Alaska Dispatch

According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a German man, Joachim Rinsten, has begun walking from Fairbanks to Whitehorse on the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest sled dog trail. Rinsten is part of a group that regularly takes extreme walks every other year on the Yukon Quest trail between Whitehorse and Dawson City, but this year, for his 50th birthday, his wife gave him a ticket to Fairbanks to take on the full Quest trail. He expects the trip to take about five or six weeks and is using a sled to pull all the food and gear he'll need (and trying desperately not to sweat or get his feet wet from river overflow). Read more here, including mention of a neat two-threat-level emergency beacon he carries.