Legally blind musher Rachael Scdoris of Bend, Oregon, has also attempted the Iditarod for the second time, after she scratched in Eagle Island in 2005. Her visual interpreter for that year was Tim Osmar. According to Iditarod reporter Little, the field was just as competitive as it was during the 2005 Iditarod, making it very hard to pick a winner. Former champions Buser, King, Swingley, and Seavey were all strong candidates to win. Of that elite crowd, King won the Kobuk 440 last year and the Kusko this year; while five-time winner Swenson, who scratched for the first time in 2005, is probably out of the running. The last of the likely winners is Bjørnar Andersen. As this year's representative of Team Norway, he inherited half of Robert Sørlie's winning 2005 team of dogs, and even without them Andersen's 4th-place finish in 2004 was the best finish by a rookie since the race first started in the 1970s. Other racers who expected to finish well were Lance Mackey, who won the 1,000 mi (1,600 km) Yukon Quest, three-time runner up DeeDee Jonrowe, 2005's 2nd-place finisher Ed Iten, two-time runner up Ramy Brooks, perennial top-10er John Baker. A third tier of capable racers included winner of the 2005 Klondike 300 Cim Smyth (who also recorded the fastest time from Safety to Nome in 2005, despite only having 5 dogs left), Jessie Royner, winner of the 2005 Sheep Mountain 150 Ken Andersen, Aaron Burmeister, 2nd-place finisher in the 2005 Klondike 300 Matt Hayashida, Melanie Gould, Paul Gebhardt, and former Yukon Quest winner Aliy Zirkle. A win by either Aliy Zirkle or Lance Mackey would place them in the elite company of mushers to have won both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod — in Lance's case, in the same year, an historical first. Hans Gatt is normally a contender, but this year he is running a team of young, inexperienced dogs. Warren Palfrey of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Tore Albrigtsen or Tove Sorensen from Norway were likely candidates for rookie of the year. Awards Doug Swingley won the PenAir Spirit of Alaska Award on March 8 at 0:12 a.m. for being the first to reach McGrath, on the bank of the Kuskokwim River. He was awarded a "spirit mask" by artist Orville Lind and USD $500 in credit to cover travel or freight shipments at the checkpoint by PenAir's Chief Operating Officer, Danny