Alaska - The Shivering Place

This beautiful stamp, recently issued by US Postal Service on 3rd January 2009 attracted me with its amazing scene of Alaska shown on the stamp !

U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp on the 50th Anniversary Alaska Statehood .In celebration of Alaska’s past, with the treaty ratification with Russia on April 9, 1867, the purchase and transfer to the United States on Oct. 18, 1867, to it becoming an official U.S. territory in 1912, and the 49th state on Jan. 3, 1959, Alaska remains “the last frontier.” The name of the state derives from an Aleut word meaning “great land.”

The stamp features Jeff Schultz’s photograph of a dog musher taken during the 2000 Iditarod. Fifteen degrees above zero, Schultz was 75 miles from the nearest town following the trail along the Rainey Pass just as the dog sled team raced across the foreground. Unlike any other race in the world, Iditarod competitors traverse more than 1,150 miles of the most extreme and beautiful terrain known to man to include mountain ranges, frozen rivers, dense forests, desolate tundra and windswept coastline