Sometimes it's easy to forget Alaska is more than just a U.S. state with glorious summers and long, dark winters. But there comes a reminder about this time every year when the almost mythical nothingness of the far north draws people from all over the country, and the world, to test themselves against some sort of wilderness-challenging benchmark made legendary by the likes of author Jack London and poet Robert Service.

"Have you known the Great White Silence?" Service asked, "not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver?

"Have you broken trail on snowshoes? mushed your huskies up the river?"

Nobody much breaks trail on snowshoes anymore. There are snowmachines to do that. But plenty still mush those huskies up the river, or drag themselves foot by foot forward on the Iditarod Trail in dogged pursuit of what Service tagged "the call of the wild," or roar north on high-powered snowmachines for who knows what.

It's certainly not for the money. Like the prospectors of old, some of these people do dream of finding "color" in the celebrity-driven Internet world of today. Much the same way the prospectors panned for the yellow of gold, they set up Web sites to promote their adventures hoping this might, in turn, yield some of the green of cash. But by and large, it doesn't work.

As with the gold miners, for every one who strikes it rich there are dozens barely eking out an existence. Only a handful of people manage to make a living off the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, despite its $525,000 purse. Nobody makes a living racing snowmobiles in the Iron Dog, which has managed to grow its prize money to within about third of the Iditarod's but costs so much to run that even the race winners lose money on the deal. And then there is the Iditarod Trail Invitational, which attracts bicyclists, skiers and snowshoers from around the globe, willing to race for nothing but the honor of saying they raced.

Five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson from Two Rivers, the winningest musher in Iditarod history, once remarked during one of the many periods Iditarod was struggling through financial troubles that competition was so deeply ingrained in the fabric of Alaska that mushers would, if necessary, race to Nome for nothing more than a bag of dog food at the finish line. The cyclists, skiers and runners in the Iditarod Trail Invitational can top that. There isn't even a Clif Bar waiting for the winner of the race in McGrath, 350 miles north of Anchorage on the other side of the Alaska Range.

Getting over the range isn't easy, either. Last year was epic. It snowed so much at one point that race organizer Bill Merchant gave up trying to break open the Iditarod Trail with his snowmachine. After getting stuck for the umpteenth time and worrying he was going to exhaust himself digging out again, he finally just abandoned the sled and took refuge in a remote, albeit roofless, shelter cabin to wait out the weather. Some of the "racers," having by that point given up racing in favor of becoming survivalists, joined him there. One of them, Californian Louise Kobin, later wrote about trying to leave, discovering that was a bad decision, and retreating back to the wreck of a cabin:

"The wind and snow had really picked up and our bikes were covered in snow," she wrote. "So were the tracks made by the racers in front of us. We took off from the cabin, and couldn't even figure out how to get to where we had come from. There was just waist-deep, soft snow everywhere. The wind was blowing really hard, and we barely made any progress. After about half an hour we decided it was pointless; there was no way we could make it all the way to Rohn by ourselves, so we turned around to go back. Our tracks had already been blown over. It was so frustrating, overwhelming, and kind of scary...''

You can read the full account on Kobin's blog.