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Nice catch. I always wondered why Steele get up this big cliff so fast that he saw Balto and the team leaving, but nobody noticed him...
But that was pretty weird, he must have run all around the forest, making all those marks before Balto came. It's pretty impossible...


I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens...

Maybe Steele had been originally leading the team back to Nome and Balto just happened to run into the pack.

He was leading them back--there was a montage that showed the team taking the crate of serum from the train at Nenana.
Although it did show Balto and the team backtracking what was meant to be several miles (the clearing where the camera pans upward and spins) so maybe that was where he managed to get ahead of them.

Because Steele is awesome! Err, I mean because Steele is a big strong husky, can run very fast (especially since he was not pulling a sled loaded with a musher and a heavy crate of antitoxin), and he knew the correct way back because Balto marked the trees. And, because Steele marked the wrong trees, Balto and his team got lost and ended up going in circles. An more likely than not, because it was an integral plot device and was required to connect the rest of the plot. I do not know of a simpler way to explain it.

Both Steele and Balto seem unreasonably strong in parts of the movie. Steele survives a very nasty fall down the side of a ravine, is visibly injured/hurting, yet manages to run like a mad dog marking trees and running all the way back to Nome. Balto manages to pull the crate of antitoxin up the side of a cliff, which had to have easily weighed 300 lb (if not more, liquid filled glass containers in a heavy crate like that are incredibly heavy) all by himself. I think parts of the movie were meant to be more for plot devices than to be realistic.