The fanfare of the Ceremonial Start keeps the daunting prospect of two weeks alone with nothing but snow and sky from feeling too overwhelming, says Mountain. “It’s not lonely being out there with the dogs, but it’s lonesome in terms of human conversation,” he tells me over Russian dumplings at late-night spot Pel’meni a couple nights before. “So when you have all these people come to downtown Anchorage, from all over the world, to attend what is essentially a giant dog parade, it helps give me perspective—both because of the joy it brings everyone and the sort of fundamental absurdity of it all.”

A giant dog parade it may be, but one with a platform worthy of Mountain flying a transgender flag at the meet and greet. The day before we spend time together, the Trump administration announces it will begin denying visa applications from transgender athletes seeking to enter the US for sports events, among a litany of other policy changes regarding transgender rights. Unlike many competitive sports, Mountain notes that the Iditarod does not divide those entering the race by gender; it’s one category, with one winner at the end of it. “Right now, there are people who can’t do whatever their calling is, and so this race feels important to me in a different way lately,” says Mountain as we walk back to his truck after dinner. “I thought that I would always be able to do this. I had forgotten to notice the privilege in that.”

Every musher who competes in the Iditarod will tell you about the silence. Ford says “there is a comfort to it.” Redington calls it “peaceful.” Mountain, “fully consuming.” When I speak to Libby Riddles, the first woman to win the Iditarod in 1985 after surviving a blizzard that felt like “being in a blender of powdered milk,” she describes the thick of solitude as reaching a “flow state,” where all of your senses are attuned to the dangers you can’t see—a snow covered tree trunk that could send the sled flying, even a sleeping moose in your path. But her friend Lloyd Gilbertson, a Minnesota-born musher who competed twice and trained polar explorer Will Steger in the practice, puts it most poetically, perhaps because he doesn’t consider there being silence at all. “Traveling by dog team has a sound,” he says. “The dogs are panting lightly, you can see the vapor from their breath. There is this percussion thing with their feet going on, like drums. To march along together like that is a kind of music.”

On my last day, I join a small group of tourists led by tour operator John Hall’s Alaska, which takes visitors on excursions like Aurora Borealis chasing in the Arctic Circle and bear watching by the Bering Sea, to a remote Iditarod checkpoint at Manley Hot Springs—200 miles into the race. In winter, this small town in Interior Alaska can only be reached by nine-seater plane, snow machine, or dog sled, and so we fly over a patchwork of frozen lakes and snow-tipped forests to a nearby airstrip; before we land, I catch a fleeting glimpse of a musher cutting through the trees. On the ground, snow machines are delivering supplies, while volunteer veterinarians, some of whom have traveled thousands of miles to be here, check over the arriving huskies before they take naps on piles of hay and have their paws rubbed with lemon oil (checkpoints are intended as rest tops, many of them compulsory). Tourists and official Iditarod photographers jostle at the sidelines with their cameras in anticipation of the next team. It’s still early in their journeys, and anything could happen.

As morning turns to afternoon in Manley, the wind picks up so that the cold reaches through my mittens and my fingers begin to burn. The temperature has dropped down to -13 Farenheit—warm for the town, but painful enough that even the hardier visitors have retreated to the nearby roadhouse for french fries. I hang back for one last glance of a musher, and soon I hear a whooping sound as a team shoots out from between the trees. They stay only for a few minutes, however, and I watch them disappear over the tundra into whatever awaits them next. I think of a text Mountain had sent me the night before the race: “I never expected to be mushing sled dogs, much less racing the Iditarod,” he said. “Freedom is being able to go to unexpected places.”

Over the coming two weeks, 22 mushers will complete the race. Several will end it prematurely, including Mountain after 9 days; Holmes, of Life Below Zero fame, will take first place, winning what was named, following the reroute, the longest Iditarod in history at 1,128 miles. A dog will die, suddenly, reigniting calls from PETA and other animal rights groups to end competitive sled dog racing, and commentators will remain divided on the contemporary purpose of working dogs. There is still no snow on the ground in Anchorage, but in Nenana, bets remain on when the ice will break.