LEAVING THE WARMTH of the Golden Hub Motel on day three, the videographer and I plan to use the 2XtM GPS with two-way radio to guide ourselves back to wherever the team is. But the guys either have forgotten to turn on their fancy device or have let the batteries die. And since we're in no-bars country, we swing into the one-room post office in Alamo, hoping to use a landline to call the guys' satellite phone.

Joanne, a middle-aged postal clerk with buggy glasses and curly red hair, asks if she can help. When I tell her we're with 2XtM, she perks up—she's been following it in the local paper and online. "Are they coming through here?" she asks excitedly.

"I dunno," I say.

Unprompted, she jumps on 2xtm.com, locates the team with the real-time-tracking tab, and says they're between County Roads 130 and 129, north of 89.

Sure enough, we find them kiting near the road, just beyond a frozen reservoir thick with bushy cattails, in the middle of a fierce whiteout.

"The kite is like an angry kangaroo on the end of a string!" bellows Sam.

"We pitched our tent next to a chicken coop last night," Jason tells me as he struggles to keep the team within sight of one another—a difficult task, given that swirling ice vapor has already made me queasy with vertigo.

Paul says little, mumbling that he has spent the past hour crashing and rolling through thigh-high prairie grass.

At twilight they clomp into Alamo and happen to run into Joanne, who immediately invites them to stay the night at her house. They decline graciously. She offers to drive them to the nearest place where she can buy them a hot dinner. No, thanks. She offers to bring them a hot dinner. Thank you, but no. She insists they at least stay inside. They finally relent and spend a warm night in a church, kites drying on the pews.

Repeatedly smothered by the brown gravy of midwestern kindness, they will end up staying in another church, a stranger's home, a Quonset hut, and a mobile home. Large meals will be set before for them, homemade cookies brought. A Hidatsa tribeswoman will organize a lakeside gathering of elders to cheer them on. The show of support is nothing less than flabbergasting.