With a commanding Iditarod lead, Ryan Redington arrives first into White Mountain as Nome awaits a winner

NOME — The burled arch is up, straddling Nome’s Front Street, a church on one side of the gnarled wooden portal and a liquor store on the other. A thin ribbon of snow is piled into the finish chute, where soon crowds of locals, visitors and wilderness dog-sport fanatics will assemble to greet the first musher to finish racing a thousand miles across Alaska. The town of just under 4,000 souls is ready to greet this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race winner, who at this point could very likely...