'Have you spent any time in small aircraft?' It's a technique that's worked well for me so far.' 'Do you have experience in winter-survival-type situations?' he asked. I hate snow, do not play winter sports, keep the thermostat at 65 on a good day, and haven't logged out of Spotify since 2011. I was staring at a week and a half of bone-deep cold, probable-verging-on-inevitable blizzards, baneful travel conditions, and total isolation from the civilized (read: broadband-having) world.

The fastest mushers take around nine days to reach the finish line, and that's assuming ideal conditions, say 15 below, with blue skies and hard-packed, ice-slick snow. That's not an exaggeration, by the way: There's disagreement over how long the Iditarod Trail really is, but the best estimates peg it at right around the distance from Carnegie Hall to Epcot. This was a plan of - I think I might be quoting my editors on this - questionable sanity, even before you consider the logistical complexity of chasing several dozen sled-dog teams across a subarctic wilderness the size of the Eastern Seaboard. 'I entered a world of mixed reality and dreams, peopled with the most bizarre souls and creatures …' At one point he thinks he's on a beach in California at another he pulls out a real ax to fend offĪ town near the Bering Sea, and the final stop of the Iditarod race. 'It was beyond all reason,' Paulsen writes in his Iditarod memoir Winterdance. The novelist Gary Paulsen, who ran the Iditarod twice in the 1980s, describes the Burn as a place where mushers literally go mad. But even then, a seasoned musher could need 12 hours or more to cross from Rohn to Nikolai, the checkpoints on either side of the Burn - a passage that would frequently be made in darkness, through heavy wind and extreme, subzero cold. In 1984, the Alaska Bureau of Land Management cut a swath for a better trail. Runners broke tree shards snagged tug lines speeds dropped to 3 or 4 miles per hour. Sleds intended for snow and ice had to be dragged across hardened mud and gravel. Many years, the Burn accumulated little precipitation.

Now dog teams were forced to navigate through blackened stumps and fallen limbs, along a trail that was often impossible to follow. Large expanses of the state had, for much of its history, been unreachable by other forms of transportation. The race had been founded only four years earlier, as a way to commemorate the importance of sled dogs to Alaska. Into the mountains of the Alaska Range, then plunges down, into the interior, where it enters the fire's scorched country.įor the mushers of the Iditarod, the Farewell Burn, as the region became known, was a nightmare.

The big alone