Frontrunning teams in the 2026 Iditarod raced across the sea ice of Norton Sound early Monday, as defending champion Jessie Holmes held onto a solid lead and the hopes of joining a handful of mushers with consecutive wins.
Only five others have repeated as champs in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and the last was a decade ago.
Holmes’ team was the first to reach Koyuk, arriving at the village checkpoint a little after 7:30 a.m. Monday. It’s another 90 miles or so to White Mountain, where teams take a mandatory eight-hour rest. With enough of a gap on the rest of the pack, the leader out of White Mountain often wins the race.
A first-place team could reach Nome as early as Tuesday afternoon.
Holmes and his sled dogs, known as Team Can’t Stop, have led much of the 1,000-mile race. Other top teams – including those of Cantwell musher Paige Drobny and veteran Travis Beals – have been leapfrogging each other and will continue to do so as mushers alternate run and recovery intervals.
Holmes told Iditarod Insider while stopped in Koyuk that good nutrition – meals of beef, fat and kibble – keeps the dogs in the right mood.
“It makes it to where, if you need to do a long run, it’s no problem,” Holmes said, his face wind-whipped and pink. “It keeps the dogs’ attitudes up, doesn’t give them any chance to go calorie deficient. I wish I knew all of this stuff before. A couple more years, I’ll learn a couple more tricks, too, hopefully.”
Mushers have experienced a bit of everything so far: bison, overflow and extremely cold weather. Teams have experienced windchill down to 45 below zero, and even colder in low-lying areas.
This is Holmes’ ninth Iditarod. He’s originally from Alabama and has starred on the reality TV show “Life Below Zero.” He currently lives off the Denali Highway in Brushkana, according to his racer bio, and was Rookie of the Year in 2018.
Mushing over the Blueberry Hills on the trail to Shaktoolik, a checkpoint about 750 miles into the race, was a highlight of Holmes’ championship run last year. While in Koyuk, he told Insider that was a high point this year, too.
“It was the best ride of my life, the most amazing dog team I’ve ever seen,” Holmes said. “They were all barking, howling to go every time I stopped, dogs that typically don’t even bark at home were just losing their minds.”
Only one musher, Jaye Foucher of New Hampshire, had scratched from the race, as of noon Monday. The rookie wrote on Facebook that an early section of trail was “the most intense and technically difficult” she had ever driven.
Non-competitive Expedition Class mushers Thomas Waerner and Steve Curtis ended their runs Sunday in Unalakleet and McGrath, respectively. Waerner’s team withdrew because his team had shown symptoms of kennel cough, a respiratory illness that’s highly contagious among canines. Norwegian billionaire Kjell Røkke, the third Expedition musher, continued on the trail with the help of a support team on snowmachines.
That leaves 35 teams still on the trail, spread out over more than 150 miles as of midday Monday.After teams take the eight-hour layover in White Mountain, it’s 77 miles to the famed Burled Arch, the Iditarod’s finish line in Nome.
It could take mushers anywhere from nine to 12 hours to reach the finish line from White Mountain, according to previous race times.
