Iditarod 2015: Map, weather and more for Saturday

The 2015 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is set to begin on Saturday, though the weather has been less than cooperative in facilitating the nearly 1,000-mile race. The race was always going to start with a ceremonial run through Anchorage, Alaska on Saturday, but due to warm weather along the original route to Nome, the actual start of the race has been moved over 200 miles north to Fairbanks.

There were issues with the trail last year as well, leading to accidents where the weather was too warm to support the race. This year, it’s bad enough to force the aforementioned move. The city of Anchorage has a lot to do to even facilitate the ceremonial run on Saturday. As noted by the Alaska Dispatch News, the city has workers shoveling snow onto pavement and ice where it’s melted away. Anchorage typically gets around 60 inches of snow per year, but got less than half of that this time around.

The ceremonial run will go 11 miles through the bulk of Anchorage. The race proper features 78 mushers, including six former champions and 20 newcomers. It seems like anybody’s race this time around given the switch in route, which includes “about 600 miles” of river ice, according to the Associated Press.

Veteran mushers typically have their stops picked out and routes planned out to a degree they simply can’t do with this switch. They’ll obviously have something of an advantage, but the race is a whole lot more interesting given these changes. Below, we’ve got a map of the full route (with a comparison to the original route), via the Iditarod official website here: