EAGLE, Alaska - Yukon Quest mushers continued to flow in and out of the Eagle checkpoint Wednesday after frontrunners Lance Mackey and Ken Anderson left.

Talk was turning to the jumble ice they had gone through and the warming temperatures.

"I crashed all over the place. My body's just one bruise," Tagish musher Michelle Phillips said inside the old one-room school house that serves as the community's checkpoint.

Phillips was the fourth musher into Eagle, arriving at 5:08 a.m. Wednesday and leaving about seven hours later at 12:02 p.m. She dropped one dog at the site to recover from the impacts of the jumble ice.

Mushers tackled jumble ice on a stretch of trail near Slaven's Cabin.

While Phillips was part of a group of mushers who all arrived within a couple of hours of each other, Phillips said they weren't travelling together.

Ahead of Phillips was Brent Sass, who came in at 4:24 a.m. and left at 11:36 a.m. Hugh Neff followed her in a minute later at 5:09 a.m., leaving at 12:11 a.m.

Dave Dalton was the next in the pack to lope in at 6:12 a.m., taking off toward Dawson City at 12:59 p.m.

It wasn't until the end of Trout Creek that Phillips saw Dalton.

Neff argued the trail needs to be broken sooner. He'd like to see a crew out there a week before the race starts so the trail can be ready. (The race began last Saturday in Fairbanks.)

While it was less than a week ago that mushers started the race in temperatures in the -40 C range, today's temperatures near 0 C are having an impact as well.

In these kinds of temperatures, Phillips said, it would be better to be running on a night schedule when the sun isn't up.

While mushers are continuing on their Quest, Neff and Phillips said there is something missing this year without the German/Austrian contingent that usually enters the race.

Long-time Questers like William Kleedehn, Gerry Willomitzer and Sebastian Schnuelle didn't enter the 2008 Quest.

While Kleedehn and Willomitzer are focusing their efforts on Alaska's Iditarod, Schnuelle is helping out filmmakers who are doing a documentary on the Quest, and has been seen along the trail.

"We actually sort of miss them," Phillips said.

Other Quest competitors were continuing to come into the checkpoint through last night, with all 16 mushers still in the race out of Slaven's Cabin by 3:26 a.m. Wednesday, when Mike Ellis left for Eagle.

Twenty-four mushers began the race.

Meanwhile, the Dawson checkpoint was bustling at 5 a.m. today with media, mushers' spouses, handlers and race officials awaiting the frontrunners But it was around that time that word came in from Fortymile that Mackey and Anderson had swung by without stopping.

Fortymile is a hospitality stop, not a checkpoint, so race followers were lucky that the two stopped even for a second.

Sebastian Jones, a volunteer who has been living either part-time or full-time at Fortymile for 15 years and has been hosting the hospitality stop for as long, is manning the site alone. He has a big pot of chili, homemade buns, water for the dogs and a roaring fire ready for any musher who stop.

Race marshal Doug Grilliot said the trail from Eagle to Dawson is good.

The rough trail was put behind the mushers when they left Eagle Wednesday morning, he said.