Iron Dog this weekend

Links to stories on this hardcore race:

C4P: Iron Dog, Duct Tape, and Commemoratve Knives

HillBuzz: We don't know which one is cuter . . .

The stories are great.

But this picture . . . !

This is the most photogenic family ever. And they are genuinely interesting people. They, like, do things.

Here's what I wrote about the Palins and their mass-appeal on September 4th just after Sarah's convention speech. That was before the msm smearing kicked in. It's hard to know what "the public" would think of the Palins without the distorting effect of the msm lens.

Here's a fun excerpt from a Washington Post article on Todd from Sept. 7, 2008:

Todd Palin arrived in Wasilla from Dillingham on Bristol Bay in the early 1980s, and cut such a figure at the high school that girls inked T-O-D-D on the back of their fingers, Kaylene Johnson wrote in her admiring biography of the governor. The newcomer chose Sarah Heath, daughter of a popular science teacher, and flirted with her from a two-way radio on the open boat his family used when the salmon ran up Bristol Bay.

Todd Palin claims Yupik Eskimo blood through his grandmother. When he took a job on the North Slope, working Arctic Circle oil pads for British Petroleum, the family's life assumed a rhythm familiar in Alaska: a week or two at home, a week or two on "the Slope."

And when he won the Iron Dog, he basically owned the state. The endurance race involves six days of steering a snowmobile at 80 mph. From its start in Wasilla, the course runs across two mountain ranges to Nome on the Bering Sea, then back down the Yukon River to Fairbanks.

The terrain is so rough that some days drivers pull their hands out of mittens bloody from blistering, and so dangerous that drivers must move in teams. With Scott Davis, who sells concrete block in Soldotna, Palin has won the race four times.

"He's always trying to give someone else credit," Davis said.

(cross-posted here)