(U-WIRE) NORMAN, Okla. – In the northernmost city in the United States, two University of Oklahoma students trekked into polar bear country.

Barrow, Alaska, a small town with one of the world’s largest Eskimo settlements and a grocery store that sells snowmobiles, is where Andy Herringshaw, business senior, and Daniel Hattaway, geography senior, traveled for the show No Opportunity Wasted to make their dream a reality, or was it really their dream?

“We didn’t have that dream before the show,” Herringshaw admitted.

“We were just trying to find something that would get us on the show,” Hattaway said. “So we might have been cheating. I don’t know”

Herringshaw said he was at first trying to get on The Amazing Race with his fiancee. That idea soon fizzled as he found out he couldn’t because his fiancee wasn’t yet 21. He searched on the Internet and found No Opportunity Wasted, a new show on the Discovery Channel that gives its contestants $3,000 and 72 hours to fulfill a dream.

Herringshaw and Hattaway applied, and when they finally found out, the two men said they were surprised.

“We were at a baseball game,” Hattaway said. “The show’s host basically came down to the diamond and was standing on the pitchers mound and called us down while we were there at the Bricktown Ballpark. So we go down there, and they give us the flag and tell us to run. So then we try to figure out where we are supposed to be going cause we just left this baseball field and they tell us we need to go to Alaska.”

The pair went home, packed and headed to Alaska to start their dream of holding an Alaskan bike race. Their ideas didn’t go as well as they had hoped.

“It’s the nothernmost city on the continent, and for nine months out of the year, the ocean freezes over off of Barrow Point, and so we wanted to put our bike race on the ocean,” Herringshaw said.

The problems started there, as Hattaway pointed out.

“The ocean is not exactly smooth,” Hattaway said. “What you have are these drifts and then you’ll have holes. It’s almost impossible to ride on, and polar bears are out there.”

-Kelli Stegeman