FAIRBANKS – This year's Yukon Quest trail, which wreaked havoc on many of the race's frontrunners, was kinder to the middle of the pack, it seems, as the fifth- and sixth-place finishers slid into Fairbanks Wednesday without too many tales of woe to tell.

"Except for being hunkered down on American Summit for four hours and that big overflow (36 kilometres before Central, Alaska), the run was fantastic,” Kelley Griffin said after crossing the finish line Wednesday.

"Fantastic snow, fantastic trail. The dogs have been clipping right along.”

This was Griffin's ninth Yukon Quest, and her highest finish yet. She came in fifth, and finished in 11 days, three hours and two minutes.

"Last year, this was my 15th-place team – it was my puppy team – so I was just taking it easy with them, showing them the trail, and this year we came back to race,” Griffin said.

She started this race on Feb. 5 in Whitehorse with only 13 dogs, having decided to drop one of her team members before the race even started in order to rest up for the Iditarod.

At Carmacks, she dropped three more, among them one of her main leaders.

"And my other leader is in flaming heat, so I had some challenges with my leadership,” she said with a laugh.

For many of the teams this year, Eagle Summit was the peak to beat.

It was too much for Hugh Neff's team, as it was for Dan Kaduce's, but Griffin has tangled with Eagle before, and this year she was determined to beat it.

"I've been working on (Eagle Summit) since last August, when I started training the dogs,” she said.

"In 2007, I had a wreck; it was horrible coming up over Eagle so I swore, ‘Never again.'

"I really focused some training on that. I just powered over, and as I passed Allen (Moore), he goes, ‘Is that lead dog for sale?'”

Moore came in exactly 4 1/2 hours behind Griffin, and was welcomed by an enthusiastic hometown crowd, which included his daughters and wife, 2000 Quest champion Aliy Zirkle.

This was Moore's first Quest, and he was in high spirits as his team brought him over the finish line.

He said he managed to overcome the trap so many mushers fall into when a race passed near their home turf – the dogs insisting on heading toward their beds instead of the finish line.

"They did great because probably the week before the race started, we went and done this run three times, all the way to here, so they did well not wanting to go to our house and they never showed any emotion to go to the house or not,” Moore said.

As with Griffin, the hardest part of the trail for Moore was American Summit, where he had to fight against the elements to get his team over the top.

"The 50-, 60-mile-an-hour winds, the no visibility, just not knowing which direction to go,” he said of what made American so difficult.

"The dogs had the wind blowing right in their faces and they wanted to go the other way (but) if you get stuck there, you just have the wind pounding into you ... so you go string them out and say, ‘Let's go,' and they'll go for a little while but then they'll fall down the hill and you go do it again, over and over and over.”

Moore managed to bypass the overflow which spelled the end of Hans Gatt's race, and severely slowed Sebastian Schnuelle's because by the time he came along, he could see the various routes his competitors had taken through and around the water, and chose a relatively dry path.

In fact, he managed to stay dry until about an hour out of Fairbanks, when his dogs got a little too enthusiastic about meeting some of their fans.

"There were some spectators up on the bank and the dogs wanted to go to them so I had to go get them turned back around come back to the sled, and fell right through the river, with running water flowing over me,” Moore said, laughing.

"So I slid up on the ice like a penguin and said, ‘Well, it's never too late.'”

Moore is also registered to run the Iditarod this year, and didn't rule out returning to the Quest next year.

"I could do it every year from now on, or I may not ever do it again. It's hard to say,” he said.

"I'm sure once all the pain is gone, it'll be easy to say, ‘Yeah, let's do it again.' That's what us mushers usually do in the spring time.”

Moore brought by far the smallest (and also some of the most affectionate) dogs to this race, with the smallest Quester this year being his dog Malibu, who weighs just 34 pounds.

Dallas Seavey won the race Tuesday night.