Final Results are up for the 2008 Alcan 5000 Winter Rally - click here to view them.

Today's the day we made it to the Arctic Circle - and beyond. 

To get to the Circle, you get up early in Dawson City, Yukon, and hit the road hours before sunrise. We were up at 6 and on the road before 7. Fill up with gas at the Klondike/Dempster highway junction, and every chance you get after that. There aren't many gas stations along the way. In fact, there's not much of anything along the way except spindly evergreen trees, ice, snow, and rocks. It's a harsh, but beautiful place.

250 miles from the Junction, you encounter the next sign of civilization. Eagle Plains is plunked down in the middle of nowhere because it's about 1 tank of gas from the Klondike Junction. There's a gas station, a restaurant, a bar, and a hotel (we'll be there tomorrow night). And an MGB under a car cover and about 2 feet of snow. "Been there about three years," says the pump jockey.

From Eagle Plains, it's about 20 miles to the Arctic Circle - the southernmost line above which the sun doesn't set in winter. 66 degrees, 33 minutes north of the Equator. That's about 4500 miles from the Equator, or 1,471 miles north of our homes in Portland. That's as the crow flies - and did I mention that they have crows the size of turkeys up here? We saw one carrying some small furry critter (maybe a golden retriever?) in its claws today. 

We reached the Arctic Circle, and it was a great moment - one of the big reasons we came on this trip. Going down the sponsor list - we couldn't have made it without Mitsubishi Motors and the great Outlanders they lent us for the trip, Hankook Tire for making the best studded ice and snow tires around, Columbia Sportswear for keeping us warm and dry and comfortable, Halton Company for their support, BajaRack for helping  us carry our stuff, KC HiLites for lighting the way through the winter dark, H3R Performance for fire extinguishers, Fleet Sign & Graphics for our decorations, and ProDrive for teaching us how to stay on the road under these conditions.

Tomorrow we head up the frozen McKenzie River and out across the Arctic Ocean sheet ice to Tuktoyaktuk - almost at 70 degrees North, and the farthest north you can drive in Canada. Only Prudhoe Bay in Alaska is closer to the pole and accessible by car.

We'll have a full report ASAP.

Day 4 was both harsh and kind to us. Harsh because the TSD leg was known in advance to competitors who have run the Alcan before and there was a very tricky turn that virtually all rookies missed. Those who had run this event before knew the trap, and therefore did well.

For Team Mitsubishi Car 1, this was a critical problem because their closest competition are Alcan veterans, and we lost points to them as a result. In Mitsubishi Car 2, we started the day in fourth place. The second and third place cars in our class made the same error we did, so we were all about equally hurt. But it turns out that some were more equally hurt than others and we made up some points, so we might just end up sitting in third position in our class when the dust settles.

On the ice racing, we were reasonably fast but not the fastest, so we'll pick up a few points there, but not nearly as many as some other teams.

There are no TSD or racing legs for the next three days - just Pass/Fail challenges to reach Inuvik and Tuk. We are optimistic that we'll hit those goals and then do well at the end of the event - when it comes down to endurance. 

Day 3 was not a big day for changes to the standings - all the teams did well on a short and easy TSD leg, and so there's not much to report.

So far, only one competitor team has dropped out, but they're still with the rally - they did so poorly on the Day 2 contests that they have  decided to become rally officials to replace an official car that broke down and had to turn around and head south again. Everyone else is still in the hunt, and Team Mitsubishi is holding steady. After day 2 scores were all sorted and adjusted, Car 2 was actually sitting in fourth place for stock odo cars. Car 1 was sitting second (and well ahead of 3rd and 4th) in Unlimited SUV.  We think that these standings are likely to improve as the days wear on.