NULATO -- As the beer-splashed celebration of Lance Mackey's unprecedented four-in-a-row Iditarod victory began off to the northwest along the Bering Sea coast in Nome on Tuesday, a simpler, more primordial celebration of a different sort was underway among the mushers still struggling here along the Yukon River.

They were thanking the gods, the spirits and good luck that the life-threatening cold that has hunkered over the Alaska Interior for most of this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race was finally relenting.

Outside Nulato's Andrew K. Demoski school, the temperature had warmed to 27 degrees below zero by daybreak Tuesday, leaving mushers almost giddy.

"I'm so excited about this warm weather," said Ross Adam, a lanky Canadian buffalo rancher and businessman. "Last night for the first time, the dogs weren't shivering. They sort of settled down and started to relax."

Adam didn't much like the sight of shivering dogs though he knew as well as everyone that shivering is a physiological adaptation that allows dogs to warm themselves. Shivering helps dogs. It doesn't do much for people, though they shiver, too. Canadian Hank Debruin shivered through much of the night Monday and into the day Tuesday. He didn't much like it.

"I couldn't get warm," he said. "It was damn cold."

Icicles hung from his beard, and his face looked raw and red when he came into the checkpoint. Still, he was lucky. He didn't seem to have any serious cold injuries.

Almost everyone in this race is now suffering from some injury of that sort. There are frostnipped or frostbitten noses, fingers, cheeks and toes. Jane Faulkner, a nurse from Soldotna, was debating Tuesday whether to open the painful, cold-caused blisters on her fingertips, or hope they would be reabsorbed. Inside the checkpoint, she asked the advice of an Iditarod volunteering German veterinarian, who just happens to work as a physician in Bern, Switzerland.

Trained in both canine and human medicine, he said, he volunteered to work as an Iditarod vet because he finds the physiology of Alaska sled dogs so intriguing. The Iditarod has shown them capable of stunning cardio-vascular performance. The dogs are well studied. Less so the people. The same goes for medical attention.

There are multiple veterinarians at every checkpoint on the trail. There is rarely a human doctor. So Faulkner got lucky although the doctor's advice wasn't much help.

"I don't know," he said. "If you open them, you have to be aware they could get infected. But when they open up on their own, they might also get infected."

Faulker was leaning toward stabbing the blisters and draining them, but the sterile suture the veterinarian had opened was already being unsterilized. Adam was using it to suture his coyote ruff back onto his parka. A fur ruff in this climate is a face-saver. The anti-fur crowd can harp all they want about how fur is only for fashion, but out here the claim is just so much bull.