EAGLE, Alaska For the little town of Eagle, the Yukon Quest is one of the biggest events of the winter.

Eagle sits on the Yukon River and is accessible only by air, snowmachine or dogsled in the winter.

With a population of 150, at least half the town volunteers to help out at the Quest checkpoint.

Volunteers brought the mushers burritos and other goodies while the dogs rested on mounds of straw outside.

Jon Little was the first musher to arrive in Eagle, pulling in at 9 a.m. Sunday with Lance Mackey hot on his tail, arriving at 9:10 a.m.

'It was fun getting here first, because I haven't been first into a checkpoint yet,' said Little, adding that Mackey is also 'on fire.'

Mackey is hoping to someday win both the Quest and the Iditarod, just like his brother, Rick Mackey.

'But first I have to get through this race and see how I do.'

Mackey has 10 dogs left on his team. Nine of them are males and the other one is a female in heat.

'So the males are kind of irritable right now. They're all in love with the same girl,' he said.

The males have been venting their frustrations by chewing their booties and ropes, something that Mackey said is unusual behaviour.

'These dogs have funny ways of showing their love. I guess with the 12 to 30 grand I'll pull in here, I can afford new ones,' said Mackey, who is anticipating making some major prize money in this year's Quest.

Hugh Neff says the team that wins the race will be the one that makes the fewest mistakes.

'It will be an interesting couple of days,' he said.

'There is nothing better than beating the airplanes,' said Mackey. He was referring to how the frontrunners got to Eagle before planes could carry media and veterinarians to the site.

'I knew I was fast, but I didn't think I was that fast,' said Mackey.

'The hardest part of this trail is listening to Mackey talk,' joked Neff, who was next into town with Gerry Willomitzer. They got in at around 9:30 a.m.

Neff tried calling his girlfriend, who lives in the Whitehorse area, but he couldn't get through.

'I hope she's meeting me in Fairbanks,' he said.

'Nope, I saw her in Dawson with two men under each arm,' joked a race official.

William Kleedehn and Sebastian Schnuelle rolled into Eagle next at around noon. Willomitzer, meanwhile, said his ride into town went all right.

The frontrunners were all bunched up at Fortymile River, 'long-faced and not wanting to go' out after a snowstorm blew through, he said.

But eventually, Little decided to leave, and three minutes later, Willomizter left, with Mackey close behind.

Willomitzer climbed over the 1,026-metre (3,420-foot) American Summit in the morning before sunrise, when the traditionally windy summit is known to be calm.

He had been travelling with Kleedehn throughout the race, but after Kleedehn ran into problems with his dogs, Willomitzer decided to leave him in his dust.

One of Kleedehn's dogs fell into a hole and injured itself, while several others had problems with diarrhea. He also lost his favourite leader, Dogmatic, in Scroggie Creek, after he hurt himself on the punchy trail. Dogmatic had never been injured before and has usually finished every race Kleedehn has entered him in.

'It took the wind out of my sails,' said Kleedehn about his problems.

He told reporters he thinks his chances of winning the race are over. (See earlier story, p. 4.)

Willomitzer, on the other hand, is surprised with himself. Going into the race, he thought Kleedehn had the better team. All Willomitzer wanted was to come in higher than 12th, which was his ranking last year as a rookie.

On the trail, Willomitzer has been resting slightly more than running.

'I don't want to cheat the team,' he said, while he got his dogs ready to leave Eagle. 'We'll see how it turns out. If the dogs need more rest, I'll give it to them. I want to shake that Mackey guy, though.'

'You know I'm not going to let you do that really easily,' replied Mackey, who was packing his sled, parked beside Willomitzer.

Little said Willomitzer and Mackey's teams were peaking. Little's team has yet to peak, 'but they're nearly there,' he said.

Schnuelle was also parked near Willomitzer. He's running almost the same team as last year with few problems.

'So far, so good, no wrist injuries, no nothing,' said the German expatriate, who now lives in Whitehorse. 'I hope it stays that way.'

Schnuelle is trying to stay with the front group and hopes the backrunners don't catch up.

'It could potentially be a very lonely race for me if I lose the front group and the other ones don't catch up,' he said.

Schnuelle thinks that the race is Little's to lose.

'To see him move on the trail, his team just looks beautiful,' he said.

Schnuelle was fairly sick at the start of the Quest. A week before the race, he woke up with a fever.

'I was really out of it. I was sick. On race day, I still had it, and now it is slowly going away,' he said about his illness.

Schnuelle called the next part of the race the 'deciding miles.'

'There are stretches coming up that could really bite you if you screw up,' he said. 'You have to think carefully about what you do.'

He had been travelling from 6 a.m. until noon. At that point, he usually stops for a snack and an afternoon nap, before carrying on from 6 p.m. until midnight.

With the warm weather forecast for this week, Schnuelle said, it's good to travel in the morning and the evening so the heat doesn't get to the dogs.

Temperatures are expected to sit just below 0 C outside Fairbanks, where the race ends.

When Schnuelle left Pelly Crossing, he knew there was good food in Stepping Stone, so he decided to skip dinner. He ate there, and when he was asked if he wanted any extra food for the trail, Schnuelle said no, without looking in his sled bag.

'By the time I was ready for my snack, I opened my bag and there is not a piece of food in it. I totally forgot to pack any food in Pelly. So I was like, Oh man, what did that guy ask me?'' he said.

Schnuelle's main leader, Tang, is a picky eater, so he carries a lot of hot dogs for her.

'She loves wieners,' Schnuelle said, but since he had no other food, he ate her hot dogs for breakfast, lunch and supper.

'That's all I had to eat from Stepping Stone to Dawson,' Schnuelle said with a laugh about the 269-kilometre stretch. 'Tang probably thought: You bastard, you're eating my wieners.''

Now the first thing he puts in his sled is food for himself.

'It's not happening again. There will be no more wieners for the rest of this trip.'

To get into Eagle, mushers had to climb American Summit.

'It was pretty good,' said David Dalton, who also came in during the early afternoon. 'It was a pretty good trail, although it was a little warm for my dogs. Nothing really major happened.'

In past years, Dalton has seen the summit get bad.

'The wind can be gusting and your sled starts going sideways. I have had to tuck myself behind the sled and peak over to see if the leaders are still there,' he said.

So far, this year, the only bad luck for Dalton was being knocked unconscious by a tree.

While on his way into Dawson, Dalton fell asleep on his sled and was whipped in the face by a branch that pierced through his lip, hitting him in the teeth.

Another branch rapped across his knuckles.

The force was enough to knock Dalton off his sled. He got up in a daze.

'I felt cold and shaken,' Dalton said. When he got back on his sled, he added, he blacked out moments later on top of his sled, while his dog team pulled him to a camp belonging to three other mushers.

When he woke up, all he saw were three head lamps looking down at him.

'My face was really bloody,' said Dalton, who had to ask other mushers what it looked like. They told him he had a puffed-up lip.

Dalton thought he had done a lot of damage, but in the end, there is a small scab below his lip to remind him of his unwanted piercing.

At the time, Dalton was spitting up blood.

'I thought I was dead,' he said.

The Healy, Alaska musher has no idea how long he was knocked out.

Dalton has run the Quest 15 times, coming in third last year with all 14 of his dogs.

He is anticipating the next stretch of trail to be quite punchy.

'We'll let the frontrunners go through and plow the trail first,' said the musher, who still has 13 dogs on his team. 'Hopefully, we'll catch up to them later.'

Dalton has been almost able to maintain a full-team of dogs on the Quest.

'It's just a good team,' he said about their ability to keep running when other teams quit. 'They don't get hurt easy and they come from a good line.'

With the 656 kilometres to Fairbanks left in the race, Dalton is hoping he won't do anything stupid to ruin his race.

At around 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Mackey, Little, Neff and Willomitzer were packing their sleds and getting ready to hit the trail again. Willomitzer was the first one to leave Eagle, at around 2 p.m.

He had to struggle to get his dogs going in the right direction as they wanted to walk toward the town's people, who had a bonfire going nearby.

Willomitzer got off his sled and walked over to where the dogs were supposed to be headed. He tried calling them toward him. When that failed, he literally picked up his lead dogs by the collar and pulled them in the right direction.

The next few mushers to come into Eagle didn't get in until 8 p.m.

In the middle of the pack were Yukoners Frank Turner and Ed Hopkins, and John Schandelmeier and Blake Freking.