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TELLER -- Bryan Weyauvanna stepped off his snowmachine, gulped the last of his thermos of coffee, and gestured at one of the mountains behind Cape Woolley, pastel pink in the setting sun.
"That mountain? It's 3870 on the map, but in my language, it's Singatook. And when you see a cloud up there, that means it's going to be windy."
We had been skiing on the frozen Bering Sea for a week already, and were not quite halfway between Nome and Teller. It took Dallas Seavey's team of canine athletes less than nine days to make the 1,000-mile journey of the Iditarod. It took us about three days to get beyond earshot of Nome's Iditarod siren, which blared an alert for each new musher trotting into town.
My 4- and 6-year-old children had climbed to the top of nearly every pressure ridge along the way, making monsters and castles out of the jumbled blocks of blue and white. We are not athletes.