Brent Sass learned a few hard lessons in getting run down by 16-year-old musher Emily Robinson at last month’s Knik 200.
Sass, a distance musher champion with Iditarod and Yukon Quest titles, acknowledged the sled he’d been running for the last decade was not ideal for mid-distance races.
So he took the 2024 Yukon Quest Alaska 300 as an opportunity to try out a sled a bit more appropriate for the race. And it appeared to be a perfect fit.
Sass won the Yukon Quest Alaska 300, crossing the finish line on Monday in Central. He finished in 46 hours, 48 minutes according to the Quest’s race tracker.
Sass ordered a pair of sleds from Austrian company Danler and could feel the difference on the route, which started Saturday in Fairbanks.
“It was awesome,” he said. “It was like driving an F1 (car) instead of like a big dump truck. Basically, that’s what the difference felt like, so that was really fun. I had a really good time with that.”
Sass had, in essence, been running a distance sled for the last 10 years, regardless of the race. He said the new sled had a number of improvements for a mid-distance run, but the most noticeable difference was the fact that it was 25 pounds lighter.
“That was all kind of sparked by that 200-mile race when I got beat by Emily Robinson a couple of weeks back,” he said. “You know, she had a nice light Danler sled and I was like, ‘You know what, it’s time for this old sled to get retired.’ So that was the catalyst that started it.”
The win was the sixth for Sass in a Yukon Quest race. He was a champion last year, taking the Yukon Quest 550 race.
The Quest, traditionally 1,000 miles through both Alaska and Canada, split in 2022 and is running two separate race programs this year after a disagreement in rules between organizers on both sides of the border. The Canadian Yukon Quest started Saturday in Whitehorse and was won Monday by Yukon musher Michelle Phillips. Initially planned for 450 miles, the race was modified to 300.
Sass has won the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest three times (2015, 2019 and 2020).
Aside from the weight, he said the maneuverability was greatly increased with the new sled, allowing his team to maintain momentum.
“It just drives so amazing,” he said. “(On tight turns) the dogs aren’t getting shoved into the snowbank because I’m able to actually maneuver the sled more fluidly around those turns. It’s just very flexible, so it steers like just on a dime. I think it put a lot less pressure on the dogs.”
Mushers were challenged by frigid temperatures throughout the race that dipped down to below minus 40 on the trail at times. Although Sass felt comfortable in the conditions, he said mushers have to put an emphasis on dog care when temps dip that low.
Sass topped a field of 13 racers in the 300, the race’s main mid-distance event. A number of mushers had made the turn from Circle by Monday evening and were heading back to Central for the finish.
“It was really fun to see a lot of these young new mushers in the Quest, going out and getting after it, figuring out how to deal with this stuff,” he said. “A lot of these people had never mushed in conditions like that and it really takes a lot of gumption, a lot of drive and a lot of just pure guts to go out there and do that.”
Sass said the race continues to be very important for him to run. His first win was in 2006 in the Yukon Quest 300.
“I basically decided that I was going to devote my mushing career to the Quest and so coming back and running the 300 again for the first time since 2006, it was fun to get another W and be back out on the Quest trail,” he said.
Sass will now go into preparation mode for next month’s Iditarod, and try to break in another new Danler sled, this one meant for distance mushing.
