UNALAKLEET – A blazing orange sun hung over Jessie Holmes’ shoulder as the defending Iditarod champion and his lead dogs Polar and Zeus navigated the wide valley of the Unalakleet River early Sunday morning.
Holmes and a team of 13 perky huskies pulled into this Norton Sound checkpoint at 9:27 a.m. Sunday with roughly another quarter of the 1,000-mile trail to Nome still to come. Holmes’ closest competitor, friend and frequent top-10 finisher Paige Drobny, arrived a little less than three hours later, leaving a significant but not insurmountable gap.
From here the race heads onto frozen sections of Norton Sound, where windstorms have been known to derail a frontrunner’s championship aspirations.
The Last Great Race could be won out on that sea ice.
After parking his team, Holmes said the sizable lead gave him enough time to bed down his dogs for a brief rest in the busy regional hub community.
“It's such a hospitable place, and it's nice to visit with everybody and regroup and get out of the wind,” Holmes said. And I didn't really want to do a long run.”
Holmes took a five-hour rest the night before at Tripod Flats Cabin, 35 miles east of Unalakleet. As Drobny’s team arrived at the cabin about midnight, Holmes said his talkative dogs alerted him. He said he was grateful for that, because he wasn’t exactly decent.
“So glad that something woke me up, other than somebody walking in the door, because when you got all these clothes on, sometimes it just feels good to shed some layers,” Holmes said in Unalakleet, holding back laughter.
It’s now more tempting to take breaks from the windy, subzero conditions on the trail, Holmes said.
“Because you start liking it. Earlier on in the race, I was just kind of too busy to get sleep. Then when you start getting some really nice sleep in a nice warm cabin, you're like, ‘Oh, some more, that'd be nice.’” he said.
In Unalakleet, Holmes fed his dog team a warm breakfast of beef fat and kibble. Unalakleet locals then fed Holmes sourdough pancakes inside the checkpoint building.
As reward for being the first to reach the coast, Holmes received a hand-carved loon made by Inupiaq artist Mark Tetpon, as well as $2,500 worth of gold nuggets from race sponsor Ryan Air.
“Tell you what, I ain't cold no more,” Holmes said as he accepted the loon. “My heart's warm, full of joy.”
Drobny arrived at 12:18 p.m. with 13 dogs in harness. Like Holmes, Drobny decided to bed down her dogs, feed them a meal and get some rest. Drobny fed them a trifecta of beef fat, pork belly and chicken skins.
Her dogs need about 15,000 calories a day to keep up their speed, she said.
“Their physiology changes pretty early on into the race to be fat-burning like the keto diet, essentially,” Drobny explained. “If you were to feed your pet dog what I just fed these guys they would probably end up pretty quickly with pancreatitis. Their metabolism is just different.”
As the race entered its seventh day, Drobny said her team is finally on a “perfect” schedule, where the dogs can rest in the sunlight during the day and run through the night, when it’s colder and they’re more efficient. But with just 261 miles between Unalakleet and Nome, Drobny said time was running out to make a move to slip into the lead.
“There's a couple options, and I will get the dogs up and get them out of here and see what they look like and make a last-minute decision,” Drobny said. “I think that this dog team is capable of winning. If the opportunity doesn't present itself perfectly to me, then I just won't take it.”
A first-place finish would make Drobny one of just three female Iditarod champions and the first since Susan Butcher claimed the top spot in 1990.
“I think to have a woman, any of us women out there, win this race again would be amazing,” she said.
If Holmes can hang onto the lead all the way to Nome, he’ll be the first repeat champion in the Iditarod since the race’s winningest musher, six-time champion Dallas Seavey, took first place three years in a row, from 2014 to 2016.
Eleven-time Iditarod finisher Travis Beals was third to pull into Unalakleet. The veteran from Seward finished sixth each of the last two years. Beals raced down the Unalakleet River with Iditarod veteran Mille Porsild, as Riley Dyche trailed several miles behind.
This year’s race has seen few scratches. By Holmes’ arrival in Unalakleet, only one musher, Jaye Foucher, had withdrawn from the race. By the same point in 2025, seven teams had scratched, some due to low snow and a rough trail. In 2024, five teams had scratched by the time the first musher reached Unalakleet.
Non-competitive Expedition Class mushers Thomas Waerner and Steve Curtis ended their runs Sunday. The Iditarod announced Waerner’s team had shown symptoms of kennel cough, a respiratory illness, and he decided to end the run in Unalakleet on Saturday. The third Expedition musher, Norwegian billionaire Kjell Røkke, carried on without Waerner, his partner, but with the help of a support team on snowmachines.
After the Unalakleet checkpoint, teams will travel north along the Norton Sound coastline, then head west after passing through the village of Koyuk. A mandatory eight-hour layover awaits in White Mountain before the 77-mile run toward the finish line in Nome.
The first team could arrive in Nome as early as Tuesday afternoon.
