For mushers and eager dogs, it is a trek of incessant extremes. Solo competitors traverse soaring Arctic mountains, vast tracts of whiteness flatter than Kansas and stretches of deceiving rough ice that look solid. The sound track for this adventure is the unremitting hiss of sled runners and the piston panting of dogs.
Sleep comes in such miserly amounts that unprepared racers hallucinate.
And it's very, very cold. Thermometer mercury hides, refusing to report temperatures of -40 degrees F and below. Exposed skin freezes in 30 seconds or less, and wind chill steals even more heat from the musher's bodies as they steer their sleds. The only climatic difference between this place at this time and the peak of Mount Everest is that oxygen is more plentiful. Roughly equivalent to the distance from Miami to New York City, the Iditarod trail was first broken by sled dogs in 1925.