As night fell in the Yukon and Alaska, sketchy and sometimes contradictory reports came from Central checkpoint of the Yukon Quest concerning the events at Eagle Summit.
As far as can be determined (subject to the whole story being reversed or denied tomorrow, because that's the way this story is shaping up), it appears that a total of six dogteams and mushers have now been airlifted from the summit and deposited at the Mile 101 dog drop location. Race Marshall Mike McCowan has described the situation laconically as "out of the ordinary." At one point four aircraft were searching the summit for the lost mushers, including a Canadian military C130 Hercules equipped with infrared sensors.
Although there has been no specific word on this point, it's possible the six rescued teams will be out of the race, having had to accept outside assistance. On the other hand, since they were returned to an earlier dog drop on the trail, they might be allowed to make a second effort at Eagle Summit.
The latest word on Randy Chappel's dog team, lost without its driver somewhere on the down side of Eagle Summit, comes from the Fairbanks News-Miner and simply states that the lost team has "been located" with no further details as yet. A CBC radio interview with another Quest 300 musher, 26-year-old Brent Sass who had been running with Chappel, went as follows (mostly verbatim excerpts from the interview):
"Me and Randy were having a great race. . . I didn't know he was behind me. He came up behind me and went up ahead . . . We got up to the top and it was blowin hard, we couldn't see . . . It wasn't a good idea to move at all, because it was just dangerous . . . We stopped there and sorted out some dog stuff . . . Decided we were going to wait it out . . . We heard a dog bark, all of a sudden this dog team comes over the edge . . . It was Gina [Regina Wycoff, Yukon Quest competitor -- YQ and Quest 300 competitors were on the trail together at this point], she had come up behind us . . . we decided "lets get outa here" . . . We packed up and left . . . We stayed in a close distance and started working our teams down the slope . . . there was no trail . . . As we were workin our way down, all of us had real hairy goes at it . . . One time, Randy was goin down and he lost it, he was goin down full speed hangin onto his sled . . . He tried his hardest but he couldn't hold on . . . and the dog team took off and they were gone . . . We couldn't do anything about it, we had two teams left to worry about . . . He drove the sled of Gina's . . . My dog Silver led us outa there. . . Found a trail marker at the bottom . . . Gina rode with Randy all the way back. . . There was nothin we could do, they were goin 20 miles an hour down that hill. . . We hadda get off that mountain."
Best source of updated information on all this seems to be the Fairbanks News-Miner's Yukon Quest News update-blog. The Yukon Quest website (typically) is late posting any infomation at all and, when posted, it is usually sketchy compared with the Fairbanks newspaper's reports.
http://newsminerextra.com/quest06/news/