My favorite village of all. The south-facing hillside it sits on, making for so many sunny days, the forest of tall spruce that make it an oasis in a land of tundra, the nice people like Jack and Joanna Adams who have us over for caribou stir fry, the caribou caught by Adrian. Something just feels right here.

T'was a nice ride from Elim, too. The sun had just popped above the horizon when Kenji finished talking with the three Elim students in the science class. We were on the trail again, and the snowmachine felt good. We're getting into a ryhthm now, that travel vibe where you just want to go, and see new stuff.

We scaled what some mushers call Little McKinley today. It's a white world of hills between Elim and Golovin. Here's Tohru making short work of it with his iron horse.

Windy up there, but it had been windier, as you can see from this lovely sastrugi. Sastrugi definition from Wiki–"Sastrugi are various surface irregularities resulting from wind erosion . . . Travel on the irregular surface of sastrugi can be very tiring, and can risk breaking skis—ripples and waves are often undercut, the surface is hard and unforgiving with constant minor topographic changes between ridge and trough."

We spent a good few hours in Golovin, where Kenji lectured and drilled two holes, and then we headed the 17 miles to White Mountain. The sun dazzled us all afternoon. Welcome to White Mountain.

And, finally, a sign from the Elim school library: