ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The final musher has arrived in Nome, ending the 50th running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race across Alaska.
Musher Apayauq Reitan of Kaktovik, Alaska, crossed the finish line late Saturday night to win the Red Lantern award and $1,000 for being the last sled dog team to reach the coastal community of the Bering Sea on Alaska’s western coast.
Reitan also extinguished the widow’s lamp on the studded arch towering over the finish, a tradition that means there are no other mushers on the trail.
The world’s most famous sled dog race began on March 6 in front of 49 mushers north of Anchorage. The nearly 1,600-mile (1,609-kilometer) trail took them across two mountain ranges, along the frozen Yukon River, and then along the ice of the Bering Sea on Alaska’s western coast.
Twelve mushers scratched, half of them on Friday during a vicious storm that battered mushers with high winds as they tried to make it the last 77 miles (124 kilometers) to Nome.
Brent Sass, a Minnesota native who now lives in Eureka, Alaska, won the race Tuesday.
