and crows (some of my only bird sightings while in Alaska) kept a close watch on the activities ready to snatch whatever they could.
A whiteboard hanging nearby kept a daily and overall tally of the summer’s fish derbies which included halibut and silver salmon.
The harbor and adjacent village are situated on the Valdez Arm of Prince WIlliam Sound (PWS) in the northeast portion of the sound. We came in over the Chugach Mountains via the Richardson Highway and in the final thirty miles we crossed the summit of Thompson Pass (at 2805 feet it averages 500 inches of snow per year) and saw waterfalls and glaciers at almost every curve in the road.
My reading during the trip included the memoir The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost by Marybeth Holleman. She describes the location of Prince William Sound:
It is a place of convergence–the geographic center for Alaska and the Pacific, where the Arctic to the north, Aleutians to the west, and Inside Passage to the south all intersect.
Holleman arrived in Alaska a few years prior to the Exxon Valdez oil spill and spent those years and many after the disaster kayaking or boating on the sound and camping on its beaches. The spill spread oil throughout the sound killing thousands of fish and animals. Her story recounts not only the toll on marine life but also on the humans who lived, worked, and recreated in this unique and pristine environment.
The timeline (see below) provided by NOAA was thumbtacked on a bulletin board at the harbormaster’s building. It shows the status of PWS species recovery 25 years after the spill. Another ten years has now passed, and I wonder if anything has changed especially for those on the bottom row.
In the evening, we returned to the boat where we had loaded our backpacks and suitcases. The sunny evening and a big salmon dinner kept us going even though we were all fighting colds that I caught first and had now moved on to Dave and Dad. We found the accommodations challenging but not impossible. A bench, one folding chair and, a big cooler with four cupholders was our living room. An extension cord gave us all a place to charge our phones and one bright light, but we never did figure out how to turn on the string of party lights.
By morning fog and rain had moved in and weren’t budging. Getting out and exploring wasn’t appealing so we went from a coffee shop to the library to the visitor center to a Chinese restaurant for dinner trying to stay warm and dry. I connected my phone to the public Wi-Fi at each place we stopped but was never able to upload the photos for my previous post about fireweed and white spruce. I finally conceded defeat and decided to finish these posts once I returned to my dry dining room table.
Back on the damp boat for our second night we consoled ourselves that it was still better than sleeping in a tent. And I said, “If we survive this, we’ll look back on it as an adventure.” But I’m not sure I convinced anyone. Everyone’s spirits seemed to lift a bit the next morning when we carefully disembarked the boat through its small door for the last time.
I confess I was also beginning to feel melancholy about the trip. Since our first brief trip to Alaska back in 2000 I had looked forward to returning, hoping that we would be able to make the trip with Dad, and now it was almost over.
So, it wasn’t long before I began thinking about a return visit somewhere down the road. I’m still not sold on the Inside Passage cruises that are so popular but maybe a flight to Anchorage and another trip on the Alaska Railroad–south to Seward with a with a stop in Whittier to get a look at the other side of Prince WIlliam Sound. And maybe this time I’ll see some tufted puffins.
From the window of the Denali Star, we saw our first stand of fireweed (Epibolium angustifolium). The tour guide on the train pointed out that the plant blooms from the bottom up and told us a local legend claims that summer is over when the blooms reach the top.
I later read that the plant is called fireweed because it is one of the first plants to bloom after a fire. It seems to grow everywhere in Alaska. I saw it from Denali to Fairbanks to Tok to Valdez and back in Anchorage, mostly wild but sometimes cultivated. By the end of our trip, it seemed to me that it was as ubiquitous as sunflowers are here in the western part of the Lower Forty-Eight.
Photo: Fireweed, Denali NP, AK
2024
Two weeks before our mid-July trip to Denali National Park, the Riley Fire started near the visitor center which is just across the road from the Alaska Railroad station. Within hours the park was shut down. The fire burned 432 acres but was nearly 100% contained by July 10th when the park re-opened, and train service resumed. We saw stands of charred trees within the park, and as we departed on the train to Fairbanks, we saw areas that had burned right next to the tracks.
As Denali faded in the distance, I wondered how long it would be before the dormant, deeply buried seeds of the fireweed would sprout and make their showy comeback in the newly burned areas of Denali.
While visiting Denali I went on a short hike led by a Youth Conservation Corps ranger named Izzy. Just outside the back door of the visitor center was a stand of white spruce (Picea glauca) where we walked. The trees are tall, skinny conifers with spire-shaped tops. Like fireweed they grow in much of Alaska.
Sixteen-year-old Izzy’s enthusiasm for her topic was contagious as she talked about the importance of white spruce to animals and humans. Red squirrels (one of whom was keeping a close eye on us) build middens from the cones which provide both shelter and food. Moose browse the trees in winter when it’s hard to find other food sources. Athabaskans rely on all parts of the tree for a multitude of uses including shelter, medicine, and fuel. Before the group dispersed Izzy suggested that we all think about our role in protecting the forest.
We drove through miles and miles of white spruce on our trip from Fairbanks to Tok. I later learned about black spruce (Picea marianna) that looks (at least to untrained eyes) similar to white spruce. Both are widely distributed in Alaska but thrive in different conditions. So, I’m guessing some, or maybe many, of those white spruce I saw were actually black spruce.
The trees pictured at right are white spruce. They appear to range from about forty feet to sixty feet in height. It’s hard for me to guess how old they are since I’ve read they can grow anywhere from three to twelve inches in a year.
Alaska has always been about mountains to me–range after range of snow-covered peaks. But after this trip that image in my mind has been replaced with forests of stately spruce trees and shrubs filled with pinkish purple flowers blooming in the sun at their feet.
Photo: Bearberry Cabin, Tok, AK
2024
Postscript: Right after I published this post I discovered that the next chapter in the book I was reading about Alaska was titled “Fireweed”. Here the writer compares the plant to its namesake:
Fire: with weedlike tenacity, it ignites a fire of green on barren ground. Fire: it blazes across mountainsides in mid- and late summer, blooming profusely and then bursting white cotton-swathed seedpods that look like wisps of smoke as they quiver and release to the winds.
The book is called The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost by Marybeth Holleman.
Denali National Park. Elevation 1746 feet at the Visitor Center. Thursday July 18, 2024-High 50s/Partly Cloudy Sunrise: 4:40 am/Sunset: 11:43 pm. 19 hours and 4 minutes of daylight.
On this trip to Alaska just like the one in 2000, we started our trip in Anchorage and took the Alaska Railroad to Denali National Park and then on to Fairbanks. We spent one night in Denali and had had several hours before our train the next day. That gave us time for a short hike and ranger talk near the visitor center and then a bus trip over to the sled dog facility to see the Denali Park dogs and a demo.
It reminded me of the dog we had when I was a kid. Her name was Punkin, Punk for short. She was black with pumpkin-colored eyebrows and chest markings. Dad told me that Mom picked her out at the pound at Fort Richardson in Anchorage where they were stationed. Dad and I recently found Punk’s first rabies certificate, signed by the Army veterinarian, in his old wooden footlocker.
Punk was still a puppy when I showed up and she wasn’t happy that all of the attention shifted to the new baby. She took to pulling my diapers off the clothesline. Eventually we would become buddies, but she was always a backyard dog, and I’m afraid we never paid enough attention to her.
The dogs at Denali are freight dogs, bred to pull heavy loads–they haul everything from supplies for trail building projects to equipment for scientific experiments. Built for work, they have long legs, big compact paws (to minimize ice balls), and thick coats. Although the AKC doesn’t formally recognize the Alaskan Husky, they are a distinct breed.
The Denali dogs welcomed us with wagging tails. Many of them came close enough to be petted by the day’s second wave of visitors (there would be total of three demos that day). Once they heard the wheeled cart being readied for the demo their attention shifted, and the howls started. They all wanted to participate in the short run, but only four of the twenty or so dogs would be chosen.
Punk died when I was fifteen, our last tie to those brief years in Alaska. I saw a dog at Denali yesterday with the same eyebrows and remembered our sweet old family dog.
We left Alaska before my first birthday. It was a long car trip; Punk and I rode together in the backseat of the blue ’56 Ford all the way to Kansas.
7/20/24 Tok, AK. 1635′ elevation. Sunrise: 4:13 am Sunset: 11:00 pm. 18 hours and 47 minutes of daylight.
I am behind on my notes and my posts. And I seem to have caught a cold. But our clothes are clean!
We spent two nights in Tok, a small town about 200 miles east of Fairbanks. It’s on the Alaska Highway (milepost 1313) close to where Dad worked on a survey crew during the summers of 1953 and 1954. More about that later.
I like going to a local laundry when traveling. It’s a good way to slow down and get a better feel for real life in an unfamiliar place. This one was at a big RV park (most of Tok’s business comes from visitors passing through) but seemed on Saturday morning to be frequented by locals.
Every other Saturday Tok has a market with a food truck, crafts, and treats, but our visit was on an off week. Even the visitor center was closed, not open on the weekends.
The day was sunny and warm, our nicest one yet. So once the laundry was folded and put away, it was time to get out on the highway to see what looked familiar to Dad after 70 years.