If you're lucky, you might get slightly more than three hours of light a day during the winter solstice in Alaska. What would that do to your psyche?
If there is any remaining doubt as to whether the Alaskan winter's bitter arctic chill and unforgiving dark days breed insanity, let the record show that the case is now rested. I'm in a 10-seat Navajo twin-engine prop plane, taking Talkeetna Aero Service's brand-new two-hour sightseeing flight around Denali National Park and Mount McKinley, and our pilot, a nice-enough guy named Corky, has already warned us that it is going to appear as if we are flying dangerously close to the jagged granite peaks of North America's highest mountain, the 20,320-foot Mount McKinley (aka Denali), but that we will actually be quite far away. Something about distances becoming distorted with objects this enormous. Whatever. As the plane rocks and rolls around the bumpy air caused by upward wind surges between the peaks, the mountain looks so harrowingly close you feel as if you could file your fingernails on it.

Corky tells us the side of the mountain is actually five miles away from the edge of the wing tip, but that distance draws a collective sigh of disbelief from the passengers. It may be true, but no one can believe it. Our point being that it looks a heck of a lot closer than that, so our stomachs are reacting accordingly. It is one of the coolest, most frightening, and most humbling experiences of my life.

Denali National Park sits 125 miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska, the gateway to the interior of this vast adventure wonderland. I've come during the winter solstice, in December, when there is so little daylight locals count the time in seconds. Sound like fun? Actually, there is a three-and-a-half-hour-or-so window of vague light, though the sun doesn't rise much above the horizon, and even more rarely above the mountains that surround the town. In other words, in December and January, Fairbanks is a very dark place indeed. That must be for the birds, right? Well, yes and no.