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My youngest daughter, Sydney, 11, came to “work” with me on Tuesday.

That is a solar halo in the sky behind Syd, on the Steese Highway at 12-Mile Summit. It’s not a camera lens trick. You can see a small sun dog, or parhelion, to the right. She’s not as miserable as she looks; she’s just 11 and standing in front of a camera. Later on we were laughing about how cold we were and just how hard the wind was blowing atop the summit.

A few hours earlier we had flown over that very spot in a Cessna Grand Caravan with Everts Air Alaska. Our pilot, Clint, told us the air temperature was a balmy 30 degrees — about 70 degrees warmer than last week at this time.

The official Take Your Daughter to Work Day is April 24 (plan ahead Moms and Dads), but I’ve always thought any day I can have my kids at work with me is a good one.

So when it began to look like we were short of volunteers to retrieve the News-Miner vehicle used for Yukon Quest coverage from Circle, I began thinking about a great opportunity for a “working day” with Syd.

Every year the nice folks in the News-Miner Circulation Department arrange for one of our delivery trucks to be used as a press vehicle to cover the Yukon Quest. Canadian journalists and the KUAC reporter usually share the ride with a News-Miner reporter and photographer. The Canadians then help our staff with rides on the Yukon side of race.

The thing is that once they leave Circle and head to Eagle, someone needs to retrieve the vehicle that has been left at the end of the road. Over the past 25 years we’ve managed that retrieval with every combination of logistics imaginable.

The last time I did this we ended up in an ordeal involving musher Francois Varigas. He commandeered the News-Miner Suburban to take his team from Eagle Summit down to Central so he could scratch. Former staff photographer Mike Mathers and I were atop Eagle Summit. Francois came along and was in no mood to negotiate. The truck was there and he was getting into it. A couple of the dogs and a pile of harnesses were stuffed in the back of my old Bronco II. The sled was hoisted atop the Suburban and tied down, and off we went to find Francois’ handler in Central.

A rule about dog teams in company trucks (it had something to do with dog vomit and other sled dog by-products) was born of that misadventure.

This time I bought tickets to Circle and Sydney and I hopped the plane to Circle.

It was Sydney’s first time in a small(ish) plane. A Caravan is luxurious as small planes go. She was nervous, initially, but how can anyone not love a smooth ride over the White Mountains in February. Syd’s digital camera had a 1-gig memory card and fresh batteries when we left home. It was dead by mid-afternoon.

As for career education, Sydney is much more interested in photography, writing and video than other things we talked about. Flying is fun, but being a pilot seems a little risky, she said. She’d never thought about being one of those people who drive those big snowplows like the ones that keep Eagle Summit cleared, but those did look pretty cool.

She is really sure she doesn’t want to be a musher, though, and that is truly fine by me.