Juneau to Tok

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." It seems that every time I am in some kind of transition, both positive and negative, everything around me becomes more vibrant and memorable. Light intensifies, colors sharpen, and seemingly rare or unlikely events stack up, as though the universe itself is nodding its approval in my direction. This trip, which has the simple purpose of shuttling my belongings from Juneau to Anchorage, so far has been spectacular.

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. Easter Sunday to three inches of fresh snow. I drove to the ferry terminal feeling as though I was emerging from deep water, slow and breathless. I tried to shake off the two hours I had slept and gazed dreamily at the ghostly trees, powder-drenched and glowing in the pre-dawn moonlight. Juneau has had so little sea-level snow in 2010 that I had almost forgotten how beautiful the city becomes when washed white.

When I pulled my car up to the boat, the purser asked me where I drove from that morning. "Douglas," I replied. "Wow," he said, "You actually managed to get that here?," referring to my overloaded, small and old, low-riding car that I had to plow through three inches of wet snow along 15 miles of uncleared streets. I realized that new snow in Juneau likely also meant new snow in Skagway, which did not bode well for Geo's ascent of White Pass. I tried to put that fact out of my mind, hoping providence would intervene. I stood out on the side deck as the ferry pulled away, watching as my former house at Fritz Cove, Thunder Mountain and the Mendenhall Glacier faded into the distance. It was all so fantastically beautiful, dusted with snow and wisps of clouds. I indulged in a few tears because I was having a much harder time leaving it behind than I'd expected, and it felt good to physically acknowledge it.

But a six-hour ferry ride injected with several unsatisfying 10-minute naps will dull even the sharpest heartbreak, and by the time I reached Skagway, I was just glad to see that the clouds were breaking up and there didn't seem to be any new snow on the road. White Pass, miles 0 to 14, was one of my biggest worries for making this trip with my car, because it's steep with regular bad weather and limited maintenance. Happily, the road was clear and I reached the top without any mishaps. The first sunlight of the day broke out right at the top, where I stopped to take this picture at the U.S./Canada border. I think I was more proud of Geo for making the climb than I ever have been of myself for doing the same on a bicycle.

I arrived to my friends' house in Whitehorse just in time for an Easter Sunday barbecue, with Arctic char and grilled vegetables. Talk about good timing! Sierra and I went for a walk along the ridge above town in the warm, calm air of late evening (it stays light here until nearly 10 p.m., already.)

I also learned that in Canada, Easter Monday is a holiday as well. Which meant my friends were available for a Monday morning ride on a tight, rolling loop of foot-packed snow singletrack. I actually haven't ridden my bike once since returning from Fairbanks. My knee still bothers me when I turn pedals, but I could hardly resist such an opportunity.

I felt sorely out of practice and had a difficult time finding a flow. Even taking it easy off the back of the group, I still hooked one tree, and another time dropped into a rut and flipped over the handlebars into a mercifully soft snowbank. The trail was quite icy and really encouraged speed, not always a good thing. But it was tons of fun. In fact, riding really doesn't get any better in the north in April. Anchorage is probably already well into its spring slush phase, and Juneau has been in that phase since November.

After the ride, it was time to roll northwest. It was a beautiful day for driving, about 35 degrees, partly cloudy with generous hits of sunlight. I kept my window rolled down and blasted the heat at the same time, both in an effort to keep my car from overheating and to breathe the crisp, sweet air. I happily drank can after can of Diet Pepsi (when I am driving, I let myself drink as much caffeine as I want. I will worry about the cavities and cancer when I am not operating a vehicle.) I was in a great mood and even let my cat, who has been in a perpetual state of annoyance since I moved her out of my old house, out of her kennel so she could sit on my lap. Shortly after I did this, we came upon a lynx prowling alongside the road. "Look Cady," I said to my cat as though I was cooing at a 2-year-old, "Big Kitty."

I stopped the car and watched as the lynx repeatedly dove into the snow and sometimes emerged with a small rodent in its mouth. It would gulp down the tiny gray morsel and continue on its way, not caring in the least that I was inching my car down the road beside it like the worst kind of gawking RV tourist. Luckily, there was no traffic. Cady propped herself up on the windowsill and mewed quietly for several seconds before deciding to crawl below the driver's seat. I followed the lynx for about five minutes, completely enthralled as it hunted and prowled, watching its giant feet move effortlessly over the crusty snowpack. Every few steps, one of its thick legs would punch all the way though, and I felt emboldened by the realization that even lynx posthole sometimes.

Here's a pixilated shot with the digital zoom. As much as I love photo-documenting, there are actually relatively few times that I feel truly cheated by the fact that I do not own a "real" camera. Today was one of those times.

The wildlife sightings stacked up heavily throughout the Yukon. I saw a bull moose standing alone in a field. I watched two small groups of caribou dart across the road. Near Destruction Bay, I came upon a coyote standing in the middle of the road. I had to hit the brakes and slow to a near halt before it finally moved out of the way. As I began to drive forward again, it trotted alongside me - obviously, this poor coyote had been fed at some point, and thus has become unnaturally interested in cars.

It was a beautiful creature, though. Big ears, shiny fur. Even habituated as it was, it is a special experience to look so closely into the eyes of a wild predator. I continued driving to keep it from actually approaching my window, and it kept running alongside the car. Cady, who emerged from the seat after we slowed down, even crawled onto my lap again to see what all the commotion was about. When she saw the coyote, she hissed loudly the same way she does when she sees a dog. The coyote jumped back, obviously startled, and I laughed out loud. Some animal interactions know no boundaries.

I made it to Tok before sunset and decided to stop here for the night. I wanted to camp, but the low temperature is supposed to be 14 tonight and I didn't know how well my cat would handle that inside the car. I'm hoping my knee will loosen up for a short ride in the morning, maybe on the famous "bike path to nowhere," before coaxing Geo the final 350 miles into Anchorage.

A weekend of goodbyes

Friday and Saturday were wonderful days. Juneau put on its best early spring face: Filtered sunshine, sharp wind and warm rain. There were many goodbyes, many parting words, but for now, there is only time for photos.

Spring snowshoeing in the slush: Short sleeves and trench foot.

Mount Jumbo in repose.

Ready Bullion, polished by the sun.

Downtown Juneau.

Looking north, to the future.

Rainbow over Douglas Harbor.

Gulls at the mouth of Sheep Creek.

Waiting for that next hit of rain.

Finally, crust after 45 minutes of postholing.

Smiling in the wind.

My last alpine stomp before I leave town — the bowl beneath West Peak.

Wind, sun and snow, all at once.

Loaded up to go in downtown Juneau. The ferry leaves at 7 a.m. Sunday. That old car could probably use a few Easter prayers.

Goodbye to Blackerby

I've been sucked into the vortex of the last days, trying to see everyone and do everything. It's been a bit of a whirlwind, manic and subdued at the same time. But there is still time - really, there's always time - to get out for few hours and say goodbye to the quieter places that I keep close to my heart. One of my favorite places in Juneau is Blackerby Ridge, and a quick jaunt up there on an early April morning reminds me of the many things I am going to miss about Juneau:

The old-growth Sitka spruce trees, some of them eight feet in diameter, many of them just stumps now, but all a reminder of the richness of this land.

The first buds of spring, filling the air with sweet, succulent smells while hard, cold winter lingers just a few thousand feet higher.

Hard, cold winter, with a sharp wind blowing shards of ice along an open expanse of white. Juneau does get it sometimes, even in April, if you know where to look for it.

And that's what makes the Southeast Coast so unique in Alaska and in the world - this diversity of landscape wedged into a tiny geographical area. With the continental divide looming just a dozen or so direct miles from the coast, we have everything from marine shorelines to rich rainforests to swampy muskeg to alpine tundra to sweeping deserts of rock and ice, along with all of the crazy weather that accompanies such places. I'm going to miss it.

And of course, on more personal level, I'm going to miss Blackerby Ridge.

Last day at the office

I have the best view from my office. True, my back is turned to it most of the time, where I sit facing a wall, planted like a slug with eyes fixated on a screen while my fingers frantically adjust imaginary words and pictures. But on rare (increasingly more rare) occasions, I stand up and walk to the window, where my second-story workplace looks over Gastineau Channel. In the summer, the salmon return to the hatchery across the street. Their smooth bodies churn up the shallow water, a roiling silver mass of gulping mouths and leaping tails. People line the shoreline with fishing poles — snaggers — plucking the fish out of the chaos in fantastic leaps and fights. Sea lions come too, and every once in a great while, orca whales, plying the narrow channel between two civilized towns. In the fall, I watch ribbons of fog caress the mountains, flowing like silk down a thick carpet of spruce trees. Snow creeps lower until it touches sea water, and then I know it is winter. During long stretches of cold, the channel sometimes freezes over. Tiny ice-breaking tug boats guide massive barges through the cracked white surface. The sun arcs low behind Douglas Island, casting the building in near-continuous shadow. Slowly, the sun climbs higher, reaching farther to the north, and then I know it is spring. Snow creeps back up the mountain, children run barefoot through the wet grass, and the return of the salmon is just a few short weeks away.

Wednesday, March 31. Thick clouds envelop the hillside, but there's a break in the west, a shimmer of sunlight, casting a golden glow on the water. I stand on the balcony to soak in the moist air, clogged with the earthy smells and sweet taste of new life. This view, this job, has been the one constant in my life since I first strolled into the office on Aug. 7, 2006. Since then, I've moved three times (at least three times, and that's just counting my permanent residences.) I've lost a relationship. I've watched friends come and go. I've watched co-workers come and go. I've left town myself and wondered whether I'd ever really come back. But the office was always here. It was always waiting for my return.

I breathe deep and realize this may be the last time I'll stand here. I feel a rush of emotion, manufactured maybe, a mixture of nostalgia and mourning for a past that will never return. I realize that once I step away from this office, I will release the last anchor in my life, the last one, and will truly become a vessel adrift at sea. There will be no ice-breaking tugs, no narrow channel to guide me home. There will only be a vast and unbroken ocean, and unlimited directions from which to travel.

Dark descends as I finish up the day's work. I clean out my desk, extracting little trinkets I haven't thought about in three and a half years. There's the hand-drawn sign my co-workers made me when I returned from the Great Divide last summer. There's the glass award I received from the Society of Professional Journalists for best news page design. There's the emergency Power Bar that is at least three years old. I stuff them all in a plastic bag. The office is strangely still, quiet. As usual, I am the last one to leave. The goodbyes have been said. The newspaper has been put to bed. I do what I've done most every Wednesday night for the past three and a half years — I turn out the lights, descend a flight of stairs, and step into the cool night.

As I gaze into your skies

As the reality sets in that this is my last week in Juneau, I find myself obsessing about the surrounding mountains. If the clouds lift just enough to reveal steep, spruce-clogged hillsides and snowy ridgelines, I can't take my eyes off them. In fact, if you live in Juneau and at any time during the next week happen to see a red Geo Prism with four tires strapped to the roof driving down the highway, you should probably just swerve well clear, because there is a good chance I am not looking at the road, but rather gazing up at the towering skyline.

These oh-so-accessible and yet mysterious mountains have long been my favorite thing about living in Juneau. A friend and I went out Saturday night, and I was trying to explain to her my "Juneau Burnout," which I insisted not only existed in my job and living situation, but even singed the edges of my favorite recreational activities.

"That makes a lot of sense," she said. "I mean, how many times can you climb Mount Jumbo, really?"

The statement suddenly struck me, because although I feel almost irreconcilably worn out by the same old roads and the same old trails, part of me feels like I could run up Mount Jumbo 100 times — and, if I count all my partial ascents on training runs, my own four-year total is probably at least half that — and still love it every time. I'm going to miss Mount Jumbo, along with every cornice and sloping contour that I have come to know so well.

My hope before I left town was to climb as many "my" mountains as possible. Since I came back from Fairbanks, reality has set in that I have neither the time nor the physical health to bid these mountains a proper goodbye. My knee is coming around, but it's still stiff. Today I went for a mellow run up the Salmon Creek trail to loosen it up. It probably seems strange that while I cope with an overuse injury commonly called "Runner's Knee," I can run but not ride a bicycle. The problem with my knee isn't an impact thing, it's an angle thing — namely acute angles. The knee starts to hurt when I bend it beyond about 75 degrees. Cycling demands sharper angles with every rotation, while the only time runners bend that much is when they're sprinting or trying to clear hurdles. (Note: I took this photo at the midway point of the trail where I stopped to do some stretches. The leg I'm successfully bending is my left i.e. "good" knee.)

Today, as I shuffled up Salmon Creek, a beautiful blue sucker hole revealed the looming mass of Observation Peak. That 5,000-foot, broad pyramid of rock is a place I have wanted to visit for four years now, but weather or time limitations have thwarted every attempt. And now, with one bad knee and no hope of going there in the next week, I could only stare wistfully at Observation, now a monument to missed opportunity, mocking my narrow definition of Burnout.

"You think you've been everywhere in Juneau," the mountain whispered. "You haven't been anywhere. You haven't seen anything."

And I could only breathe loudly in resigned agreement. Much of my self-identity, and much of my happiness, is based in discovery. And much of my excitement about moving has little to do with the location and more to do with the fact that everything will be entirely new — new roads, new trails. New mountains. And yet the more I discover, the more I understand that there is infinitely more to be discovered — as Ani Difranco sings, "Try to keep your eye on the big picture; the picture just keeps getting bigger."

I am not done with Juneau, not by a long shot. But I do feel strongly that I need to step away for a while, if only to appreciate all of the spaces I'll never truly know.

These last days

This post-race week has been more than a bit of a blur. After I rolled into the finish I waited nearly four hours to catch a ride back to town. At first I just sat in the "heating" tent and shivered; then I finally wrestled my boots back on and schlepped the 500 frigid yards to John's wind-blasted truck to grab my winter sleeping bag. I sat in a camp chair and cocooned myself in a -40-degree down shell and completely passed out as finishing racers, Arctic winds and commotion swirled around me.

Chris and I caught a ride back to Fairbanks with Robin Beebee and her husband, and we each succeeded in catching about a two-hour nap before John arrived at home and it was time to eat a half dozen meals and swap race stories. Skiers shuffled in and out of the house all day, telling tales of the trail, showing off battle scars and trying to remember faces and names as the line between consciousness and dreams became more and more blurred. I was up chatting with Ed and company until nearly 2 a.m., and at 4:30 I was suddenly awakened by a call from a taxi driver, asking why no one answered when he knocked on the door. I was so completely fargone that I stood at the window for several seconds, wondering why this yellow car was waiting for me and where exactly I was. And then I remembered — I was supposed to be up at 4! I have a 6 a.m. flight to catch! Thank you, Mr. Taxi Driver, for not abandoning me when I slept in!

By 10 a.m. I was back in Juneau, where six inches of wet snow coated the Mendenhall Valley. My Juneau taxi driver became stuck in my driveway and I had to help push him out. I spent an hour shoveling out my car and much of the lower half of Hughes Way because my knee was locked up and there was no way I could bike commute to work, and anyway, Pugsley was already on his way to Anchorage. I finally succeeded in freeing my car and then I went to work. I've been a gimpy zombie ever since.

Actually, I've just been preoccupied with packing, sorting, showing up on time for various appointments and visiting friends. With the exception of my knee, the after-effects of the White Mountains 100 wore off quickly. The feeling came back to my fingers by Wednesday morning. I finally got a full night of sleep on Wednesday night. My shoulders felt pinched, but beyond that I had no muscle soreness — a habit from my Tour Divide days, where I tend to ride at a pace I'd feel physically comfortable sustaining for 24 days, even though it would make sense, in a one-day race, to push for a pace I might only be able to sustain for 24 hours. I'm OK with that, though. I had a super fun race and it's nice, despite the crazy travel schedule, not to emerge from it feeling fully wrecked.

My right knee, though, has a few problems. I have been very gentle with it since returning to Juneau, icing every night, applying blue goop, taking Advil, massaging and stretching. Today I finally went to the gym and tried a gentle spin on the elliptical trainer. It loosened up nicely, but I haven't yet gained back the range of motion I'd need to ride a bicycle. Gah! I genuinely thought I was out of the water with this knee, being that it survived the 24-day Tour Divide without issue. But obviously there were things I failed to do, from my limited bike training right down to the adjustments for my Pugsley (I rode the race with my seatpost low because of all the 'techy' maneuvers.)

Not much I can do about it now but recover. I've made enough improvement in the past few days that I do think I'm not in for an extended recovery. And now is really an good time to take it easy anyway. I have to move out of my apartment by March 31, which means I have three more days to figure out how to transfer all of the belongings I wish to keep into the compartment of a Geo Prism (I love this part of moving: Prioritize, simplify, and purge.) Then I'm going to float around for a few days before catching a ferry out of town on April 4. There were lots of things I wanted to accomplish before leaving Juneau, but the combination of my Angry Knee and a rather dismal weather forecast may mean a more subdued goodbye to the beautiful Southeast.

Either way, I am really going to try to soak it all in before this, too, fades to memory.

White Mountains 100, part 2

I pulled into the Windy Gap cabin, mile 62, at 7:25 p.m. A sliver of evening sun still hung above the mountains — one of the glorious benefits of spring. But it didn't feel like spring, with a sharp wind tearing down the canyon as air temperatures plummeted. I ducked inside the small cabin, which was packed with racers. Ted, Brian, Chris and Scott were all there, as were two Fairbanks cyclists — Rocky Reifenstuhl and his wife, Gail Koepf. It seemed I had joined a tight-knit group of bikers and skiers, although on the outside we mostly traveled alone. I greedily accepted my allotted serving of three meatballs and rice. I didn't even wait for it to cool before I wolfed down the deliciously throat-searing meal. I could have eaten three times as much, and was beginning to understand why the race organizers limited the servings — otherwise, it would probably already be gone. Every scrap of wood, food, water and supplies had to be hauled in over dozens of miles of trail by volunteers on snowmobiles. It was all so precious — so hard to ride away from. Still, I was burning daylight. I hoped to get some pictures of sunset before I faced the final 40 miles of the race in the dark. So as quickly as I entered the cabin, I left.

Outside, I tried to take some pictures, but my camera was no longer working. Cold battery. Oh well. I started pedaling into the growing twilight, with a thick wedge of the moon casting a soft glow on snow-covered hillsides. The wind started to let up, which was disappointing, because it was finally at my back. It was replaced by a deepening cold, which seemed to pierce through the still air. I climbed up a long hill, generating a furnace of heat in my core, but my fingers and legs started to sting. I launched into a long descent, and by the time I dropped into the next valley, my fingers and legs were tingling and my butt had become almost completely numb.

I stopped to put my gloves back on and contemplated changing out my layers. I had an extra insulation layer in my bag, but it would require stripping down to my base layer to pull it on, which would mean removing my hard boots and the many insulating layers around my feet. It seemed easier to wait until the next checkpoint, which I estimated was about 10 miles away. I forget that on my snow bike, 10 miles often amounts to two hours. All I was wearing on my legs was a pair of thin spandex tights and soft shell pants. It had been perfect for the sunlit daytime weather, but was no match for temperatures that had already dropped 30 degrees and were still rapidly plummeting. I'm from the Southeast Coast. I'm not used to wild swings in temperatures. I thought I just wasn't pedaling hard enough. So I tried to ride harder.

It's a frustrating exercise — trying to use cold muscles that just won't warm up. The brain can make them spin the rotations, but it's helpless to add power. And meanwhile, the muscles' heat output lessens, the cold cuts deeper, and basically what is happening is the body is slipping into hypothermia, one cell layer at a time. Shivering kicked in. I thought, "OK, I have to work harder." And I thought I was working harder. But if I had looked at my watch, if I had looked at my GPS, it probably would have revealed that I was moving ever slower. But I didn't look at those things. I only looked at my thermometer, which appeared to have dipped beneath 10 below. And, of course, the intelligent thing to do would have been to stop riding my bike and start applying my insulation layers and chemical warmers. But cold bodies do not want to stop. They want to find warmth. And I was convinced the checkpoint had to be close.

I dropped into Beaver Creek, where even on numb skin I could feel another sharp dip in the temperature. The thermometer was frosted over and difficult to read. The red line looked bottomed out at 20 below. I remembered Jeff Oatley telling me the night before that Beaver Creek was the lowest — and therefore coldest — point on the course. "If you get cold on Beaver Creek, just keep riding. It will get warmer," he said. And the checkpoint had to be close. But the cold air filtered through my ice-coated face mask and filled my lungs with fire. I yanked the face mask down, gasping and coughing until I could breathe again, but then my nose began to sting. I pulled the mask up, and again, I could not breathe. I coughed and sputtered and shifted my mask, alternating between breathing free and trying to thaw my cheeks and nose. I was finally ready to just stop and deal with it all — building a fire if I had to — when I saw a sign indicating the checkpoint was only a mile away. I coughed the whole way there — the longest mile in the history of distance. Even though the trail was flat, sloping slightly downhill on the creek bed, my speed was barely above a crawl. I didn't really notice, though. Time had essentially stopped for me. I was moving as though in a dream, in slow motion, no longer fully conscious and therefore no longer accountable for the poor decisions I had made.

It was nearly midnight when I reached the Borealis-LeFevre Cabin, mile 82. I was incredulous, because I could not figure out how four hours had passed since I left the last checkpoint. But first things first — I had to thaw out. I stumbled into the cabin with a head ringed in ice.

"It's cold for me out there," I announced. "Yeah, I'm from Juneau."

"It's cold for everyone out there," the checker said. "Last I looked outside, it was 15 below."

"My thermometer said 20 below," I said.

"Sounds about right, down on the river," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's negative 25."

I pulled off my coat and the inside was coated in frost, as was my polar fleece pullover. "Wow," the checker said. "You're pretty wet."

"Yeah," I said. I opened my mouth to formulate an excuse, but I had none. I had made the most basic error, sweating myself out during the day and going into the cold night partly soaked. I hadn't even realized I had sweat that much during the day. A race volunteer asked me if I wanted hot chocolate. I nodded, but the drink wasn't really hot; it was barely warm. He placed the cup in my hands and I clenched my numb fingers around it. After he had turned away, my hand started convulsing uncontrollably and I spilled a bunch on the seat. I quickly mopped it up with my sleeve, hoping he didn't notice. These volunteers were going to think I was completely incompetent and call in an evacuation.

So I did my best to hide the tears in my eyes as my numb body parts came back to life. The bulk of the pain was in my butt and fingers, which looked swollen and red. My toes, the body part I had been so worried about, were basically fine. I had insulated them in so many layers that they were essentially a self-contained unit, but I hadn't really thought through the rest of my kit, at least not the needed layer changes for temps ranging from 25 above to 25 below. I carefully pulled off my softshell pants and put on long johns, then dry liner socks, then a dry base layer and insulation layer on my torso. I cracked open a bunch of chemical warmers and placed them in my boots, mittens and — when no one was looking — stuffed some down my tights. Others in the cabin were in various states of distress. Gail was severely dehydrated and in the first stages of shock. Chris told me his ski boots were too cold and his feet were giving him trouble. I was so wrapped up in my own issues that I didn't even think to offer him some of my warmers — he later told me he didn't have any of his own — an oversight I'm still kicking myself over.

For a while I sat and ate and waited for my body to warm up. I considered rolling out my sleeping bag and resting a while, but the cabin itself wasn't very warm. It was enough to bring my frozen body parts back to life but not the kind of place I wanted to stick around, especially since I finally had enough layers to deal with the temperatures outside. Moving seemed better than sitting. So an hour after I checked in, I checked out, returning to the tomb-like air outside.

The warmers, long johns and new balaclava seemed to make all the difference. The brutal cold stayed away from my skin and my core burned with new warmth. I even took the time to adjust my seat post and move my sagging seat post bag to the front rack. But as I pedaled into the blue-tinted shadows, I felt a new wash of fatigue. It was as though my hours-long battle with the cold had sucked the energy right out of my body, and it didn't matter how many frozen Sour Patch Kids I gnawed on — the energy just wouldn't come back.

I could say it was a struggle, but the landscape was too dreamlike, too compelling, to be a place of struggle. The moon wedge burned bright in a sky splattered with stars, and the twisted trees carved gothic silhouettes over the snow. I did a lot of thinking about the upcoming changes in my life and felt a beautiful sense of peace. Just as I had no real control over the cold, over my fatigue, I had no control over the future. And yet I could move through it, taking on the challenges with the best of my abilities, learning from my mistakes, and growing. Even when the race got hard, like life, it never stopped being worth it.

About 14 miles from the end, my knee started to go. I have issues with my right joint that my doctor once called "Angry Knee." Basically, overuse causes a flareup of chondromalacia that stiffens the joint until I can't bend it at all without pain. The onset of that all-too-familiar sharp pain causes no end of anxiety, because I have no idea how bad it will get or how long it will last. In 2007, I couldn't ride my bicycle for three months as I recovered from chondromalacia I acquired, interestingly enough, during the final miles of a frigid 100-mile winter race called the Susitna 100. And at mile 87 of the White Mountains 100, my Angry Knee was none too happy. My usual strategy is to stop riding, but that wasn't really an option on a remote trail in subzero temperatures. I just had to hope I could limp it to the end without too much long-term damage.

I did do everything I could to be as gentle as possible. I essentially stopped riding up hills; even the mellow ones I walked. Even still, the pain increased. I'm not sure why my knee chose this precise time to give up the fight. I think a large part of it was undertraining. I can climb all the difficult mountains I want, but unless I turn pedals, I'm not going to build up the essential muscles to support my joint through an excessive number of rotations in a short period of time. I also suspect that this knee doesn't like extreme cold very much. I stopped and ate a recklessly large handful of Advil pills, which helped.

About seven miles from the finish, I reached the Wickersham Wall. Lovingly named after a face of Denali that is essentially unclimbable, the White Mountains' Wickersham Wall gains 1,000 feet in a little less than two miles. Judging by the footprints punched into the trail, it must have been a walk for nearly everyone, but I really felt like I was tackling some high-altitude route on Denali. Every 30 steps or so I had to stop, gasping for breath and massaging my knee. My body was beaten, but — amazingly — my attitude remained upbeat. I could look back and see the headlamps of other racers, pinpricks of light in a vast and dark wilderness. Behind them, a sliver of dawn's blue light climbed over the horizon. And in front of me, the setting moon burned with a surreal tint of dark orange. I felt happy. My lungs burned; my swollen fingers ached and my knee sometimes screamed in pain, but I still felt happy. I think much of it was the realization that even though my body is my vehicle through life, life itself is my source of joy.

Dawn had broken when I rolled into the finish line at 6:23 a.m., for a finishing time of 22 hours, 23 minutes, in 14th place out of 49 finishers. I was satisfied to be done, but more than that, I was just grateful to have been a part of it. There are a lot of people that deserve a huge thanks — Ed Plumb and Ann Farris for organizing the race; John Shook for putting me, Chris and his wife, Maura, up for two nights, feeding us meals and letting us throw our stinky gear all over his spare bedrooms; Robin BeeBee for finding and returning my SPOT unit after it bounced off my bike near the end the route — my mother especially is grateful for this; all of the the volunteers who manned the checkpoints, working harder getting even less sleep than the racers; the medics who covered the entire course on snowmobiles, and everyone else who helped make the White Mountains 100 happen. Thank you. It was really great.

White Mountains 100

When I say it was spectacular, I mean it was really hard. And easy, too, because it never once became a burden or a chore. There were times I was so cold I couldn’t breathe, coughing and gasping for air as I pulled off my face mask even though my nose started to freeze within seconds. There were times that my right knee became so stiff that I couldn’t bend it as I limped up hills, wondering if I’d be able to “de-rust” the hinge enough to pedal the last 10 miles to the end. But these issues seemed unimportant, the inevitable fee for coming to the White Mountains 100 somewhat under-prepared. And they were a small price to pay for a chance to spend a day in my happy place — a place cut into a small, wind-swept mountain range in the heart of Alaska, a place where wildfire-scorched spruce trees stoop over frozen swamps and people grin through ice-ringed face masks. They too understand the beauty and discovery of these journeys through the soul.

This was the inaugural year for the White Mountains 100, a 100-mile bike, ski and foot race on a large loop of remote snowmobile trails 40 miles north of Fairbanks. The thing that impressed me most about this race was just how brilliantly organized it was. Basically, a small group of Fairbanks skiers decided it would be fun to hold an endurance race on their home trails. Within a matter of months, their race was full with 50 racers from Fairbanks and Anchorage (and one straggler from Juneau), a full army of friendly volunteers and a luxurious menu of trailside meals, homemade cookies and medical support.

Although I was intrigued by this new winter endurance race, I admit it was only on the edge of my radar. I had met one of the co-organizers, a skier named Ed Plumb, during the 2009 Iditarod Trail Invitational. I was holed up in Yentna Station with five swollen, purple toes and a black cloud hanging over my head. Ed offered a few kind words that helped put the whole sad situation in perspective, and even followed up to ask about my recovery after he successfully completed the race. He was kind enough to e-mail me early in the White Mountains 100 planning, and again when the race was nearly full. I decided to sign up even though I felt ambivalent about it. The cost of travel would be significant, preparations would be tough and I was coping with shifts in my own attitude about racing in general. As my life fell into deeper unrest, this ambivalence strengthened, until the race was days away and I realized that my preparations only amounted to about three weeks of actual focused training. My snow bike laid in pieces in my room. I hadn't yet chosen my "kit." I was mired in stressful logistics of moving away from Juneau, and I was ready to pull the plug on the race without regret.

But then I didn't. I'm so glad I didn't. Saturday was a whirlwind — meeting the friendly Fairbanks skiers, rushing around town with Bjorn as he bought up supplies for a three-week climbing expedition into the Hayes Range, attending the pre-race meeting, having dinner with the fast bikers and stumbling upstairs to my own explosion of gear. I finally crawled into bed at midnight and slept like a log out of sheer exhaustion. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning to carpool out to the start with Ed. His eyes had the glazed-over look of a struck deer, and he admitted that organizing the race proved far more all-consuming than he ever imagined. "I haven't even thought about skiing," he said, even as he faced the 100-mile effort that loomed in front of us. I watched the thermometer on his dashboard drift from 10 above all the way to 18 below in the low-lying valleys. I felt my own eyes glaze over, struck by a vague sense of doom.

The hour leading up to a race is always the worst, and the White Mountains 100 was no different. I stepped out of Ed's truck and the cold wind hit me like a sucker punch. I froze my fingers while trying to put my bike together, waited in line at the outhouse to purge the meager contents of my breakfast and forgot to sign in. But when someone finally yelled, "Go!," all of the fatigue and anxiety melted away as my mind instantly shifted to the focus of the task at hand. I pedaled up the first hill in a wash of relief, because I was on the trail and so I no longer had to think about it. All I had to do was pedal. And compared to the rest of life, pedaling is amazingly easy.

For many hours, the White Mountains 100 was pure fun. I was struck by the sheer amount of climbing. In my pre-race ambivalence, I actually never even looked at the elevation profile, which in the end would net nearly 8,000 feet of gain. I guess I should have expected as much from a race with the word "Mountains" in the name. Still, I relished in the work, powering up the nicely packed trail at a paltry — but satisfying — 4.5 mph. The downhill runs were like the best kind of mountain biking, smooth and flowing with a few blissful "big airs" over the snowmobile moguls. An air inversion caused intriguing temperature fluctuations — I'd climb high with the warm sun caressing my face, and then drop into a subzero sinkhole as my quickly-applied face mask filled with ice. For several miles I shadowed a couple of skate skiers, which was a cool experience in itself — two very different modes of travel, perfectly synchronized.

My main point of stress was overflow, which the White Mountains region has an abundance of. Overflow is water that gurgles up from ice-covered stream beds, refreezing on top of the snow until the ground is covered in mounds of wet ice. It's treacherously slick, but that's the least of the concern, because a badly placed foot can punch into deeper pools of unfrozen water, wetting vital gear and body parts — a bad, bad thing in subzero temperatures. Because of my previous frostbite experience, every loud crack or change of color on the ice was heart-stopping scary, but it only added to my overall excitement about the course. The White Mountains were harsh, they were real, and they were amazingly within my grasp.

And this harsh, real landscape was also breathtakingly beautiful. We coastal Alaskans have a tendency to write off the Interior as a flat, frigid swamp, but it is actually ringed with snow-swept mountains and craggy cliffs. The weather was gorgeous if a bit cold for this coastal girl, and a brisk headwind stung my exposed skin. Still, I felt strong and I was pounding down the calories. I stopped briefly at the Cache Mountain cabin at mile 36. A fire raged in the wood stove and the tiny single-room structure was clogged with racers and stiflingly hot. I ate handfuls of cheese cubes and a brownie as I chatted with Anchorage cyclists Ted Cahalane and Brian Garcia. Everyone was in a good mood but ready to admit we were starting to feel it. On a snow bike, tackling a mountain course in subzero windchill, a race pace of 7 mph feels fast and 36 miles feels like a long way.

And the big climb was yet to come. After several more miles of rollers, the course began the steady, 1,800-foot ascent to the "Divide," a 3,500-foot alpine pass. The snow had softened in the sun and was churned up by previous racers, which made the going incredibly slow. The trail was rideable, but it eventually became a decision of whether I wanted to struggle at 90-percent effort a move 3.5 mph or push my ~50-pound bike at 70-percent effort and move 2.5 mph. I was too tired to do the math, but walking sure felt better, so I walked. A few skiers caught up and passed me, justifiably gloating at the anchor I was dragging up the mountain.

But I am always willing to do the work for a breath of open mountain air, even if it is driven by stunningly cold wind. I stopped at the top for several minutes, completely exposed to the wind and cold, just to soak in the wonder of the moment. I sucked on some deep-frozen Sour Patch Kids and analyzed the wind's artwork, carved in flowing strokes across the open tundra. It was 4 p.m. I was 50 miles and eight hours into the race, still on my best-case-scenario pace, feeling strong. I hopped back on the bike and churned over the drifted trail, swerving and bouncing across the rough surface. I passed Ted, who was walking his bike downhill. "You're having better luck than I am," he called out. "It's not easy, but it's doable," I yelled back. A few minutes later, I bounced sideways off a mogul and landed face-first into a pillow of snow. I was still extracting myself when skiers Chris Wrobel and Scott Hauser came up from behind. I quickly rolled back into the snow as they whisked by, calling out to make sure I was OK.

Ten minutes and 1,000 feet of descent later, we were all standing at the edge of the Ice Lakes. The Ice Lakes are actually a mile-long stretch of overflow that is very unpredictable. Ice conditions change by the hour and we had all been warned to pass through this area with extreme care. Chris and Scott gave up on skiing early and donned overboots and ice creepers. I had bolts screwed into the soles of my boots, but they weren't quite enough to actually grip the wet ice. I skittered across the downhill-sloping surface as the frigid wind blew at my side, with my bike acting like an uncontrollable sail. I walked through ankle deep pools of slush, areas where any kind of fall would be disastrous. My heart raced and anxiety coursed through my veins like hot lead even as my body became colder and colder. I started to shiver but I couldn't move any faster for fear of losing my balance. My fingers went numb, but I didn't want to stop and find my mittens for the same reason. It was a painfully slow march to the other side, and I had no choice but to endure it.

Brian Garcia passed me near the last ice lake, riding his bicycle, which I thought was enviably bold. A mile later, I passed him standing by the side of the trail, eating M 'n' Ms with a packet of cream cheese, which I was jealous of too, having become tired of my own peanut butter cups and Odwalla bars, and having found frozen Sour Patch Kids to be too slow-melting and frustrating to be edible. I wanted to stop and chat and maybe ride with him for a bit, but I was still shivering and knew I had to keep moving before my body heat took too much of a downward spiral. The trail itself spiraled downward, winding through the spruce forest on tight and challenging winter "singletrack." It, like most of the rest of the course, was truly fun biking, the kind that makes you wonder why everyone doesn't just go out and buy a fat bike and move to Fairbanks. But then I'd hit another open area of overflow, and the cold wind would needle into my skin, and I'd remember that, oh yeah, this is Alaska — a hard place that doesn't easily forgive complacency. Still, I was soaked in the pink light of sunset and filled with my typical mid-race overconfidence. I had climbed the Divide. I had survived the Ice Lakes. The worst was behind me. It would all be coasting from here on out ...

To be continued ... (Sorry, but if I don't go to bed soon I'm going to pass out at my desk and drool all over my keyboard.)

Into the Interior

Well, I made it to Fairbanks. It's a beautiful first day of spring, sunny and warm - 33 degrees. Downright tropical in this part of the world. I haven't been to this region of Alaska in nearly seven years; I'm actually surprised how much of it feels familiar to me. We had a great trip up, traveling overland - the only way to travel. We took the ferry to Skagway and chugged up White Pass in my friend Bjorn's old Subaru (crossing our fingers the entire way). We visited friends in Whitehorse and continued north on the Alaska Highway to Kluane Lake, where we geared up for an overnight "ski" trip (I was on snowshoes) in the frigid mountains of the Yukon.

We started up Sheep Mountain on the grade of an old mining road. The surface was knee-to-thigh deep sugar snow with occasional - and often completely invisible until you punched through and twisted a knee - thin-frozen crust. It felt like wading through a bottomless bucket of sand. Strenuous and slow going. Bjorn broke trail most of the way. I tried to forge ahead to do my share, but I could scarcely keep up with him. I'm not used to hoisting 25 pounds of winter gear on my back, and he had that ski advantage (although, really, it hardly looked like an advantage in these conditions.)

We trudged upward for nearly five hours, barely making five miles during that time, and we were nowhere near where we had hoped to be - somewhere closer to the ridge of Sheep Mountain or at least in the alpine bowl. We did see some Dall sheep, however, not to mention a veritable highway of wolf and coyote tracks. But, sunset was well on its way and we decided we wanted to be closer to the car for the Friday drive to Fairbanks, so we started down. The worst part about the snow is it didn't even pack down, so we basically had to break trail through sugar going downhill as well. Bjorn didn't get to do much skiing at all. I actually felt like snowshoes were an advantage, since I could at least pick up my feet while he had to shuffle through the sand. He did manage to slide a little, though, even with skins on.

The part about the ski trip that I was really excited about was the camping. We set up the tent on the shoreline of the Slim River, donned down coats and fired up the stove to melt snow. Winds were light and dusk temperatures were about 15 degrees - really mild for the Yukon in March. We were able to sit outside around our "campfire" of a stove, drinking hot water (we both forgot to bring tea) and eating frozen turkey sandwiches and Snickers bars. There was no wind, and if we stopped talking, the valley was so quiet that we could hear animal sounds in the far distance - small creatures running, coyotes yipping, wolves howling. It was really quite special. We settled into our Arctic bags and fell asleep to the ranging silence. The overnight temperature dropped below zero and I got one of the best nights of sleep I have had in a long time.

The ski out on the Slim River was pretty mellow, which helped make up for our afternoon of wallowing the day before. It's certainly questionable whether I should have participated in a ~11-hour overnight hike just a couple of days before my bike race, but in this case, as in many cases, it was exactly what I needed. Things here in Fairbanks have been kind of stressful - as they should be, I guess, since I am gearing up for this 100-mile bike race. Trail conditions and weather both look to be good. I'm enamored with this harsh Interior landscape and I can't wait to get out on the trail. The race begins at 8 a.m. Sunday. I'll be carrying my SPOT unit along the way, so you can track my progress (or possible lack thereof) at this link: My Shared Page.

Race updates here.

Wish me luck!