A few notes

While Yukon Quest teams continue to pull into Dawson I thought I'd post a few quick notes:

• Trackleaders also has a topo option for a map layer.  It's my preferred choice for looking at maps because of the detail it provides (including place names!), and because it gives a much clearer sense of the trail's topography than the terrain map display does.  There's also a satellite option and that can be interesting, but topo maps are the ticket.  Here's an example.  Note that the place to choose your map layer is a drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner.

• Among the tools the tracking software gives us to be able to get a better visual handle on what's happening on the trail are speed/distance and speed/time plots on the individual mushers' pages.  They're down towards the bottom.  I haven't found the speed/distance plot to be that interesting for dogsled races (although I'll bet it's really interesting for bicycle racing, etc.), but I like the speed/time plot a lot.  It can give you a very graphic image of how often and where teams are resting, and by comparing them you can get a quick grasp of who's resting more and who's resting less.  Here's Dan Kaduce's, shortly after he arrived in Dawson, and Hugh Neff's from about the same time.  Interesting, right?

Dan Kaduce

Hugh Neff

• I've gotten a couple of questions about the tracker leaderboard.  The first thing to understand is that the times being shown aren't time of day (clock time), they're elapsed time since the start of the race, Saturday at 11.  So, for example, the tracker leaderboard shows Allen getting into Scroggie at 2:11:59.  Doing the arithmetic, that's Monday (two days after the start) at 22 hours (11:00am + 11 hours) and 59 minutes, or Monday at 10:59pm.  If you take a look at the Quest official times (and they are absolutely authoritative), they give his time into Scroggie as 10:47pm.  The tracking software figures out whether or not somebody's arrived by measuring their proximity to a particular geographic coordinate.  It's a pretty safe bet that the latitude/longitude for the real checkpoint location is going to be different from the ones the tracker has by some tens of feet.  You may have noticed that the Trackleaders leaderboard doesn't show anyone as having arrived in Dawson, and projects that Hugh will be arriving there Wednesday at 3:23pm, or just about 10 minutes from now as I'm writing this (he got in over 24 hours ago).  I expect to see that keep being bumped back until Hugh's sled finally gets close enough to the location they've identified as the checkpoint that it will register as having arrived.  Seriously, the Trackleaders leaderboard: no, don't use it, and ignore their projections.