LANCE LEKANDER

“Do I have any weapons? Of course I do! I’ve got 14 loaded ones right here!”

Pointing at his team of steamy, frost-covered dogs, my brother Zack was having fun with the checkpoint volunteer who asked if he had any firearms to declare after crossing the border into Canada by sled.

Sleep-deprived and hungry, Zack was slaphappy when he arrived in Dawson City, Yukon, the halfway point of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Dog Sled Race between Fairbanks and Whitehorse, Yukon. After traveling 540 miles over four days, Zack had banked fewer than nine hours of sleep. In Dawson City, dog teams are required to take a 36-hour layover, and I could tell my brother was looking forward to handing off his dog team to Jake, his full-time handler, and me.

Until then, our job had been easy: shadow Zack by driving his truck from checkpoint to checkpoint, picking up dropped dogs and raking leftover piles of straw laced with poop and Snickers wrappers—race rules said we weren’t allowed to help any more than that before Dawson City. Of course, things were not really that simple. Zack’s truck died on us in Circle, at the end of the Steese Highway, and we had to catch a ride 350 miles south to Tok with another team’s support staff. There, my chariot waited; Zack’s Toyota Sienna minivan would serve as our makeshift dog truck for the second half of the race. We madly drove 700 miles south from Tok, across the Canadian border to Whitehorse and then north to Dawson City, trying to catch up with the mushers (a shorter, 185-mile route along the Top of the World Highway connecting Eagle to Dawson City is closed in winter). As Jake and I motored along, Hans Gatt, Lance Mackey and Hugh Neff were pushing the limits of distance racing with runs of more than 100 miles with minimal rest in the desolate Forty Mile region and along the ice-jumbled Yukon River.

Though they are both billed as tough 1,000-mile races, the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest are very different events. Most of the Yukon Quest route is road-accessible. Beyond the Willow restart, none of the Iditarod is on the road system. The Quest has 11 official checkpoints and the Iditarod has 26—this means Quest mushers carry more food for their dogs between checkpoints, as well as gear for campouts along the trail. Iditarod mushers must take one 24-hour layover, an eight-hour stop on the Yukon River and another eight-hour rest in White Mountain. In the Quest, mushers have a mandatory 36-hour layover in Dawson City—where they can accept outside assistance from their handlers—plus a two-hour stop at Mile 101, four hours in Eagle and eight hours in Braeburn.

In Dawson City, mushers park their dog teams at the local campground—where handlers have set up elaborate dog palaces—and go to a hotel for some much needed rest and recovery while support staff feed, walk and massage their dogs. Jake and I took our campground setup seriously, stringing tarps, spreading straw and building fires—this was a competition after all. I regretted that I did not pack the tiki torches.

I soon discovered that 36 hours with limited dog responsibilities is almost too much for mushers to handle. After well-earned showers and naps, some of the racers looked lost without sleds to pack or paws to bootie. For the first time in days, mushers had to talk to other humans, not tail-wagging teammates that would tolerate their off-key singing.

In Dawson City, we were treated to a string of sunny, blue-sky days that made the 15-degree temperatures feel much warmer. On an afternoon walk I met Caveman Bill, who has lived in a cave in the bluff across the Yukon River from Dawson City for more than 14 years. He invited me into his surprisingly comfortable abode and used his car-battery-powered laptop to show me videos of last spring’s breakup on the Yukon River. This area of the Yukon is known for its “colorful 5 percent” a term coined by artist Jim Robb referring to people who are—as one local put it—just a little bit more than eclectic.

Steeped in 1890s Gold Rush-era history, Dawson City is famous for being the home of a short-lived mining bonanza that spawned the literary careers of Robert Service and Jack London. Raucous bars, brothels and gambling halls with names like Diamond Tooth Gerties, Klondike Kate’s and Bombay Peggy’s have a hard time competing with Dawson City’s most famous barroom attraction: the Sourtoe cocktail—a preserved human toe plunked into the drink of your choice. The Sourtoe started in the 1970s when a local entrepreneur found a shriveled, frostbitten toe sealed in a jar in an old miner’s cabin and decided that he would start a new Klondike tradition. (Believe it or not, that entrepreneur was not Mr. Whitekeys.) Unfortunately, the Sourtoe had been put away for the night when I got up the nerve to ask—the bartender said it was starting to defrost.

After Dawson City, we traveled south along the Klondike Highway through Pelly Crossing, Carmacks and Braeburn (where they make cinnamon buns bigger than my head), stuffing dropped dogs and gear into an already over-packed minivan as Zack battled Ken Anderson for fourth place. At one checkpoint, as we rearranged our overflowing—and somewhat geeky—van to fit a third dropped dog, another team’s handler heckled us by asking if we were good at playing the videogame Tetris.

In Braeburn, the last stop before the race finish in Whitehorse, we sat down for a meal with Zack. He shared some tales from the trail, and I told him how Hugh Neff watched Lance Mackey tumble off his sled when his seat broke during a monotonous stretch of lake-flat trail. Zack laughed so hard a big bite of hamburger flew out of his mouth and across the table. Note to self: Learn how to do the Heimlich maneuver through a parka.

Twelve hours later, Zack finished fourth in Whitehorse, three minutes ahead of Ken Anderson. It was a record-setting race in which each of the top six finishers beat Sebastian Schnuelle’s winning 2009 finish time.

Jake and I were relieved to see Zack’s wife, Anjanette, arrive with the repaired dog truck a few hours before he reached the finish line—we had been fretting about fitting 16 dogs, two sleds, a musher and two handlers into the van for the long ride back to Sheep Mountain.

As I said goodbye to the handlers, mushers, officials and volunteers I met along the way, I found myself saying, “See you next year.” I was hooked on the adventure and excitement of traveling across Alaska and the Yukon in winter, meeting locals and fellow travelers who have a hearty appreciation for the cold north. For them, living up here is a full-time quest.

Rachel Steer is a lifelong Alaskan, Olympic biathlete and former assistant editor of Alaska magazine.