Winterdance, the terrifing story of the Iditarod

Recently, I have read Winterdance, an amazing book by Gary Paulsen. Of which, he writes his autobiographical memoir of the time he lived in Alaska with his wife. This story starts out in mid-action, where he just recently entered the Iditarod race, a daring and deadly dogsled race through the Alaskan wilderness. Then, the story continues to write in an extremely detailed way of how he felt about the race. Moreover, Gary felt extremely anxious, and more than everything, afraid. Yet, he continued throughout the race. Hours into the race, the effects of hypothermia had gotten into Gary, and he started loosing several functions he learned that he would eventually loose to hypothermia; self consciousness, knowledge of danger, and pain. Furthermore, Gary got to the point where he was not aware of the strong winds that had risen in the mountains, where in a case like this he had to stop immediately to set camp, or else, he would get blown right off the cliff. Unfortunately, Gary suffered the latter. He had gotten blown off the cliff and he was hanging for his life, he could not see his dogs, so he took them for dead. Afterwards, Gary got enough strength to fight the wind, and get up on his own, he then saw the sled and his dogs dangling by a nearby rock; with all hope, Gary got to them and was able to secure himself aswell as the sled onto the rock.

some of the main themes in the book, are: loneliness, sadness, and near death experiencess

Something that this part of the story made me think about was near death experiences, or life threatening moments.

-So post about any of these experiences that you, or a loved one, has had!