Professor Brian O'Donoghue

A reporter can’t do much better than landing an assignment to cover the Yukon Quest.

You have the drama attached to a 10-15 day, ultra-marathon race. The story line inevitably pivots on some sort of rescue, setback or slippery detour besetting dogs and drivers as they charge across 1,000 miles of wilderness.

Best of all, unlike the better-known Iditarod, the informality of the Quest and its handful of isolated checkpoints offers a journalist better opportunity for gathering vivid tales from the trail. I had a hunch that might be true after covering both races for several news organizations. In the 1990s, I confirmed it taking my own dogs the distance in the Iditarod and the Quest.

When Iditarod reporters aren’t tripping over each other at press conferences, they’re sweating out the logistics of intercepting front runners another 20 miles farther up the trail. Out on the Quest, checkpoints are so few and far between that mushers tend to linger over a bowl of steaming moose stew. The results are less pressured interviews, generally reflecting more candor.

I’ve always considered myself a political reporter; covering sled dog races not only provided a great change of pace, it sharpened my skills in this challenging arena. Trust me, tracking developments behind closed doors in the capitol is no challenge compared to shadowing dog teams along frozen rivers and over mountains, overcoming camera and laptop failures brought on by the cold and ferreting out developments in a non-stop, 24-hour event, all the while meeting daily deadlines.

Yet, in the six years I’ve been teaching at UAF, I’ve shied away from assigning students to cover the Quest.

I’ve sent students to interview prison inmates, including convicted murderers. I’ve turned them loose reporting on military exercises involving the Fairbanks-based U.S. Army Stryker Brigade. One year I even had a class cover the start of the Iditarod.

The Quest?

There I drew the line--too much could go wrong.

Picture a carload of students attempting to navigate Eagle Summit in a whiteout, oblivious to the sheer cliffs lining the unpaved road. Count on half the class showing up in sneakers and a light jacket, inviting frostbite or worse. Imagine my journalists-in-training taking it upon themselves to hike out onto the Yukon River for a better vantage, blissfully unaware of the threat posed by open water, freezing overflow or what can happen confronting a ground blizzard after working up a sweat.

I could see the headlines.

More important, could we report on the Quest in a way that might shine new perspective on the event? Could a team of hustling young reporters take this familiar Quest someplace readers and viewers haven’t gone before?

Extreme Alaska suggested possibilities.

How about examining this insane Interior Alaska tradition from a half-dozen places at once? How about a package of stories told in over-lapping fashion? Why not explore storytelling using as many mediums as students might dare, and document competitive spirits burning bright past midnight in an event that never sleeps?

As it happens, it meant dispatching students on overnight assignments to remote communities spread across roughly 200 miles of highway. Few of those students had a real idea of what they were getting into. The narratives in this section make that much clear. Of course, this assignment unfolded in 50-below.

Perfect training conditions.

And judging from the results, it was well worth the risk.