Goho, an Iditarod veterinarian stationed here in middle-of-nowhere Alaska, lives most of the year in North Carolina near city lights. On this night, there was no full moon, mountains or trees to obstruct his view.

It was 11 p.m. Friday. Martin Buser and Jeff King, leaders in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, weren't expected to arrive here for hours. Goho should have been sleeping, but this was a moment he couldn't miss.

Twinkling stars were immaculate in the Alaska sky.

"You just don't find this in North Carolina," he said of one of the most remote and inhospitable places of the 1,100-mile trail.

The nearest villages were 70 miles upriver in Kaltag and 60 miles downriver in Grayling.

Actually, the checkpoint isn't on Eagle Island. That's five miles to the south, one of the many islands that dot the 2,300-mile long Yukon.

Instead, the checkpoint -- 421 miles from Nome -- is on river's west bank, protected from the bitter winds by forests of birch and spruce on the mouth of a frozen slough.

"Imagine yourself lost in an arctic wilderness on some bank of the Yukon and you're at Eagle Island," said Keith Larson, a 24-year-old from Boise, Idaho, who volunteered to check mushers in here.

Larson had that feeling for four days while he prepared for the Saturday morning arrival of mushers, media and tourists traveling via Bush planes and helicopters. When he and another checker landed on Wednesday, two wall tents, nasty winds and deep, wind-drifted snow is all that was here.

Larson has spent the winter in North Pole with Iditarod musher Jeff Holt on what he calls a "dog-mushing internship," a program offered at a small college in Idaho. But this week, it was his job to make this hostile place look presentable.

"It was quiet," Larson said.

IDITAROD IGLOOS

Day by day, the peacefulness gradually disappeared. Iditarod Air Force planes buzz the ice landing strip, marked by knee-high spruce branches. Pilots drop off loads of straw bales and drop bags for mushers.

Though every drop meant more work for Larson, the snowdrifts harden every time he hauls the bags from the river to the slough by snowmachine. On the northern side of the slough, he pitched a yellow, arctic-oven tent next to the wall tents that would soon be used by mushers and Iditarod officials.

Race marshal Mark Nordman said those wall tents were buried beneath three feet of snow until Iditarod volunteer Jim Paulus dug them out. Paulus also created a four-mile trail along the slough to give mushers a temporary break from the wind.

"It's a real nice place," Nordman said. "(But) some years the snow was so deep, you couldn't get a snowmachine through here.

"For the last few years we've been out on the river. But we wanted to get these guys off the line."

Checkpoint workers walk back and forth, back and forth, in front of the structures, packing a narrow path. Packed snow quickly forms a rock-hard surface.

Larson sawed a spruce log to use as a table leg. He tried cutting it vertically from the ground, but he couldn't get an angle. As he cut the log horizontally, the saw tip ground into the snow.

Snow cuts easily, he noticed. Soon he was pumping out blocks.

"Hey, what should we do with this stuff?," he asked co-workers.

With the wind blowing nonstop from the north, there was no shelter other than the tents for checkers outside awaiting mushers. Turn the blocks into icehouses, Larson thought.

He went to work, cutting block after block for hours on end. He turned into an ice architect, constructing a half-igloo shelter at the checkpoint entrance and an ice outhouse on the side of a hill, further down the slough.

"We knew we'd be miserable if we didn't do something," he said.

YUKON RIVER WIND

Zack Steer of Sheep Mountain stands on the runners of his sled behind his team, fighting a 20 mph Yukon River headwind. He's a couple dozen miles out of the Eagle Island checkpoint when an Iditarod helicopter approaches.

"I swear it was only 50 feet behind me," he said. "He came zooming behind me, and I didn't even hear him."

With the wind piercing his face for hours on end, Steer wears goggles and a full facemask. He focuses forward but sometimes ducks below his handlebars for temporary shelter.

"You can see frost bit skin -- it'll get ya if you're not careful," he said. "That's what they say up here -- 'It's not the cold that get's ya. It's the wind.' "

Miles behind Steer was Ed Iten of Kotzebue, whose dogs are accustomed to running in the wind.

"If it's a hot day, they love wind," Iten said. "If they're beating their heads against it all day long, they get tired of it.

"But they'll drive into it. They don't know not to."

Paul Gebhardt, meanwhile, is miles ahead of Iten and Steer, trading leads with Lance Mackey of Fairbanks.

Gebhardt is having an easier time battling the wind. The Kasilof musher, who is also fighting a cold, wears a bulky Bombardier snowmachine helmet with a plastic face shield. Though Gebhardt says he hates riding snowmachines, the helmet works.

He and Mackey, who used to be Kenai Peninsula neighbors before Mackey moved to Fairbanks last year, trade jokes about the Yukon River winds as one passes another.

"It's miserable as hell, absolutely miserable," Mackey said. "But we're all here voluntarily. We have to go through the same stuff, so it's like an equal playing field. Our attitude is dry humor. We all deal with this stuff in different ways, but we're all on the same path."

"We had fun," Gebhardt said. "But his sense of humor is different from my sense of humor."

Mackey's biggest laugh came when he and other mushers used the ice outhouse. Inside, laying on an ice seat, beside a package of toilet paper, was a sheet of blue Styrofoam with a hole cut in the middle. Beneath the hole, a honey bucket.

"Fantastic," Mackey said.

Steer said the bathroom accommodations were luxurious compared to Grayling.

"At least it has a door," he said. "I (went to the bathroom) at 3 in the morning outside the checkpoint without a door in Grayling."

Gebhardt took off his snowmachine helmet after following Mackey into Eagle Island and made one final joke.

"Where is this place?" he asked. "We figured they moved the checkpoint to Kaltag. We didn't know."

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Daily News reporter Kevin Klott can be reached at kklott@adn.com or 257-4335.