Our man Rob Frost (who is working with Sender so much these days he is de facto staff) just got back from shooting the Iditarod dog sled race. Here is his report:

Just got back from an amazing journey through Alaska. Snowmobiled and filmed the famous 1,000 mile Iditarod dog sled race that starts just north of Anchorage and finishes in Nome. It was truly one of the most epic adventures of my life and an unreal way to see the expansive wilderness up there in Alaska. The trail takes the 71 teams 9-14 days to complete. They pass through checkpoints which are old mining towns in the interior, and Inuit villages once the course hits the Bering Sea. Each dog eats 10,000 calories a day and they are some of the most gifted athletes I have ever seen (and contrary to the myth that this race is cruel to the dogs, I saw up close and personal how they live for this type of effort– it runs through every fiber in their DNA). We saw temps that got as low as -46 F. The first three days we went through the Alaska Range, over Rainey Pass at 3 in the morning in a blinding blizzard. Sacha Gros was my travel companion and survival expert- a total badass. He towed an 8 foot long sled with our stuff. We went three days straight with no sleep through driving storms, getting flipped sideways in deep snow drifts in the extreme cold, having to tow one another out, dig, and cut small trees that we got hung up in. I had moments of desperation for sure. At points I was hallucinating due to the sleep deprivation. I would fall asleep at the wheel, only to catch myself waking up and realizing that I was on a snowmobile in the middle of endless wilderness. I hit 91 mph on the Yukon River, and at one point flew off the back of my snowmobile at about 25 mph and took a gnarly digger. At about 600 miles the trail hits the coast and then angles up to the finish line in Nome. I spent the last two days of the event following and filming Lance Mackay as he mushed his way into the history books with his 4th consecutive win. It is an adventure I will never forget and hopefully I will do it again next year. Some jobs stand out, and this was certainly one of them.

Daniel Woods’ new Boulder Canyon test piece, The Game, goes at V16. That could make it the hardest boulder problem in America, if not the world. We hiked up there with Daniel, Rob Frost and Renan Ozturk to document the action for the upcoming REEL ROCK tour 2010. Photos courtesy of Renan Ozturk.

The First Ascent series has begun to roll out on tv screens across Europe and Asia, and will soon hit Latin America. Anecdotally we’ve been told the show has been kicking butt, garning viewership 4-5 times higher than average Nat Geo ratings in Australia, for example. Not a bad start! Stay tuned for U.S. tv distribution announcements, and more on the DVD box set release in the fall. Meanwhile, check out how Nat Geo Adventure is promoting the show heavily on their website.