The town is the traditional turnaround for the race, which began in Quenelle, B.C., this year. Parked outside the MacKenzie Hotel, the nine cars ranged from Audi Quattroportes and BMW ixs, both all-wheel-drive, race-ready German luxury machines that can flatten your eyeballs when the driver stands on the gas, to as-yet-unreleased Subaru SUSs.

Although few passers-by thought, "Hey, sensible family sedans," at the sight of the machines or the rumble of their low-flow racing pipes, drivers and navigators are strictly governed by speed limits and are penalized one point for each second they are early or late to a number of checkpoints set up along the route.

To illustrate the exactness, the leader on the Eagle Plains to Inuvik leg had about 30 points; the ninth of the nine competitors was three minutes out on the 365-kilometre trip, largely because their on-board rally computer tanked. Try matching that in the minivan.

Drivers like the Northern run because it is one of the few areas in North America that still offers open spaces, as well as the knotty problem of dealing with blizzards, an interesting novelty to the American competitors.

"One time about three years ago, there was a point where three cars were crawling along bumper-to-bumper, with someone walking in front of the lead car wearing a red parka so they could find the road," Carlson recalled.

Now the rally operates with two sets of times, one for good conditions and another for conditions under which sensible human beings would park it, but as Carlson observes, "Sensible people wouldn't be here in the first place."

Yet even though some of the best drivers in the world are driving some of the world's most capable cars, the North is still capable of humbling their attempts to keep it between the ditches. That problem is acute on the ice roads where as everyone knows, snowplow drivers sometimes change their minds about the route in the middle of a curve.

"On the road to Aklavik one year, we were in a turn in a beautiful (four-wheel) drift, going about 95 miles per hour -- not that we would ever do that, of course -- and the driver got nervous and lifted his foot off the throttle. The back end got light and came up, we spun three times and went off. What followed was a long philosophical discussion about what constituted a 'stuff'," Carlson said.

"I say a stuff is when you go off the road, he said it was one that you had to get out to get the car back on the road, so by his standards, it wasn't a stuff."

Driver Greg Hightower said the American drivers don't get much experience with the North.

"I come from Seattle, where battery blankets and block heaters are considered exotic mail-order parts," he joked.

Not so funny, really. Although the mild Tuesday morning was plug-in optional, two Audis in the race would not start and the Subarus did only grudgingly -- without block heaters, their southern crews stuck lightbulbs under the oil pans at night to keep them warm.

The rally took its name from the lost Mounties as a badge of respect, Carlson said.

"They couldn't admit they were lost and got down into the river valleys where they spent nine days wandering lost before turning around. They sound like rally guys to me."