Edited by Sarah Sperry

            Alone with his dogs, Bob McAlpin eyed the river ahead. Day turned to night. Shadows mingled with the trees lining the distant banks.

            The weary musher’s mind began playing tricks.
           
            Peering at his team through a double layer of frosty face masks on Birch Creek—on a night locals told him probably was 60 below if not colder, McAlpin watched his dogs morphing into fuzzy blue and orange specters.

            While fatigue probably plays the biggest part, in this instance it was the weather that distorted reality.  McAlpin’s vision was affected by frost, rapidly accumulating on his masks and his eyelashes. Clearing those bewitching crystals posed a practical challenge. It was too cold to take off his big mitts—so he kept pawing away at the frost, reopening a sparkling, glittery, mind-teasing window on reality for moments at a time.

            Kelley Griffin, who has been mushing for about 30 years, shared a similar experience.

            "What I saw was…snowshoes. My lead dogs turn(ed) into snowshoes and they were hopping on the trail,” she explained.

            Griffin believes that hallucinations may be due to dehydration.  Whatever the cause, however, she admitted it is a strange sensation.

            “Sometimes you dream and you know it’s not real, but it sure feels real,” she said with a chuckle.

            Yet, not all mushers experience such visions. 

            “We don’t hallucinate on the trail,” claims Russ Bybee, who has been running dogs for 12 years now.  “We did that all earlier in life,” he added.

Extreme reporters Brian O’Donoghue and Laureli Kinneen contributed to this story.