Junior Iditarod 2009

Rebekah's 2009 Junior Iditarod was a surprising success. After leaving the starting line sixth, she quickly moved up to second place, following Cain Carter, Lance Mackey's step-son. While she was not able to close the gap, she was able to maintain a close interval during the first 85 miles of the race. However, Rebekah ran into trouble on the Yetna River. As she descended onto the river from the woods, she encountered a very thick ice fog. Somehow, her lead dogs took a wrong turn at this point and led her off of the main trail onto the river. Knowing that she was off of the trail, but unable to even see her lead dogs through the thick fog, she chose to stay put until the musher that was following her came up behind her rather than risk getting more lost or encountering an open lead on the river. Seeing his headlamp through the fog, she was able to steer her dogs back onto the trail and followed Travis Beals into the Yetna station checkpoint. However, she had lost 35 minutes waiting on the river. The second half of the race went smoothly, with the dogs performing flawlessly. But, she was unable to recover any of the time that she had lost the previous night on the river and finished in third place with all 10 dogs. Rebekah received a lot of good prizes for her effort, as well as $2,000 in scholarship money that will come in handy when she heads off to college. All in all, it was an outstanding effort by a team that had finished in 13th place the year before. She is already looking forward to next year.