This year, Grantland's Brian Phillips set out to follow the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race through the state of Alaska. Phillips tracked the race by air in a Super Cub plane, making stops at various checkpoints before catching the finish in Nome.Map by Bryan Christie Design

I landed in Anchorage in the middle of the night. The next morning, I drove an hour north to Wolf Lake Airport, a private airfield near Wasilla. You know those old photo-backdrop screens that little kids in department stores used to have their portraits taken in front of? It was like driving into one of those. National-monument mountains framing a sky that was chemical blue. Highway as straight as a rifle sight. Until you actually get to Alaska, it's hard to prepare yourself for the scale of it, the sheer felt immensity. The numbers barely do it justice. Sixty percent of the nation's parkland is in Alaska. Four of the parks — four — are bigger than Connecticut. If you stood Mount McKinley, which Alaskans call "Denali," next to Mount Everest on level ground, McKinley would tower over it, thousands of feet higher; Everest is taller only because it rests on an elevated plateau.

The majority of this extreme vastness can't be reached by road. Juneau, the state capital, isn't on a highway network. Head north, into the semipopulated reaches, and you'll find nothing connecting the villages at all. Alaskans depend on bush pilots, fliers who take small planes into remote and dangerous places, for transportation, mail — almost every type of contact with the outside world. I had come to watch what might be the least spectator-friendly sporting event on earth: To follow the Iditarod requires not only a bush plane, but a bush plane equipped with skis, capable of landing on frozen rivers and lakes.

Jay Baldwin met me at the hangar. He'd flown F-16s back in the day and put in a couple of decades with Delta and Northwest before moving to Alaska to be a bush pilot. He was retired, in some theoretical sense, but he had a flight school, Alaska Cub Training Specialists, at Wolf Lake Airport, near Wasilla, and from what I saw still knocked out around 19 high-intensity daily hours running that, tinkering with airplanes, and educating anyone within earshot (children, small animals, whatever stray Iditarod reporters happened to stroll past) about the perils of bush flying. Jay was 60 years old and tall and he had white hair and a smile so enthusiastic it hinted at actual anarchy.

His best friend was a musher, Linwood Fiedler, who'd been the Iditarod's runner-up in 2001. They'd grown up together in the Lower 48, then lost touch before reconnecting as adults in Alaska, having in the meantime become a bush aviator and a professional dog musher, respectively, because obviously that is life. Every year, Jay led an expedition to follow the Iditarod from the air, partly for the flying and partly as a show of support. This was what I'd signed up for.

"You're not a pilot in Alaska," Jay said, fixing me with a blue-eyed and somehow vaguely piratical stare, "until you've crashed an airplane. You go up in one of these stinkin' tin cans in the Arctic? Sooner or later you're gonna lose a motor, meet the wrong gust of wind, you name it. And OH BY THE WAY" (leaning in closer, stare magnifying in significance) "that doesn't have to be the last word."

Having lost more friends than he could count to wrecks in the remote Alaskan wilderness, he was obsessed with crash reports, fatality statistics, replaying weird scenarios. One wall of the ACTS hangar was plastered with newspaper clippings from accounts of gruesome accidents: "5 killed as small planes collide," "Sisters among dead in plane crash," "Flying to die." My favorite clip was titled simply: "Pilots: Grief." I pictured tiny mosquitoes of flame blooming against the side of a mountain, torn hulls rolling in black water. "This is the junk that keeps me up at night," Jay said, smoothing his hair under his ACTS baseball cap. "I've flown just about every dangerous kinda bird you can fly. Why are they gone and I'm still here?" One of his mentors had vanished without a trace while transporting a couple of bear-watchers over the Shelikof Strait from Hallo Bay to Homer; the authorities didn't know for sure that the plane had gone down until the body of a passenger washed up in a fishing net about 10 days later. And yet Jay wholly, truly loved flying, the way some people can love it. I have a brother-in-law who's like that. When he's not in the air, it's like he's seeing fewer colors.

This was the paradox of Jay Baldwin: One of the most infectiously happy guys I've ever been around, his every waking moment was a kind of prolonged existential debrief. He was never not working on how to outwit the horrific eventualities he was forever expecting to befall him, and he was never not just extremely cheerful about this. Jay was a Vermont kid, raised in a small town, and there was a mordant New England pluck in the way he gazed into the abyss and said: "I see what you're trying to do there, abyss."

The plan was for me to spend a few nights in the apartment connected to the hangar — live with the planes, get the feel of them. I'd read that some Iditarod mushers slept with their dogs, to make themselves one with the pack. I needed flying lessons because the little Piper Super Cubs that would carry us to Nome were two-seaters, one in front, one behind. Jay wanted me prepared in case he had a fatal brain aneurysm (his words), or a heart attack (his words 10 seconds later), or keeled over of massive unspecified organ failure ("Hey, I'm gettin' up there — but don't worry!") at 2,200 feet.

Choosing an airplane — that was the first step. Jay had four, and as the first ACTS client to arrive, I got first pick.

They were so small. Airplanes aren't supposed to be so small. How can I tell you what it was like, standing there under the trillion-mile blue of the Alaska sky, ringed in by white mountains, resolving to take to the air in one of these winged lozenges? Each cockpit was exactly the size of a coffin. A desk fan could have blown the things off course. A desk fan on medium. Possibly without being plugged in.

"God love 'em," Jay said. "Cubs are slower'n heck, they'll get beat all to hell by the wind, and there's not much under the hood. But bush pilots adore 'em, because you can mod 'em to death. And OH BY THE WAY … put 'em on skis and come winter, the suckers'll land you anywhere."

Two of the Cubs were painted bright yellow. I took an immediate liking to the one with longer windows in the back. Better visibility, I told myself, nodding. Jay said it had the smallest engine of any of the Cubs in our squadron. Less momentum when I go shearing into the treeline, I told myself, nodding.

The name painted in black on her yellow door read: NUGGET. She had a single propeller, which sat inquisitively on the end of her nose, like whiskers. Jay told me — I heard him as if from a great distance — that she'd had to be rebuilt not long ago, after being destroyed on a previous trip north. Was I hearing things, or did he say destroyed by polar bears?

I patted Nugget's side. Her fuselage was made of stretched fabric. It flexed like a beach ball, disconcertingly.

Into the cockpit. Flight helmet strapped, restraints active. Mic check. Then Jay's voice in my headset: "Are you ready!" It wasn't exactly a question.

And this, ground-dweller, is Alaska from 900 feet. White-flecked spruce forest. Snow-smothered lakes. Mountains all around. There's Denali, clear and far away. Right here, in the Mat-Su Valley, the southern part of the state, you can see power lines, the sketch of a highway system. A little farther north and all that will vanish. People out here can sound mystical when they talk about the bush pilots, about how they knit Alaska together. From 900 feet, it makes sense.

We'd done some practice turns and picked out a lake; now all I had to do was get the plane on it. Jay explained to me about landing on snow, how the scatter of light tends to mask the true height of the ground. You can go kamikaze into the ice, thinking the earth is still 30 feet below you. To gauge your real altitude re: the whiteout, you have to use "references" — sticks poking through the snow, a line of trees on the bank. These supply you with vital cues, like "might want to ease down a touch" or "gracious, I'm about to fireball."

I won't bore you with the details of how to steer a Super Cub — where the stick was (imagine the porniest position possible; now go 6 inches pornier than that), how to bank, what the rudder pedals felt like. Suffice it to say that in theory, it was ridiculously simple. In practice …

"You have the aircraft." Jay's voice in my ear. "Just bring us down in a nice straight line."

I felt the weight in my right hand as Jay released the stick. The lake was straight ahead, maybe three miles off, a white thumbnail in an evergreen-spammed distance. The plane was under my control.

Nugget — I'm not sure how to put this — began to sashay.

"Just a niiice straight line," Jay reminded me. "And OH BY THE WAY … your pilot's dead." He slumped over in his seat.

Little lesson I picked up someplace: Once your pilot gives up the ghost, it is not so easy to see where you are headed from the backseat of a Super Cub. I mean at the "what direction is the plane even pointing right now" level. You will find that your deceased pilot, looming up against the windshield, blocks almost your entire forward view. To mitigate this, the savvy backseater will bank the wings one way while stepping on the opposite rudder pedal, causing the plane to twist 30 degrees or so to one side while continuing to travel in a straight line, like a runner sliding into base. That way, said enterprising backseater can see forward through the plane's presumably non-corpse-occluded side window.

Yeah. Well. A thing about me as a pilot is that I do not, ever, want to see forward out of the side window. Especially not while plummeting toward a frozen lake. It's like, bro, why create the hurricane. I figured that, as an alternative technique, I would just basically try to guess where we were going.

"How's your speed?" my pilot('s lifeless form) inquired.

The ground seemed to be making an actual screaming noise as it rushed up toward us. Hmm — maybe a little fast. I cut the throttle. Nugget kind of heaved and started falling at a different angle; more "straight down," as the aeronautics manuals say. We were out over the lake. I had a sense of measureless whiteness lethally spread out below me. Either the landscape was baffled or I was. There were trees on the bank, but we were dropping too fast; I couldn't relate them to anything. My references had gone sideways. At the last moment I pulled back on the stick.

There was a chiropractic skrrrk of skis entering snow. There was, simultaneously, a feeling of force transmitting itself upward into the plane. Nugget bounced, like a skipped stone, off the ice. We were tossed up and forward, maybe 15 feet into the air …

… and came down again, bounced again, came down again, and, unbelievably, slid to a stop.

"Guess what," the reanimated form of my pilot said, popping up. "You just landed an airplane."

I've never felt all that caught up, personally, in the miracle of air travel. I played a little Wing Commander once upon a time, but it's not like I was one of those pre-9/11 kids who used to lurk around open cockpit doors hoping some head-tousling type would kick them a set of plastic wings. Still, there are moments when your adrenal glands just aren't even going to pretend to hold back.

I HAVE CONQUERED THE MYSTERIES OF FLIGHT, I hollered inwardly, across the valleys of my emotions. LET THE AIR ITSELF BOW DOWN BEFORE ME.

"That was pretty good," Jay said. "Let's try it again."

EEP, NO, I bellowed to the valleys.

Anchorage, Alaska's one real city. Fairbanks is a town, Juneau is an admin building with ideas. Anchorage is Tulsa, only poured into a little hollow in a celestially beautiful mountain range on the outer rim of the world.

When you're there, it truly feels like you're at the end of something. Like a last outpost. You're in a coffee shop, you ordered cappuccino, you can see white mountains from the window, and on the other side of the mountains is wilderness that hasn't changed since 1492.

That's an exaggeration, but not as much of one as you might think.

It's Saturday, March 2, the start of the Iditarod. Here's how this works: In the middle of the night, large trucks beep-reverse in and dump snow over an area of downtown. Race volunteers wearing little lanyard-clipped name badges spend a chunk of the night smoothing the snow down over the streets. Early the next morning, mushers and their dog handlers roll into the staging area in pickup trucks, the beds of which have been fitted with multi-compartmented dog carriers. The compartments on the carriers are arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid with little doors that open to the outside. Your reference here is a wall of PO boxes, only behind each door there's a sled dog lying in a petite bed of straw. Some of the dog carriers have cards hanging from their side-clamps with clothespins attached to them. A quick reportorial investigation reveals that each clothespin has a dog's name markered on it: Cutter, Lyra, Harp, Sable, Chisel, Bree. Soon the mushers are opening compartment doors and pulling out dogs. The dogs have their toes examined and their lips peeled back so the mushers can check their gums. There's a scholarly air, on the mushers' part, to these inspections. You get the impression that they've checked the dogs out of a library. The dogs shake nonexistent water off their coats and are chained, one by one, to the trailer hitches and free grab-handles on their mushers' trucks. Dog handlers drop food in each dog's particular vicinity. The food is in some cases raw meat, which leaves soggy pinkish traces in the snow. Human food is being vended to the growing crowd of spectators via several small pavilions, which bear signs like "Alaska Reindeer Sausage" and, impenetrably, "Reindeer Bratwurst Louisiana." The air smells of hot meat and hay. I spot Jay talking to a woman near Linwood's truck, so I go over to say hello, and it turns out she's Libby Riddles, the famous Iditarod champion from '85. A shivery breeze keeps blowing up Fourth Avenue off the Cook Inlet, maybe six blocks to the west, but the day's sunny, it's 30°F. You can see your breath, but it's pleasant. The crowd milling under the giant carved bear that hangs above Grizzly's Unique Alaskan Gifts does sport some heavy-fur wearers, but that's a cultural thing, it's celebratory. All of the heavy furs that I spot are on men. There's a stout, bearded race official going around in not only a heavy fur coat but also an astounding brutalist apartment block of a fur hat that has a bobcat's entire face on it. The face has teeth. I make a note to check whether it would be possible to eyeball the hierarchy of race officials based on the food-chain status of the dead animals whose faces are on their hats, but, though it feels like a searing reportorial lead at the moment, the results of my follow-up investigation will prove disappointing.

Bobcat-hat-face is going around doing little knee-dips over dog teams that are starting to be hooked up to their sleds' riggings. It's maybe a half-hour before the official 10 a.m. start of the race. Volunteers circulate with clipboards; near the starting line, the bulge of the crowd is impassable. The Iditarod is a huge deal in Alaska, did I mention that? Sled-dog racing in general is a big deal; the Iditarod is the most famous race, but there are others, like the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, that draw major attention. Among the tiny population of the state, the top mushers are massively famous. You can walk into a hardware store in Anchorage and go, "Did you hear about DeeDee," or "Just saw the news — Dallas might lose his nose," and no one will answer, "Who, creep-o?"

I've been YouTubing pretty diligently, so I spot some familiar faces. There's Lance Mackey, maybe the greatest long-distance musher of all time: four straight Iditarods from 2007 to 2010; also four titles in the Yukon Quest. Do you know him? He got nominated for a couple of ESPYs a few years back. Won his first Iditarod after beating throat cancer. He's a redneck icon in Alaska, a sort of ratty-looking, scrawny, patchy, permanently beat-down guy, tiny pinched head like the head of a curious tortoise. I heard somebody describe him as "the white Snoop Dogg," which fits. The first time I saw him I took out a notebook and wrote "my best friend he shoots water rats and feeds them to his geese." He's got crazy star power even though he seems to be physically disintegrating. Near the end of this year's race, he will bite into a piece of fudge and lose one of his three remaining original teeth.

Mushing 101 To understand what it takes to win the Iditarod, it helps to learn what it takes to build a great sled-dog team. Illustration by Bryan Christie Design Musher A sled-dog racer.

Rigging The collection of lines that connect dogs to a sled. Includes the tow line, tug lines, and neck lines.

Wheel Dog Dog at the back of the pack that runs directly in front of the sled. This dog is usually the strongest physically; its job is to pull the sled around corners and trees.

Swing Dog A dog that runs directly behind the leader and helps swing the team on turns or curves. Swing dogs are more specifically categorized as left swing or right swing.

Lead Dog The dog that runs in front of the pack and sets the team's pace. The lead dog is generally both intelligent and fast.

There's Aliy Zirkle, last year's runner-up, a red-cheeked and physically imposing 43-year-old who always seems to be laughing. About half the fans I talk to are pulling for her, many of them out of a feeling that a woman is due to win. At race HQ they're selling shirts that read "Alaska: Where Men Are Men and Women Win the Iditarod," but only two women ever have, and none since 1990. "It's time, you know?" people say. I'm pulling for Aliy because she makes the Iditarod look fun. (Which, Jesus.) Some glimmer in her happy eyes seems to say the whole race is a game. She's married to a musher, Allen Moore, and they trade their best dogs back and forth, depending on the event. He won the Yukon Quest with the majority of the team just three weeks ago and now she's racing them in the Iditarod.

I also spot Mitch Seavey, the 2004 champion, who's 53 and wiry, with a bacterial-looking mustache and weird little wisps of stray hair kind of haloing around his cap. Something about the prickly briskness of his movements as he tends to his dogs suggests both a high school chemistry teacher and a bird building a nest. I had read his book, Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way!: Unconventional Sled Dog Secrets of an Alaskan Iditarod Champion, Volume One, and found it fascinating both as a guide to the art of sled-dog training and as a window into the vaguely paranoid self-regard of one M. Seavey. Lead, Follow fixates often on the idea that its author's thoughts and stances are offending unspecified "wackos," who wield unspecified powers and who deserve whatever offense they get. You know how some small-town guys like imagining that everything they say is driving people on the other side of the political spectrum, none of whom they personally know, crazy? Mitch scratched in 2011 after nearly severing his index finger with a knife at the Ophir checkpoint. Then he sued the knife-maker, which has led to a lot of eye-rolling within hard-core dog-mushing circles. He's feuding with at least one Alaskan newspaper over its coverage of the lawsuit. Mitch looks like, and is, the kind of guy who holds grudges.

For most of the Iditarod, mushers will run teams of up to 16 dogs, which they're not allowed to swap out —

Dropped Dog A dog left behind at a checkpoint by the musher because of illness or injury. The dogs are flown back to Anchorage and cared for by volunteers.

dogs that get sick or injured can be dropped, but they can't be replaced with new ones. For the start day in Anchorage, however, the mushers can bring only 12, to minimize downtown chaos. A key detail about the start day in Anchorage is that it's purely for show. It's not timed, and doesn't count toward the outcome of the race. The word that gets used is "ceremonial." It's a chance for city folk to clap for the mushers before they enter the genuine wild. The official start will happen the next day, near the small town of Willow.

Still, there are 66 teams entered this year. With 12 dogs each, we're looking at nearly 800 dogs within about a five-block radius. The dog factor is crazy, tremendous. Dogs are scratching themselves, snarfing down meat, yawning, whining, wrestling, pissing, drum-majoring their tails. Iditarod sled dogs are mostly not the Siberian huskies you might be picturing but smaller, faster mixed breeds, engineered for speed rather than hauling power. Downtown is giddy with barking. Reportorially, I note falsetto yaps, screams, howls, baritone woofs. There's something jungle- or apelike about the cacophony. The presence of so many dogs drives all the dogs crazy. When the handlers start pulling out sleds and clipping the teams to their tow lines, the collective canine intelligence realizes that — ohmigosh, ohmigosh — it's about to go for a run. This is when the dogs truly begin to freak out.

There's a serious case that animal-rights people make against the Iditarod; namely, that it's long and cold and dangerous and sometimes fatal, and who are we to subject living creatures to that for our own entertainment? A dog will in fact die during this year's race, will asphyxiate in a snowdrift one night at the Unalakleet checkpoint. What you can't deny, though, is that these animals, having been bred to want to pull sleds, really want to pull them. I mean, the dogs are hysterical, they're in raptures. I watch one little guy, a black-and-tan with a shaggy belly, hurl himself forward against the restraint of his own tug line about 15 times in a row, barking up a storm, as if he's decided to get the sled going all on his own. He stops every now and again to look incredulously at his teammates. What — is — the — holdup — here — people? This is happening all over the place. It's like standing inside the mind of a saint right before an out-of-body experience. The dogs' ropes all have to be pulled by straining handlers to stop them from just taking off.

Around 9:40 a.m., I make my way to the starting line. My own lanyard-attached media badge gets me through the crowd and into a kind of holding pen adjacent to the starting chute, which itself is just a roped-off area of the street. The Iditarod starting line is a flag-surrounded banner hanging above Fourth Avenue. Seven flags correspond to the nationalities of this year's 66 contestants: the USA (obviously), Canada, Norway, Russia, New Zealand, Brazil (!), Jamaica (!!). A PA guy's warm booming baritone is priming us with factoids about the race. Every year, the first person through the chute is an honorary musher chosen for his/her contributions to the Iditarod. This year's honorary musher is the late Jan Newton, who died in August. She was a volunteer who helped run the

Takotna A village about 18 miles west of McGrath that is home to a mix of non-natives, Ingalik Indians, and Eskimos. It is about 650 miles from the finish line and 329 miles from Anchorage.

checkpoint at the tiny village of Takotna. She was known as the Queen of Takotna, the Official 2013 Race Guide says, and she was famous for her pies. That's how big a deal the race is in Alaska: You can be famous for baking Iditarod-associated pies. "Her contributions to the race are remarkable and have elevated her to a position of legendary prominence" is the Official 2013 Race Guide's line on this. Her sled will be driven by this year's Junior Iditarod champion, Noah Pereira.

After the honorary musher, the starting order is determined by an elaborate NBA-draft-lottery-style number draw at a pre-race banquet. The numbers are drawn from a sealskin Eskimo mukluk, which is something the NBA should maybe look into. I was at this banquet; it ran for five hours. Every single musher made a speech (that's more than 60 speeches). It was brutal. The only speech I liked was the one by

Scott Janssen Janssen is known as the "Mushin' Mortician," and became nationally known in 2012 when he performed a mouth-to-snout resuscitation on his dog Marshall during the race. Marshall is fully recovered and retired.

Scott Janssen, a funeral-home director by trade who's known as the "Mushin' Mortician." He introduced himself by saying, "Hi! I'm Scott Janssen, the Mushin' Mortician."

Anyway. Once the honorary musher's sled goes skritting out of sight, it's time for the real race to (ceremonially) start. Bib no. 2, to the excitement of Iditarod fans everywhere, has fallen to Martin Buser, a Swiss-born four-time champion (1992, 1994, 1997, 2002) and race icon who not only named both his sons after Iditarod checkpoints but was sworn in as an American citizen under the burled arch that serves as the finish line in Nome. He's 54 and maybe not quite a top-shelf contender any longer — Norman Vaughan, who went to Antarctica with Admiral Byrd in 1928, completed an Iditarod at the age of 84, but only one musher over 50 has ever won it (Jeff King in 2006). But Buser's known among mushers for his shrewdness, and the fashionable intelligence can't help but speculate about the implications of such a seasoned veteran leaving first.

Bobcat-hat-face, who's emerged as some sort of superimportant race marshal with the job of importantly standing in the starting chute, consulting with mushers, and pointing at things that want pointing at, is doing a little waist bend over Buser's sled while Buser goes from dog to dog down the line, patting cheeks and communing. The ex-champ is ceremonially stuffed into so many layers of arctic gear that all you can really see of him is his clear-eyed handsome Swiss face.

"One minute," says the PA guy.

Buser gets in a few more canine cheek pats.

"Thirty seconds," says the PA guy.

Buser shaking hands, receiving hugs from loved ones. Bobcat-hat-face steps back out of the way.

"Ten seconds," says the PA guy.

Buser on his sled.

"3 … 2 … 1 … GO!"

Profound roar from the crowd. The dog-handlers let go of the restraining ropes. The pandemonium in which the dog team was immersed one second ago disappears, replaced by a sense of sudden, efficient shared purpose. The dogs take off; the tow line snaps taut; the sled, with Buser standing on the back rails, slides out beyond the starting line. The dogs are quiet, running. They build speed as they go until the sled is more or less sliding on its own momentum. They keep running down Fourth Avenue and I lose sight of them in the crowd.

The next musher's team enters the chute.

And we are off.