Iditarod

Pat Moon and his team travel the Kuskokwim River toward McGrath, Alaska, during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.   
Picture: Anchorage Daily News, Marc Lester/AP, via The Telegraph.

An awesome image showing the immensity and solitude of Alaska.

While we're on the subject, I'll mention the book shown at right - Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod - which I read about fifteen years ago and thoroughly enjoyed. 

About the same time the book was published I was offered an opportunity by a friend to go winter camping by dogsled near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota.  It would have involved a couple days of preparation, then several days of dogsledding, sleeping in tents along the trail.  For reasons I can't remember now, I declined the offer.  I think of that missed chance at times like this week when reports of a "solar storm" sent me out into the midnight air for two nights, hoping to catch a glimpse of the northern lights (sadly, they weren't evident at our latitude).

Life is short, and there are always choices to be made.  I was once advised, and am more and more coming to agree, that as one gets older, the regrets one has are most often not about the things you have done, but about the things you didn't do.