Couldn't figure out where to put this, but here's as good a place as any.
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Someone posted a link to the Washington Post article about the Lanier/Janssen incident outside Safety:
http://wapo.st/2psv2UE?tid=ss_tw-bottom ... 6d0d61556c
I read the article and thought "unimpressed by accuracy of media".
And then someone posted a link to Craid Meldred's comments on the WP story (which pretty much mirrored my thoughts):
https://craigmedred.news/2018/03/20/idit-a-fable/
And then Craig took the time, as more information became available, to figure out exactly who was involved and who was where, when:
https://craigmedred.news/2018/03/23/fog-of-iditarod/
He includes a screen shot that Anna Bonderenko (Jim Lanier's wife) posted that morning, showing their trackers:
I was able to zoom in to Monica and Brett Bruggeman's trackers to the same spot (Lanier and Janssen's tracks were removed once they scratched):
And lastly, here's a video posted by Anna B, from Jay Cable, one of the Iditabikers who came upon Jim and Scott:
https://www.facebook.com/jay.cable/vide ... 389262512/
It sort of puts into perspective the conditions everyone was dealing with. Sunrise was at 9:15 the morning of this incident, so way after everything had happened.
Jay Cable, via FB:
"One of the more "interesting" (perhaps scary would be a better word) experiences in my ride to Nome this year was two encounters with Iditarod mushers in the "blowhole", a short section of trail before Safety that can have very strong winds. Here is a short clip of Philip Hofstetter helping a musher (I didn't take the time to figure out which one) find his way in the blowhole. This is the un-edited video from the camera, so don't expect anything awesome, but hopefully gives folks a feeling for what it was like. The musher is in gray, and his dogs were fine, though a bit non-plussed by the wind. It was around 4f, and maybe mid 40mph.
(This was not one of the mushers who got stuck.)"
The musher shown in the video is Lev Shvarts. Timing-wise, Lev was behind the mushers involved in the Lanier/Janssen incident, so the bikers (travelling the same direction down the trail) would have come across him first. Rerunning the tracker for all the mushers around the incident, at one point Lev backtracks a short distance - as though to look for trail markers, so possibly that's what's going on in this video.
Jay Cable posted a series of excellent photos - showing the trail in detail, with little comments, which are worth looking at (esp. when you couple what he's showing with comments from mushers about the trail conditions in various places):
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater