Trail's end

Shana and I stayed up late again, carving away the small hours with dark chocolate and stories about her childhood in Papua New Guinea versus mine in suburban Salt Lake City. We'd just met 36 hours prior, when I showed up at her doorstep in Nome with a suitcase and a forlorn homeless puppy look on my face. She graciously offered a bit of floor space to sleep while I waited for Beat to reach the end of his journey. And in typical small-town Alaska fashion, Shana opened a broad window into her life until I felt like we were old friends and I'd lived in Nome for years. I'd run the ice-coated streets at sunset, waving at drivers on four-wheelers and children playing without hats or mittens at 20 degrees. Jumbled sea ice piled up against the horizon, not so far from Russia, but even that stark and forbidding view felt familiar. This tends to be my pattern in Alaska — wherever I go, it feels like home.

As we cleaned up the remaining dishes from dinner — a conglomeration of wilted, end-of-the-road vegetables that somehow transformed into a delicious curry — Beat called one last time from the trail. He was about eight miles outside of town, he told me. "But still a long ways out," he added. It was just after 1 a.m. I suited up and left the warm comfort of Shana's home to greet a stiff Northeast wind, piercing the eerie silence of night in far western Alaska.

Beat warned me he'd be slow on the sugary trail. I knew its condition, because I tried to ride out that way earlier in the afternoon. I borrowed a fat bike from Nome hospital administrator Phil Hofstetter, who recently completed the human-powered journey to his hometown, finishing the Iditarod Trail Invitational in just over 12 days. His bike was slightly worn out from the trip, with tires that couldn't be aired down without going flat. The Iditarod Trail was covered in new snow and wind drift. The soft surface had been churned up by racing snowmachines, and was only marginally rideable on a fat bike. Running parallel to the trail is a gravel road that is unmaintained and apparently not widely used by anyone in the winter. But I wondered if I'd make better progress braving the drifts and glare ice of the road rather than pushing the bike through the flat sugar trough that the Iditarod Trail had become. I might not make better time, I thought, but at least I'd have more fun.

Heavy machinery had cut and piled solidified snow chunks up to four feet high, which served as a wind barrier to capture all of the drifting snow. I waded in drifts up to my thighs, then rode 100 feet of glare ice, and then waded for another quarter mile or more — and then repeated this slow pattern for more than seven miles. Why I kept at it, I'm not sure. Hours trickled by. The sun drifted low on the horizon. I was moving well under three miles per hour, and Beat was still many miles away. If I'd been able to ride, I would have covered enough distance to spot him; but at this pace, no way, not unless I waded around out here until midnight. Still, the irrational hope remained. It had been so long, and he'd come so far.

At mile 13, the setting sun and the fact it was going to take another three and a half hours to get back coaxed me to turn around. On the return trip, I took advantage of low light to spot shimmering surfaces of rideable crust near the road. Riding cross-country over the windswept tundra was actually faster than adhering to the oppressive conditions of the road or trail — a freeing notion.

With the onset of darkness, I knew I'd have to stick to the trail to see Beat. I figured I'd only outpace him by a small margin, probably 5 mph versus 3, and I'd have to ride for about an hour to spot him. My legs felt heavy and a bit stiff after "riding" six hours earlier in the day. But then again, any effort compared to a Nome effort is not much of anything; so I shrugged it off and pedaled as hard as I could, which is the minimum such trail conditions demand. Temperatures had dropped to single digits under clear skies, but the wind made it feel much colder, and I shivered as I worked up an unavoidable sweat.

Just as I began to resent that I'd decided to come out here rather than snuggle up in my sleeping bag at Shana's house, I passed the final electric light at the edge of town and looked forward into unbending darkness. A sliver of moonlight framed the sharp edges of white mountains, and the northern horizon was filled with an undulating band of green light. I turned off my headlight and craned my necked sideways to stare at the Northern Lights, as slack-jawed and wonder-filled as I was the first time I watched them. The way they shimmer, the way they dance as though directed by some kind of cosmic choreographer. The bike swerved and pitched off the trail, and I didn't mind.

The wind moaned but everything else was quiet, almost unnervingly so. The flight from Anchorage to Nome spans hundreds of miles of pretty much nothing — no roads, very few visible lights, very few signs of any kind that modern humans could and have traversed that distance under their own power. I varied my gaze from the sky to the vast darkness in front of me and wondered at the world Beat had come to know over the past 17 days since he left me behind in McGrath. How magnificent the landscape must seem, and how tiny one must feel in comparison.

Through my sustained fixation on the Northern Lights, I nearly missed the unmistakable glow of a headlamp making its way toward me. I pedaled harder until the headlamp glow framed a dark silhouette, and then my own headlamp caught the reflective tape patterns I'd come to know so well over 350 miles of trail to McGrath. They danced in their familiar way for the final seconds before Beat and I were standing next to each other. He was so focused on the task at hand that he continued facing forward and marching toward the city lights I had so recently left behind. We chatted about the kind of things you chat about on the Trail — weather, surface conditions since he left White Mountain, how long he stopped to rest, how much further he had to go. "Four miles," he announced after looking at his GPS. I knew the number already, of course, but I nodded in that vague way I use to muster eternal if misinformed optimism. "Maybe less," I agreed.

After several minutes I pedaled forward to let Beat enjoy the final miles of his journey in his own head space, which is the way such miles should be savored. Twenty minutes went by and I could still look back on the sea ice and see his headlamp, and then my cell phone rang. "Do you see the Northern Lights? They're so amazing!" Indeed, the green band had spread across most of the sky, shimmering and dancing with renewed vigor as virgin white streaks sliced through the heart of the arch. Back in town, I returned the bike to Phil and walked over to Iditarod's burled arch, which marks the official finish. Front Street was completely deserted at 3 a.m., save for a single rusted taxi that rolled up and down the empty street, probably hoping I would change my mind about loitering and request a ride.

Beat waited until he passed the Nome Liquor Store to veer off the sea ice and climb the bank to Front Street, arriving in Nome at 3:52 a.m. after 25 days, 12 hours, and 52 minutes on the Iditarod Trail. It was his second finish of the thousand-mile trek, one of each on the Southern and Northern Routes. He let me give him a hug but refused to let me help him lift his heavy sled onto the platform, reasoning that he couldn't accept help until he "finished."

"How do you feel?" I asked.

He leaned against the wooden pillar and smiled. "Tired," he answered. "Pretty much just tired."

I didn't have the long perspective of the walk, and couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. "I'm so proud of you," I said, and hugged him again.

"I'm glad to be done," Beat said. But as he spoke I noticed him glancing west, as though looking for the trail's non-existent continuation.

Modern Romance, part four

Four years ago, I wrote a series of posts about communing with a mountain in Juneau called Thunder Mountain during the winter of 2009-2010. You can read them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Rain patters the windshield, accumulating in a conga line of drops dancing joyfully as the wipers chase them off stage. I watch this with old eyes, a strip of exposed film that was long ago shot, and forgotten, and unintentionally spooled through the camera again. The double exposure confuses me. I am driving on memory auto-pilot, but where am I going? "Oh yes, this is Egan Drive, and soon there's going to be a turn. What was the name of the road? Glacier Road? Mendenhall Loop? And then there was another turn, on a neighborhood street. What made me think I'd remember the exact turn? It's been four years since I've been here. But, four years, how is that possible? Where have I been?" The rain continues to fall as it always falls, at least in the view of my old eyes.

I park the car and launch a familiar ritual — strapping snowshoes haphazardly to a pack, pulling up the hood of my waterproof shell, putting mittens on my hands and microspikes over my shoes. Standing up straight, I see a familiar profile coyly lurking behind satin curtains of mist.

 Hello, Thunder Mountain.

 My old eyes scan the forest floor for hints of a trail. An inch of new snow covers the mulch and moss, effortlessly erasing any sign of the path. There are pieces I remember — the blueberry bush mud shoot, the deadfall staircase, the root wall. But I have to admit to myself that these distinct fragments are just that; they do not form a whole, and they won't guide me through the maze of moss-coated spruce and skeletal devil's club. My mind flips through the double-exposed film, exposing it again. There's the creek that the rotten wood boards spanned in the summer time. There's the big overturned stump whose image always enters my thoughts when I ride my bike through redwood forests near my home in California. California? Is that where I've been? Did all of that really happen?

 I begin the mittens-on-roots climb up the mountainside when I locate tracks. Human tracks, three sets of them, so far only pointed in one direction, and at least one set distinctly belongs to a person wearing XtraTufs. Who around here wears rubber boots to hike up this particular mountain in decidedly crappy weather on a Monday? A grin spreads across my face. "Bjorn," I think. Bjorn is an old Juneau friend who introduced the basic mountaineering concepts that enabled me to begin visiting these steep mountains in the wintertime. Thanks to his simple tips and encouragement, I found new courage to pick my way up an icy slope, trudge through thigh-deep drifts, chip ax steps up a snow wall, and face the mountains in their quietest, harshest, most raw state of beauty. I could see them with new eyes, and fall in love in a whole new way.

 After another 800 vertical feet in something like a quarter mile, I encounter the makers of the tracks I was so gratefully following, making their return trip. Sure enough, it was Bjorn and his brothers, and I so expected the tracks to belong to him that the serendipitous nature of the encounter didn't even register. Bjorn and I actually met on a mountain, in much the same way, and I can barely remember ever seeing him off the mountains. We embrace, exchange quick catch-ups, and he warns me about fresh wolf tracks near the trail. And that's it — just a short reunion, but it gives me pause. "It's kind of strange," I think, "to just bump into Geoff on a mountain on Friday, and then Bjorn today." In both cases, their groups were the only other people I saw out there, in four-plus hours on the trail. People flicker in and out of our lives so unceremoniously, like blurred figures burned into double-exposed film. They look like ghosts now, but there was a time when we stood side-by-side at focal points, sharp moments in our lives when all of the noise of the present converged, and we could see the lines to our futures, and everything changed.

 After another 700 vertical feet, my cell phone rings. Beat is calling on his satellite phone from a shelter cabin between Koyuk and Elim, two weather-ravaged villages on the Bering Sea Coast, about 150 miles from Nome. His voice sounds more ragged every day. It breaks my heart, every time, even though I can hear the happiness in his words, too. I don't cope well with thoughts of his suffering, even while I relate to the intense dynamic of it all, the soaring highs and soul-rending lows of life on the Trail. My own life is far away now — in Juneau, in the recent past — and I struggle back to the surface to take in everything he has to say. His current conditions report is falling snow, and wind, and snowshoeing through deep and sticky powder at 31 degrees. He asks me how my day is going. "I'm out for a snowshoe hike," I say. "It's snowing, and windy, and yeah, I'm pretty sure it's even 31 degrees. I'm in the trees now, but once I get up on the ridge, the wind is probably going to be really bad. I will go there, and I will think of you."

 The ridge juts skyward at almost impossibly steep grades, covered knee-deep in wet powder, and my progress slows to almost a standstill. One step forward nets two sliding back, scrambling on all fours like a goat trying to climb a water slide. I have no intention of going all the way to the top of the mountain, as the final pitch is a twenty-foot vertical headwall that Bjorn, in the past, has described as "avalanchey" in new snow events. But I figured I could climb to a hundred or so feet below the headwall, down in the last stand of scraggly trees on the ridge, before turning around. Still, this effort is ridiculous. The headwind is ripping through cracks between hastily applied goggles and a buff. Occasional gusts drive brief whiteout blizzards so intense that snow packs into the arm openings of my coat. The surface has almost zero traction — heavy powder sitting on top of an icy crust layer. I wouldn't make much slower forward progress if I started crawling backward. But I think of Beat, and his struggle, every day in storms for so many miles, so much worse than this. Solidarity is as good a reason to climb a mountain as any.

 Thunder Mountain, I already know, does not care about love and solidarity. Thunder Mountain does not care that four years have passed since I walked its slopes, bearing my soul to the wind and to the silence. Thunder Mountain does not care that it was right here, on this ridge, that I found the courage and made the decision to quit my job, leave this town, and strike out into the unknown without even knowing what I was looking for. Thunder Mountain does not care that I since went on to move away from this state I so love, met an amazing person who has helped me explore a much wider range of the world, formed a new passion for traveling long distances on foot, and found the freedom to pursue something that has been a core part of my identity since I first took a red crayon to lined paper and organized known letters into still-unknown words. Thunder Mountain does not care that an infinitely small amount of time has still managed to accumulate a lifetime's worth of incredible experiences, and burned them onto the filmstrip of my memories with bright and bold colors that shine through on the grayest of days. I think about Beat and feel a murmur in my heart as cold blood sinks to my toes. Four years ago I convinced myself I could love only mountains and live with the ghosts. But now I know that I was wrong. I cannot live with ghosts alone. Beat is far away and here on Thunder Mountain I feel only the icy sting of loneliness, because Thunder Mountain does not care.

Time is on fast-forward now, moving too quickly, swirling through the snow before it's whisked into the gray expanse. I see a set of big canine tracks running parallel to my own, and remember that Bjorn and his brothers did not have a dog with them. Once I return to the relative safety of the forest, I turn on my iPod to chip away at the unsettling quiet. After shuffling through several songs, but not enough to make it seem anything but serendipitous, I find "Modern Romance" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In a rare showing of Shuffle patience, I listen to all the minutes of static silence after the song, which arrives at the hidden track:

"Baby, I'm afraid of a lot of things 
But I ain't scared of loving you. 
And baby I know you're afraid of a lot of things 
But don't be scared of love."

Juneau, again

I lived in Juneau for all of four years, between 2006 and 2010, after one year of living in Homer. I've already surpassed the three-year mark in Los Altos, a number that unsettles me because I'm dangerously close to becoming more of a Californian than I ever was an Alaskan. I also suspect I'll always be more of a rambler than a homebody, but a couple of places just feel like home. Salt Lake City — the place where I grew up — obviously. And Juneau, Alaska.

On Thursday, I boarded another plane and flew home for a visit. When I stepped out of the airport, the thermometer read 39 degrees and a mist of rain wafted on a stiff breeze. I walked across the wet tarmac with the knowledge that this was the last time all week that my shoes would be dry, stopped a moment to blink droplets off my eyelashes, and smiled. Oh, so good to be home.

 The fat bike stayed in Anchorage, so this weekend I struck back out on foot, facing a host of minor physical issues that the the bike allowed me to ignore up until now. My legs just feel tired; muscle aches, especially in my quads, crop up early and stay the whole way. My right shin is still sensitive, IT bands are tight, and the skin on both feet is a mess. Even after just an hour of being wet again, it shrivels up and makes my toes look like mummified grasshoppers, and the bottoms of my feet start to hurt in that same aggravating way all over again. But March in Alaska is not about recovery, it's about cramming as much experience into limited windows as possible. And in Juneau, when it's 30-something degrees and intermittently and sometimes simultaneously raining, snaining, blizzarding, and blasting wind, one does not rest. One hikes!

I got out on the Dan Moller Trail for a rainy day snowshoe through heavy wet slush on Friday. This turned into an 11-mile, 4.5-hour outing when I bumped into my ex-boyfriend Geoff, who was running with a group of friends. He lives in Juneau during the summers but currently spends most of the year in Colorado. He just happened to be in town because a friend of his recently died. I doubled back on another ascent toward the ridge to chat, but turned around when a hard bonk hit and I was starting to fade from the group anyway.

After catching up more at dinner last night, Geoff and I planned another outing today on Mount Roberts with our friend Dan and his girlfriend, Marisha. Geoff and I share a dynamic similar to old friends: We're not close, we only infrequently e-mail each other, and we haven't spoken face-to-face in 18 months. But put us together again and within five minutes we're avidly discussing events that happened in 2003 as though they happened last week. This is probably true of a lot of former relationships, but it's rewarding to learn what remains when all of the hurt and confusion finally fades away. Just like memories of a grueling race — we let time whittle away the excess and keep what's left at the core: Good times.

 Good times like taking a beating in Juneau's infamous Taku Wind. Today's conditions were a little breezy. I am woefully out of practice in both snowshoeing and Juneau-specific hiking, and took an unnerving tumble while trudging uphill at what felt like a 45 degree angle leaning into the crosswind. Lying with my face half buried in snow, I plunged one trekking pole into the crust out of instinct and nearly lost the other to the gusts. I wasn't actually going to blow off the mountain, but it sure felt like it. When the group reconvened again, everyone was discussing the various reasons they weren't necessarily feeling it today. Dan, who is training to run the White Mountains 100, already ran 24 miles before he met up with us. Geoff has health issues that seem to be exacerbated by travel and sleep deprivation, and was feeling downtrodden. I couldn't hear Marisha over the wind, but I cited being "a lot less than sure-footed" as my reason for being perfectly happy with turning around.

Down we ran, back to the iced-over, muddy safety of the Sitka spruce forest. The weather here is so terrible. I missed it, so much.