The First Dude in his element (cont.)

Though his team came in sixth, Sarah was proud of her husband finishing his 15th Iron Dog. Simon Bruty/SI

One afternoon in Nome, Palin comes out of his bedroom in the little apartment that he and Davis are borrowing. Freshly showered, he lumbers toward the TV. "Let's see what's on," he says, twiddling at the remote. Grainy snow blasts onto the screen, so Palin flicks the thing off and just slumps on the couch. Silently, he stares out at the frozen Bering Sea, glittering in the sun, and you have to wonder: Is he thinking of what Herman Melville called the "dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows," or is he thinking of nothing at all?

Palin's sangfroid does crack, sometimes. Over drinks in Nome, an Arctic Cat mechanic, Calvin Nolan, tells a story about helping Palin and Davis ready their sleds for the race. "Todd was having rear suspension issues," Nolan says, "a lot of shock issues, and on bumps he was bottoming out. The studs in the track were puncturing his cooler, so his antifreeze seeped out. He overheated. Several times, he had to get towed back from Cow Lake. He was really frustrated."

What did Palin say?

Nolan shakes his head, laughing. "You don't want to print it," he says.

On the trail to Nome, Davis blew a shock himself, but he and Palin fixed it in the -45 degree splendor of a subarctic night, and they remain hopeful. Last year's ­winners -- the beefy ­McKenna and a brainy engineer named Eric Quam -- were 90 minutes back at the midpoint. "It's a war of attrition," Davis says, noting that both of this year's leading teams scratched after Nome in 2008 because of mechanical problems. "When I was young," he says, "I did exactly what they're doing right now. I broke trail and ruined belts."

Davis hopes for a blizzard that will force everyone to ride blind, relying on poise and a deep memory of the terrain. "A storm would be great," he says. "Bad weather is an equalizer." Minnick, the lead driver of Team 16, says, "I'm hoping it doesn't snow. We just want to keep on keeping on." But the next morning, at the restart, leaden skies are dumping cold, dry snow. The racers press east through a swirling whiteout.

*****

Tanana (Pop. 300) is 250 miles from the Iron Dog finish. Like so many stops on the trail, it is a largely Native Alaskan village isolated from the state's road system. The most beloved Iron Dogger there is a rangy 23-year-old Athabascan, Tyler Huntington, who lives downriver in Galena. Huntington's granddad and several cousins reside in Tanana. When the principal at Maudrey J. Sommer School lets students out to watch Huntington's team come in, you expect banners and chants and tense finger-crossing out in the cold.

But the Iron Dog defies such maniacal fanhood. It's ­informal -- homey, even. Officials often time racers with analog watches lacking second hands, and refuel­ing is a funky proposition. If the village ­attendant likes the racer, it might go fast. But if he ­doesn't -- well, there's the tale about a guy whose gas cap was reattached crosswise, so that it jolted off and hit him in the face as he peeled out of a village.

The Tanana faithful mill quietly by the banks of the Yukon, and when Huntington's grandfather, Roy Folger, is asked how he might celebrate a family victory, he shrugs. "Oh, I don't know," he says. "Have another cup of coffee, I guess."

Huntington arrives moments ­later -- in fourth, and in an ill temper. The towrope tugging his idle sled broke off just outside of town. He retied it and now, at the checkpoint, says of his machine, "It run out of gas, and it was plumb full in Ruby!"

Davis and Palin pull in 53 minutes later, in sixth, niggled by more suspension hassles and out of the running. The leaders have been there for hours already. They're holed up in the spacious bed-and-­breakfast over the store, padding around in their long johns and gloating a bit. "I dare you guys to say, 'Hey, Todd, what took you so long?'" Aklestad quips, his voice a giddy whisper.

No one takes up the dare, and later ­Aklestad is deferential as Davis kvetches. "It's been an odd race," Davis says. "Not one of the top 10 teams has broken down." He blames it on the snow, which, he contends, didn't cut visibility enough and made the trail east from Nome cushier, less rattling to the stiffly shocked front-­runners. "This race isn't as tough as it used to be," he says.

Palin sits nearby, silently spitting chewing tobacco into a cup as he watches a TV show about the manufacturing of postage stamps. He sleeps well, and the next morning, over biscuits and gravy, someone notes that he doesn't seem that fazed by losing.

"What gives you that impression?" he snaps. "Maybe I don't express myself when I'm pissed off inside, but this race is very important to me. I wouldn't devote so much time to it -- I wouldn't spend so much time training and wrenching -- if it wasn't so frigging important." His eyes are electric. For a second you see the fire that has propelled him into the winner's circle and that flames up whenever, as he puts it, "that kangaroo court down in Juneau tries to ruin my wife's reputation." Todd Palin is irked.

But a second later he is the soul of cool bonhomie. "So," he shouts to his pals at the breakfast table, "we got a pool going on who's gonna win?"

*****

There is but a minute and 42 seconds separating the lead teams. Minnick and Olstad of Team 16 have been ahead almost from the get-go. But Team 8 -- Aklestad, the wisecracker, and his partner, an unassuming sheet-metal worker named Tyson Johnson, have been a close second the whole way. And now, leaving Tanana, they begin narrowing the gap.

Beyond Manley, 180 miles from the finish, Olstad breaks a stud on his track. Aklestad and Johnson pass him as he stoops over his damaged sled with a wrench. They come across his partner, Minnick, driving toward them to aid in repairs.

"It was looking good," Aklestad will say after the finish, "but about five minutes later I hit a wind drift about four feet tall." Aklestad launches at 90 mph. "I got like 10 feet of air," he will remember, "and I kicked the sled away from me." He lands on his back as his sled slams the ground, nose up. He slides. His head hurts. He can't get up. His partner runs toward him, to lift him up onto his sled -- and right then, he says, "I see Todd Minnick hit the same bump."

"I landed it," Minnick will say, "but my head hit the windshield real hard. It didn't hurt none, though, so I got back on the sled. It was purring like a kitten."

Both teams scramble forward, battered. Minnick has a cracked windshield. Aklestad's rear tension bolts are bent, so his track is loose and rattly as it churns over the snow.

The two teams meet again in the next town, Nenana, the last stop before Fairbanks. Minnick and Olstad get there first, but there isn't even a gas pump in Nenana. There's just a fuel truck waiting for racers down by the Tanana River, with a single nozzle. Minnick uses it as his father, a former racer, helps Olstad gas up from three five-gallon gas cans that he's brought (a perfectly legal maneuver). Meanwhile, the owner of the Fairbanks Skidoo shop, a sponsor of Aklestad and Johnson, begins funneling fuel into his riders' tanks. "But the jugs weren't filling our tanks good," Aklestad will lament. "We were in a hurry. Gas was spilling all over the place, and they were getting away from us."

But in the end the fumbling doesn't matter. Aklestad can go no faster than 80 mph with his wrecked track. Minnick and Olstad win by three minutes, with a time of 37:19:08, eclipsing Palin and Davis' course record by 49 minutes. They celebrate quietly. There is no champagne, no cigars.

Governor Palin is there, though, in her own monogrammed Arctic Cat jacket, and when Todd's team arrives, still in sixth, she is thrilled. "These guys are amazing!" she says, effervescent. Back in high school, she confides, her dream was to sit in the broadcast booth with Howard Cosell and do the play-by-play as her boyfriend, Todd, burned it up on the basketball court. "But this is better!" she adds. "These are my friends. This is my world." One of her earliest dates with Todd was snowmobiling in the hills of Eureka, Alaska, in the bright sun, in shirtsleeves, in the middle of May.

The TV reporters are circling by now, and someone hands Todd his infant son, Trig. Todd smiles as he pats the boy's head. A photographer leans in for the shot.

And then, a few hours later, Alaska's First Couple flies home to Wasilla, to resume normal life. Todd goes to his daughter Willow's basketball game. He tinkers with the boiler down in the basement, changes a water filter, and then gets together with Calvin Nolan, the Arctic Cat mechanic, to nail down what, exactly, went wrong.

A week after the race, on a clear, cold morning in Wasilla, Todd is pensive. "Scott and I just ran out of time this year because of our suspension setup," he says over the phone, "and we definitely wouldn't want a race like that one to be our last one. I'm ready to roll next year. I have to see how Trig's doing, and [grandson] Trip, and what Sarah's up to. But unless there's some kind of catastrophe ... "

"You don't think you're too old?" he is asked.

"Hell, no," says Todd Palin. "Hell, no."