"Nobody will believe this, Dave Dalton thinks to himself. Nobody will believe what I am seeing. Behind him, a full moon hangs bloated over the horizon and showers light across the snow on the high hills ahead. In the sky opposite, the first flickers of northern lights emerge in faint, smoky streaks of green. As the celestial voltage rises, the green intensifies into neon and widens into a vast curtain, slowly billowing in the ionospheric winds. A tinge of translucent pink emerges on the bottom edge. Then the rarest colour in all the sky materializes as the pink collects, gains density, and transforms itself into a red nebula, as if the curtain has caught fire in the cold overhead. A vast, ethereal dance of light and colour spreads above him. Tonight, the aurora borealis battles the full moon to rule the Yukon sky.
........
This is a night. Dalton congratulates himself. This is part of the payoff. This is why a man will build his life around dogs and the Yukon Quest. This is why Dave Dalton nurses no regrets that he chose dogs when his wife said them or her. This is why he drives a cab for a living, so he can be master of his own schedule and train his dogs to run as one fluid, silent line of energy under such a sky on a night like this, feeling purposeful and all alone in the wonder of the world."

Förutom en målande och insiktsfull skildring av hundar, människor och natur längs detta slädhundslopp tar författaren även med oss på en vandring i områdets kultur och all den guldgrävarhistoria som tilldrog sig här i slutet av 1800-talet. Notabelt är också att just detta år deltog fransk-kanadensaren Andre Nadeau i loppet med sitt spann av Siberian Huskys. Han kom tvåa knappt slagen av Bruce Lee. Det har skrivits oändligt många böcker om de två stora slädhundsloppen i Alaska: Iditarod samt Yukon Quest och de flesta handlar om Iditarod. Men Yukon Alone tycker jag är den bok som bäst fångar "själen" i sådant här långlopp på ett mycket personligt och medryckande sätt