DAWSON CITY – Last year’s near-winner and the 2015 Yukon Quest comeback king breezed into Dawson in first by a long shot Tuesday afternoon.

Brent Sass mushed through shin-deep overflow to beat out two former champions to the halfway point prize of Klondike gold — after cresting the race’s highest summit.

Sass arrived 6 1/2 hours ahead of Allen Moore, who has won the Quest for the past two years, and nearly nine hours in front of Hugh Neff, the 2012 champ.

“It was deep and slippery and long,” said Sass of the trail near Dawson, noting the reluctance of his dogs. “I mean, we made it, but I had to drag ’em across.”

The three mushers were the only competitors to arrive on Tuesday, with Neff squeaking in, “wiped,” at 11:59 p.m.

They had just completed the longest stretch between checkpoints on the route, and it felt like it. “It always does,” Sass said.

“My favourite part of the race is these long sections, just me and the dogs.”

The 340-kilometre leg winds through the Klondike’s Black Hills before ascending the Dome, with a towering summit 1,220 metres high (about 4,000 feet).

“It’s been a Quest trail,” said Sass, 35.  “It’s had its challenges: it’s been hard and fast, it’s been windy, it’s been full of willows….”

The drawn-out journey took its toll, though the upbeat musher out of Eureka, Alaska, insisted it was “awesome.

“Got some frostbit fingers, but I love the cold weather, so I can’t complain at all….We’re dog mushers, we’re supposed to embrace the cold.

Sass was looking over his shoulder “the whole way — how far back are those guys?” he asked media at the checkpoint finish line.

He lit out from Pelly Crossing at around 3:30 a.m. Monday, arriving in Dawson roughly 34 hours later.

As for the four ounces of gold — worth more than $6,000 — “I’m not going to talk about it until I cross the finish line, because I had a little incident last year….”

In 2014, Sass was neck-and-neck with Moore as they neared the final checkpoint.

Exhaustion triggered a fall from his sled, inducing a concussion and a scratch from the race.

Mushers must complete the entire 1,600-kilometre course to keep the nuggets.

Now Sass, who has run every Quest since 2007, sports a signature helmet and a consistently paced approach.

“I have a schedule planned out for the second half and at the moment that’s what I’m going to stick to.

“My goal is never to be here first; my goal the last two years has been to get to the finish line first, and that’s still to happen, and there’s a lot of work to do before then.”

Still, he admits: “It’s fun to be here first.”

Sass, Moore and Neff embodied the range of temperaments commonly seen mid-trail, with the young veteran touting a cheery but clear-eyed optimism versus Moore’s calm ambivalence and Neff’s weary crisis of faith in the Quest.

“The trails are perfect, couldn’t ask for a faster trail — like a tabletop. You could go as fast as you wanted to,” said Moore, 57.

“It was just the camping was not too much fun,” he added, noting the extreme cold made rest nearly impossible.

“You need to sleep, which I didn’t.”

Moore, who arrived calm and composed with a full team after 8 p.m. Tuesday, chose to run the arduous leg in three 70-mile (113-kilometre) segments.

“Other people run full hundreds. Our strategy is hopefully come out ahead at the end of the race, if they didn’t get pushed too hard.”

As he tended to his team, beaver mitts off, on arrival in the Dawson darkness surrounded by spectators, his spouse and former Quest champ Aliy Zirkle strolled up to the finish line.

“Hi, good-lookin,’” she said.

Neff’s arrival was less promising.

His team — down two dogs with a third in the basket — veered off the Yukon River onto Front Street just before midnight, mushing a crooked line to the checkpoint where a smattering of Quest faithful awaited.

“We’ve been sitting up on King Solomon’s Dome playing games for the last couple hours,” he said.

The overflow was “physically and mentally … a little tough” for the dogs.

“It was a nightmare. My worst run ever on King Solomon.”

The usually chatty Neff remained open and sharp, but was clearly exhausted.

“Basically, I’ve been running and kicking the whole time because half my team’s not doing anything,” he said. “I’m pretty wiped out.

“It wasn’t the trail; it was the temperature change,” he added.

“We went from 40 or 50 below for a week to — we were going up King Solomon today — it felt like it was plus-5 Celsius. It was crazy.”

Neff built on comments he made at last week’s Quest start banquet and in Pelly Crossing that pointed to a mid-career crisis of sorts.

“Just trying to find the passion I used to have for mushing. I enjoy the mushing part more than the racing part, to tell you the truth. That’s what I try to keep on telling myself.”

Neff was in second place for much of the most recent leg, but was passed by Moore as he rested, the live tracker revealed.

“We were talking to each other. He said, ‘Be careful, I’ve got one horny bitch up in lead.’

“I’m just hoping for a huge snowstorm that’ll maybe slow them both down.”

Asked by the Star whether he was disappointed he wouldn’t be getting the four ounces of “G-O-L-D” he’d said helped spur him on while in the lead between Carmacks and Pelly, Neff replied: “I’ll be getting 12 ounces of Yukon Gold here in a couple hours.”

He’s won that gold before.

“But I think if you’re just racing to make money or to get gold, you’re missing the whole point of it.”

Norwegian Quest veteran Joar Leifseth Ulsom reached the Dawson checkpoint after 2 a.m. today.

Tagish musher Ed Hopkins held down a solid fifth, arriving close to 10:30 a.m. (See more on Hopkins this website)

All mushers must stop for a mandatory 24-hour rest in Dawson before continuing on to Eagle, Alaska.