Multimedia

On the biggest stage in dog mushing, Dallas Seavey from Willow finally bested the women he once chased futilely along the Iditarod Trail, rolling down Front Street in Nome to win the race's 40th edition early Tuesday night. Three times Seavey had finished behind young female mushers in Junior Iditarods as he apprenticed for his chance to shine in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. So it seemed somehow only fitting that when he won the big event on Tuesday -- the Super Bowl of dog mushing -- he bested the top woman dog driver in the 49th state. Seavey, the youngest Iditarod champ in history, didn’t beat veteran musher Aliy Zirkle from Two Rivers, by much. But it was enough. Zirkle, the first and only woman to win the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race has long been tagged as the next great woman of the Iditarod, following on the dogsled runners of Libby Riddles, the first woman to win in 1985, and the late Susan Butcher. Seavey seemed calm and content as his team trotted smartly down Front Street toward the burled arch that marks the Iditarod finish. "I'm feeling a little tired and very elated,'' he said in a flat voice in response to a question from a Iditarod TV crew that had put a microphone on the sled. He thanked the crowd for coming out, praised the core of his dog team -- five dogs shared leadership responsibilities -- and sounded happy to have the race over when he finished at 7:29 p.m. ADT with the March sun still lighting the scene.The final 20 or 30 miles of trail along the exposed, Bering Sea coast and up and over 675-foot Cape Nome outside of the City of the Golden Sands "was pretty bad,'' he said. "We got to see a lot of wind.'' The last bit of weather did a nice job of underlining the difficulty of Iditarod, he observed.  "Nothing is easy in this thing," he said. It's never been -- even for some of Iditarod's biggest winners.

Ophir is the "father-and-son checkpoint" Buser said just before heading outside. In 2008 the men ran together when Rohn, then 18, was still in high school. In that race, the father saw more of the child in Rohn. "It was more like he was a kid then, and daddy had to take care of him a little more," Buser said. This year, it's different. Rohn is now 22, more mature, and his dad feels like the two men are running together as grown-ups. They were flabbergasted to discover how far behind they'd fallen -- 32nd and 33rd places. Despite that, they've had good runs and posted excellent times, according to Martin Buser. Why so far back? It could be a sign the race and its dogs are evolving beyond Buser's capacity to keep up. Or it could be that many teams have pushed their dogs too hard, too fast. Maybe they'll fizzle before the finish. No matter why, they've ended up in the middle of the pack. But for the Buser boys -- who have 15 dogs apiece -- the Iditarod isn't as much about being first as what you learn along the way. Rohn Buser said it was "cool" being out here in the solitude with his father. The dogs could get decent rest in the quiet and the men could talk about the race. "It's way more than just driving dogs. It's how you go through life," Martin Buser said as he and son walked in the snow along parallel dog lines, getting the teams ready to go. About 1 p.m., the Busers were headed for Nome once again. 

1429 might sound like a pretty dull name for a sunspot. But since it rotated into view of Earth on March 2, it's been creating some spectacular pyrotechnics, including one on Tuesday that was the second biggest solar flare in the current solar cycle -- and now it's headed for the home planet. The flare, which erupted from the sun on Tuesday, was classified as an "X5" event by spaceweather.com. NASA's Goddard Space Center later confirmed that the flare reached a magnitude of X5.4. X-class flares are the strongest and most active solar flares, with the potential to interrupt satellite operations and even ground-based communication and electrical grids. Just an hour later, another flare, this time classified X1, erupted from the same sunspot. On the upside, a flare of such size and magnitude, pointed in Earth's direction, could bring truly spectacular displays of northern lights, though the term "northern" here might be a bit of a misnomer. One Atlanta television station is optimistically predicting aurora in the skies above Georgia. Northern lights are expected above the more northern states in the Lower 48, including Michigan, Maine, and Washington. The University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute's aurora forecast page hadn't changed for Wednesday night, sitting at a still-respectable level of "active" and visible overhead from Barrow to Juneau. But that's just the tip of the iceberg: Thursday's forecast calls for "extreme" aurora stretching as far south as Kodiak, while Friday just intensifies. Late Thursday night and into Friday morning, the aurora could be directly overhead for almost the entire state of Alaska with potential to be visible low on the horizon all the way into the middle of the Lower 48. PHOTOS: Northern lights dancing over Alaska Sunspot 1429 emitted an X1-class flare on Sunday, leading to heightened aurora alerts for far northern latitudes, which were expected to begin appearing Tuesday and possibly continue through Thursday. But Sunday's flare came as the sunspot was largely pointed away from Earth, while Tuesday's eruption occurred with 1429 closer to the center of the star when viewed from terra firma. Experts confirmed that the byproduct of the flare was likely headed for earth, though it still wasn't clear just how much impact the wave of charged particles would have. With such a strong eruption, even a glancing blow has potential for atmospheric fireworks. READ MORE: "Northern lights forecast as 'extreme' with incoming solar storm"

Trail breakers spent time Sunday sculpting the section of trail that until a day earlier was out of play for the 2012 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race. The infamous Happy River Steps, one of the race's most hazardous sections, had been declared, at least publicly, history. Race officials planned, instead, to send mushers through Ptarmigan Valley -- not the steep, windy switchbacks dipping down to and up off from Happy River, but along a modern-day mining road cutting through what has been dubbed the Happy River Flats. But Iditarod leader Ray Redington proclaimed the steps “beautiful” Monday morning as he rolled into this high-altitude checkpoint, 100 miles from the race's official starting point in Willow. His 9:02 a.m. arrival time made one lucky visitor at the lodge $140 richer, the winner of a betting pool started Sunday to predict what time the first musher would arrive. Watch the video of a dog musher hauling over the Steps in the 2012 Iditarod!

Lucy Lawless, the actress best known for the title role in the cult television show "Xena: Warrior Princess," joined a group of Greenpeace activists on Feb. 23 and boarded an oil-drilling ship owned by Shell Oil Co. bound for the Alaska Arctic. The group is protesting proposed offshore drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off northwest Alaska. This video, uploaded by Greenpeace of New Zealand, captures the early stages of the occupation. Read much more, here.