The First Dude in his element (cont.)

Alaska governor Sarah Palin waved the green flag to signal the start of the year's Iron Dog race. Simon Bruty/SI

Well, kind of. Davis and Palin are banking on an old-school approach. They're going around the hellacious berms, saving their sleds. They're riding with soft suspension -- not optimal for the course's undulating first half, but possibly a lifesaver on the small, sled-­wrecking bumps that stretch onward from Nome. Yes, ever since Arctic Cat sent them their sleds -- at a deep ­discount -- in November, Team 22 has tried to exercise hoary wisdom.

But brash youth is out on the trail as well, embodied most by two top pairs of twentysomethings who've cut their teeth on the hurly-burly, crash-heavy Alaskan sprint circuit, in races like the Klondike 150. Team 8 and Team 16 are friendly with Palin and Davis. Indeed, Todd Minnick, 25, the sturdy, no-­nonsense leader of Team 16, spent two summers on Palin's commercial fishing boat a decade ago; his teammate, builder Nick Olstad, also 25, trimmed out the Palin manse in Wasilla.

The young guys don't have the lean, gym-­sculpted physiques of Davis and Palin, who trained off-sled for the race, running and lifting to build quad and core strength. But it's unclear that this is significant. On last year's winning team was a self-­described "fat guy," Marc ­McKenna, who at this year's Dog was witnessed savoring a second helping of chicken-fried steak -- for breakfast.

As they take their first ­layover -- ­beyond Ptarmigan Pass in the Alaska Range, in the village of ­Unalakleet -- on Feb. 10, Palin and Davis are in sixth place. The kids are beating them, and Tyler Aklestad, a smirking, baby-faced 23-year-old on Team 8, is having a blast. Just before the village of Koyukuk, he flew along on the banks of the Yukon at 10 p.m. It was so cold, the snow dust was blue, and suddenly -- out of nowhere, in the ­darkness -- he saw a man sitting on his snow machine by the side of the trail, broken down and battling hypothermia. "I missed him by inches," says Aklestad, "and I just kept going at, like, 90 miles an hour."

*****

Snow machine marathons are not spectator-friendly. Basically, you watch each racer rocket by for, say, four seconds before he roars out of sight, swallowed by the wilderness, for hundreds of miles. All you can do after leaving Big Lake is fly to the halfway point, Nome, and kill time hanging out at Wilderness Skidoo, a shop that in Nome (pop. 3,500) has an almost holy aura.

The snow machine season in northwest Alaska lasts about seven months, and it begins, according to Wilderness Skidoo owner John Vahnke, in late September when the year's models arrive. "We fire 'em up," Vahnke says, "and then a lot of guys, they just stand around, just to get the smell of the oil burning." Vahnke's parts guy, Andy Peterson, adds, "I've had friends tell me that if there was a cologne that had that smell, they'd wear it. It's ... well, words cannot describe that smell."

"No," Vahnke corrects him, his eyes going dreamy. "It's like a woman wearing Chanel No. 5."

The race is a battle of brethren. All but two of the teams this year are Alaskan, and if you read the race program, nearly every rider is a hardworking fellow who, on weekends, enjoys fishing and hunting and riding snow machines through powder (a whole different sport). But not all racers are equal.

Some Iron Doggers have spent upwards of $30,000 to finance a once-in-a-lifetime run into the wild heart of Alaska. Tapping their credit cards, they've shelled out $10,000 each for a 2009 snow machine, $10,000 more for an identical training sled, $2,500 for the race entry fee and a few thousand more for trailing airplane support. Palin and Davis, in contrast, have spent almost nothing. They are prodigiously sponsored, with their names monogrammed in script on their matching Arctic Cat jackets. (Palin even has the names of his five kids and his wife, SARAH, THE GOV, appliquéd on his snow machine hood.) They give inspirational speeches at trade shows. They are both adored and reviled. They are the New York Yankees of snow machining.

*****

On Feb. 12 Palin and Davis pull into Nome for a 40-hour rest, now in fourth place, a surmountable two hours and eight minutes back. Davis kind of runs the show. Out on the trail he almost always leads, even as other teams switch off riding fore and aft. And here in Nome, where Team 22 has borrowed a king cab Chevy pickup, Davis ­always ­drives. When he and Palin go over the dings on their parked sleds, Davis directs.

"What do you think of this leak right here?" Palin asks.

"That one's going to need an exhaust manifold," Davis intones as Palin silently nods.

"All right, let's turn this thing over and check out the track."

Later, over pizza, Palin is still quiet and stoical, even as the talk turns to the 2008 race, in which he hit a sunken oil drum and spilled 400 miles from the finish. Palin broke an arm then but still finished fourth, running the last 150 miles on a wrecked sled pulled by Davis. Didn't that hurt?

"Pain was the least of my worries," says Palin. "You talk to any active Alaskan, and you'll see that we all end up with a few bumps and bruises."

What about that Iron Dog a few years back in which his steering column buckled, pitching him onto the snow each time he took he a left turn? "Well, any time your snow machine can't turn and you're flying through the air, away from it, it's not good," Palin says. "It's bad."

There is something masterful about Todd Palin. He is almost invariably calm, and he is handsome and rock-steady in an affable, unobtrusive way. He is the perfect political husband. But he is also a sort of sphinx -- you keep trying to crack the enigma and glimpse the gears spinning away in his mind. You watch him.