Extreme cold slows life down for the overwhelming majority of North Americans. Winter may even cancel school, work, social hour and worse, depending on where you live and how bad winter happens. But on America's Arctic frontier, it's the complete opposite: productivity peaks for Alaska, in many respects, during late February. Maybe it's the lengthier days. Or maybe we've just finally grown accustomed to winter life, finally, four months into the season.

The news certainly gets interesting as February wanes. Politics quickens: In Juneau, the Alaska Legislature is debating oil taxes, again, and lawmakers on both sides of the discussion are passionately making their cases. Read more about this year's chorus in support of cutting state taxes -- worth billions a year -- to oil companies pumping petroleum out of Alaska's oil patch. The opposition to such cuts isn't so much of a chorus as it is a whisper. But the wisdom of tax-cut opposition shouldn't be discounted just because it's a minority opinion. We've got all sides of the multidimensional story in our Politics section.

Longer winter days mean big news on the Iditarod Trail. Alaska's most celebrated sporting events are under way across the state's historic trail, which runs from the Kenai Peninsula through the state's gold mining ghost towns to the Bering Sea coast. Currently, athletes and adventures from around the world are competing or preparing for the Iditarod Trail, and no one covers the adventure quite like Alaska Dispatch.

Keep up: bookmark our Team & Trail blog and our Iditarod project. Follow Dispatch trail coverage on Twitter: the handle's @ADIditarod. You'll thank us later.