Hi, I'm Lale Aricoglu and welcome to a new year of women who travel.

We're continuing to cover stories of adventures, expeditions and endurance.

We'll be speaking to more pioneering and curious women and sharing responsive tales from listeners

with their own travel experiences that makes us feel like we're on the trip with them.

Today, I'm talking to someone whose daily commute this time of year is rounding up her dogs

and heading out into snow drifts.

She's Blair Braverman, adventurer and author.

So I am a long-distance dog sledder.

And what that means is that I go out with my dogs and go on long trips with them.

I take teams of dogs out into the wilderness and we might go 20 miles or we might go 200 miles

or sometimes we go a lot farther than that, 400 or 1,000 miles at a time.

Every year, tour operators take visitors to Alaska to see the northern lights,

and some of them might catch the Iditarod race, which takes place over 1,000 miles.

It's the longest dog sled race in the world, and it goes from Anchorage to Gnome on the Bering Sea.

I've raced the Iditarod one time, and then the year after that, my husband raced it.

Okay.

We have one team, so we don't typically race at the same time. We alternate.

It's a race that goes over several days and crosses a huge amount of mileage.

The races that I do are typically unassisted.

So we don't have a pit crew. There's nobody setting up camp for us at the end of the day.

It's just me and the dogs getting through every challenge together and nobody's coming to help us.

I do carry an emergency beacon on my sled,

...