While you will most likely never experience 30-below zero temperatures during the middle of the afternoon -- so cold that your skin starts to burn if it touches metal -- or the feeling of complete isolation while alone in the middle of Alaska’s winter, Aliy Zirkle, a musher in the 2010 Iditarod, is doing her best to at least give you a taste of what it’s like.
VIDEO: What It’s Like To Be A Musher On The Iditarod Trail
Zirkle, is currently running in 11th place, and she brought a camera along for the ride.
In this first video, documenting her run from Ophir to Cripple, Zirkle takes a rest along the side of the trail (cue adorable shots of her dogs sleeping), notes that it is “20 or 30 below,” points out a couple of dogs who are running slow, and overall does a great job of showing just how middle-of-the-nowhere she really is.
In her second video, on the final part of the trail into the Ruby checkpoint (which admittedly doesn’t really get interesting until around the 2:40 mark), Zirkle offers a good shot of her frozen face, her commanding a a team of 12 dogs with just a couple of words, stopping to untangle her team (a process during which she almost loses her sled) and then finally arriving at the checkpoint on the Yukon River.
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