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Overview
It had been six years since newspaper reporter Brian Patrick O'Donoghue mushed to a last place finish in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Yearning to challenge himself anew, he enters the Yukon Quest, a more brutal 1,000-mile run between Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and Fairbanks, Alaska. With wry humor and diminishing expectations, O'Donoghue shares the trail with Khan, Hobbes, Scrimshaw, Cyclone, and ten other excitable Alaska huskies, plus a diverse collection of rival racers and resident bush rats. The mushers' strategies, dreams and disappointments, the antics of the dogs, and the drama of the race are all part of this punishing personal journey.
Synopsis
At 43, Brian Patrick O'Donoghue sees his youth slipping away. Yearning for one more challenge, he signs up to compete in the 1998 Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race. A last-place finisher a few years before in the Iditarod, O'Donoghue sets off with his fourteen Alaska huskies to find out if he and his team have the stuff to be contenders in an even more demanding race. With wry humor, diminishing expectations, and newfound humility, O'Donoghue introduces readers to the canine characteristics who comprise his team. O'Donoghue also takes stock of the independent-thinking, quirky, and always interesting men and women against whom he races. But it is his own absorbing "head trip" down the cold, dark trail that is the most interesting of all. The musher's strategies, hopes, dreams, and disappointments; the antics of the canine athletes, the drama of the race; and the unworldly wilderness venue add texture to a story of a personal journey by a young man who "gets away from it all" in an astonishing way.