Iditarod Again, part six

Sprinkles continued to fall as our oversized group emerged from the little cabin at Rainy Pass Lodge a few hours before dawn. The intensity of the rain had diminished, but we had no forecast to guess at whether the storm would pick back up, or turn to snow, or clear out and drag subzero temperatures back into the region. No forecast meant no plan. But we'd do what we came here to do, which is walk from one side of the Alaska Range to the other, and hope for the best. 

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Unlike some of the others in our crowded cabin, I neglected to bring my duffel inside. I'd rescued the sleeping bag, clothing, and food, but inside the duffel was an inch of standing water and several items I'd neglected to bring inside and regretted this — waders, stove, a baggie of used socks, my bag of spare mittens, buff, and hat (whoops! But luckily the silnylon sack seemed to keep those things merely damp) and a few other miscellaneous items that had now doubled in weight and diminished in usefulness. I also noticed Beat kept his sled with its built-in bivy out in the rain. He'd designed and built his own five-foot hmw-polyethylene sled with a small frame at the head, and a piece of plastic at the end to roll out to six-foot length. He then glued a silnylon shell over the top of the sled to serve as a shelter — not only would it protect his gear, but he could sleep inside. It was a fine idea in theory, but in practice the system proved to be a nuisance, as the material was loose and flapped around, it added another layer of difficulty to gear access, and he was not so stoked on sleeping inside. Beat likes to tinker with new ideas; sometimes they work for him, and sometimes they do not. But he seems to enjoy the process, even when it occasionally produces less-than-workable results. I wondered how everyone else's stuff had fared as I dumped a gush of water out of my duffel and sled. It felt particularly unfair that we had to do this. 

 At least we had enjoyed a long rest — nearly eight hours of down time in the cabin that for me included about three and a half hours of real sleep, broken up by three rain-soaked dashes to the outhouse (my kidneys seem to go into overdrive later in these long efforts, and I need to pee constantly.) But unlike the previous morning I was alert and reasonably energetic, marching up the ramp-like rise of the Ptarmigan Valley in the pre-dawn darkness. It was still too cloudy for stars, but as my eyes adjusted, silhouettes of surrounding mountains revealed the ceiling had lifted.

It was a warm, calm morning, and as daylight appeared we could see clearings to the south that appeared to be expanding. My hamstrings burned and my shoulders ached sharply, which was not unexpected for having dragged more than a third of my body weight 165 miles in three and a half days. But all in all it was a fine day for walking, and I felt pretty good. Vigilance for re-lubing and changing socks had kept my feet in good shape despite the oversized shoes, and the muscles that I'd specifically trained — such as quads and calves — felt reasonably strong despite the beating they'd taken the previous day. One of Tim's favorite pieces of advice is to not worry about early aches and pains — that your body eventually adjusts and you get stronger as you go. "The first week is always the worst," he reiterates. I only had one week of Iditarod to endure, and I certainly could not say I felt stronger than I had on the first day — but I didn't necessarily feel a whole lot weaker, either.

With everyone feeling well-rested and enjoying the warm-yet-not-rainy morning, the initial miles were relaxing and playful. This little vole popped out of the snow and dashed under Tim's sled, then tried to climb up his leg, wavering between the sled and leg while refusing to be chased away by any of us. We joked that Tim had a new pet to take with him to Nome. The vole was actually one of the few wild animals we spotted during the trip. Interior Alaska is not the Serengeti; it's hungry country and most animals are wildly dispersed. Since there are so few humans in this region, it's easy for wild animals to avoid the corridors that humans frequent, and they do — unless they have something to gain from humans, like the ravens and crows. If you want to see wild animals in Alaska, take a bus tour through Denali National Park. A thousand miles on the Iditarod Trail in the winter might get you a few moose, the hardier birds of Alaska, rodents, fox, and maybe even a possibly-real-but-most-likely-hallucinated lynx sighting.

I took many dozens of photographs. Ptarmigan Valley can be an extraordinarily mean place, with white-out blizzards, gale-force gusts, and windchills approaching 70 below. During the 2006 Iditarod Trail Invitational, a storm rushed in after the initial wave of lead cyclists, forcing everyone else in the race back. Most of the mid-pack didn't make it through, and my favorite story from this year came from my friend Brij, who stuffed socks in his hat to prevent his ears from freezing as he made three attempts into the white-out, turning around in fear of his life each time. Tim has his own collection of harrowing Rainy Pass stories, and he was the only one who actually burst through that storm in 2006. In 2008, I experienced what I was told was a "nice" day on Rainy Pass, with face-biting winds and nighttime temperatures that dipped beneath my thermometer's limit of 20 below.

 This day was just ... pleasant. Temperatures in the thirties. No wind. It was surreal.

 Then the clouds began to clear, removing any remaining immediate threats of storms.

 We stayed in a fairly tight group with Tim and Loreen, and occasionally Rick and Steve, depending on whether Loreen or Rick stopped to nap (both seemed capable of catching short snoozes on top of their sleds without freezing their feet, which I envied), or the rest of us stopped to snack or fuss over our feet. It was such a luxury, being able to stop and rest and take in the scenery. I could hardly believe our luck.

 The trail veered away from the valley and began to follow Pass Creek up the steep pitches toward Rainy Pass. My fear meter spiked here, as the trail flows through a narrow gully that creates the perfect terrain trap for avalanches. The surrounding slopes appeared to be classic high-risk angles, and the recent rain made it seem likely that there was a heavy layer of saturated snow sitting right on top of sugary fluff. "If I were hiking alone in Juneau, I would probably not go here," I thought. But there was no wind, and the odds of quiet walkers triggering an avalanche from below seemed slim. I marched hard to stick close to the group, clinging to the false security of strength in numbers.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

As sunlight spread across the canyon, the heat began cranking. Beat announced it was 40 degrees as he and Steve stopped to roll up their tights and remove vests, hats, and gloves. The trail surface was well-set, but snow was noticeably softening up in this spring-like thaw.

 We crossed Rainy Pass Lake, where Tim pointed out a private cabin that he'd happened upon years earlier in a white-out. This cabin was explicitly off-limits to travelers, and looked half dilapidated anyway. With sweat pouring down my forehead and neck, it was becoming increasingly more difficult to imagine any scenario where shelter would be desired in this place. The frantic chill on the Yentna River three days earlier was all but forgotten.

 The temperature kept climbing. As we closed in on the pass, Beat announced it was 48 degrees. This was reasonably alarming. Thaws have the power to disrupt everything that holds winter travel together — ice breaks apart, waterways open, snow becomes unmanageably soft, swamps flood. I was not exactly thrilled to be overheating and drenched in sweat on this day.

Still, Rainy Pass is an stunning setting, a corridor of open valleys and snow-swept mountains more than a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest road. It's a stark place that not only feels, but actually is far away from the hum of modern life. Hot air and glaring sunshine only added to the surreality of the place. The surface crust was smooth and icy, and we could walk anywhere we wanted along the slope — gazing up at the white-washed peaks towering over us. I walked in a happy trance until one leg broke through the crust to sugar snow, up to thigh level. I was at least wearing gaiters to protect my shins from ice shards. But it was clear the surface snow was breaking apart. It could only be the beginning. The beginning of The Wallow.

As nervous as I already was about the prospect of bad snow and ice, I couldn't get over how weird this all felt — this was the big, bad Iditarod Trail across Alaska, and I was taking it on with just my two feet and a sled. Right now, though, it felt as though I was out on a fun day hike with my friends, in a summery month like June. With temperatures near fifty degrees, it could just as well have been June. At 3,400 feet elevation, Rainy Pass is a rare low divide in the towering Alaska Range, but it's still a divide. We were crossing over a mountain range so large that it creates an almost impenetrable weather wall between Alaska's coastal climates and the frigid Interior. And it wasn't June; it was February. These conditions couldn't be real. We posed for pictures, laughed, told stories about things that were far away from here because we were all relaxed enough to let our minds wander. A breeze kicked up at the pass, cooling my overheated skin.

 It was a little too windy at the pass to linger before the chill kicked in, so we descended a few hundred feet to the cusp of treeline for a proper lunch break. We rolled out our sleeping pads and sat down with Tim and Loreen. Beat broke out one of his gallon-sized Ziploc bags of peanut butter, and complained that this caloric fuel source was not as tasty when temperatures were above freezing. When frozen, peanut butter develops a fudge-like consistency that's quite satisfying. Above freezing but still chilled, it's just stick-to-the-roof-of-your mouth gooey, and you can only choke a few bites down at a time. I took advantage of the stop to take off my gaiters, shoes, and socks, and dry my feet out properly.

 Beat offered to let me use his satellite phone to call my parents. It seemed like a fun milestone to mark with a phone call — "Hey, Ma, I'm at the crest of the Alaska Range!" My folks were surprised and thrilled to hear from me. We chatted for a few expensive minutes and I told them how great things were going, how much fun we were having, and how incredibly different this experience had been compared to my last trip on the Iditarod Trail. When I looked down the canyon, I could pinpoint what I believed to be almost the exact spot where I stopped to bivy in 2008. At the time it was well after midnight, I was all alone, a harsh wind whipped down the canyon, and temperatures had plummeted to twenty below. I was so shattered, and so unfamiliar with that depth of cold and fatigue, that when I closed my eyes for what I believed to be imperative sleep, I felt strongly uncertain about whether I'd ever wake up.

Now, six years later on the thawing bed of Pass Fork, noon temperatures soared into the high forties, and I was surging with optimism, surrounded by friends, and drying my bare feet in the sun. I've said this before, but it was surreal.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Then it started to fall apart. Literally. As in, "the trail started to fall apart." We ran the first mile of the steep descent off Rainy Pass, but only descended perhaps 500 feet before the thin layer of snow deteriorated into puffs of sugar. These gritty, unconsolidated pillows filled in the spaces between tussocks and alder branches, but it wasn't solid enough to hold our weight. So every step would sink all the way to the ground below — sometimes to our shins, sometimes to our knees. It was impossible to know until our feet hit the frozen ground, twisting ankles and wrenching knees along the way.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

We had to don snowshoes to battle the ankle-twisting holes. The snowshoes also sank into the sugar snow, and frequently got caught on grass clumps and alder branches. Often I had to reach down with my fingers to wrestle the snowshoe free from the latest plant trap. The sled dragged and caught branches just as badly, until I had to work considerably harder, and at a much slower pace, to descend Rainy Pass than I had climbing it. It was maddening. Humorously maddening.

 Tim, as usual, kept an unwaveringly sunny disposition. As I struggled to catch up with Beat, Tim would walk with me, because he was waiting for Loreen, who was somewhere farther back. Occasionally he would flip his sled all the way around (his flexible PVC poles allowed him to do this without diving into alder thickets) and walk back to find Loreen. Then I'd see him again twenty or thirty minutes later, chatting away, in some kind of inexplicably fantastic mood. "This is really hard work," I said, and Tim agreed. He loved it.

 I wrestled alders, scratched my hands, ripped a hole in my shirt, and did some silent gnashing of teeth. But in the end I had to take Tim's words to heart — "what can you do about it?" — and embrace the Zen of resignation. The sugar layer only grew thinner as we descended, until it was scarcely a dusting on top of the fortunately-still-frozen surface of Pass Fork.

 After descending a thousand grueling feet from Rainy Pass, we dropped into the Dalzell Gorge, where the torrent of Dalzell Creek rages down the canyon as waterfalls tumble over sheer walls — whitewater that's frozen in time during the winter. Having been here before, what we saw this year was almost unfathomable. The snow was gone. Even the ice had been stripped to a minimum. My fatigued mind juggled impossible possibilities — like maybe we had warped through time to a distant summer month. A surging Dalzell Creek gushed beneath open leads and layers of thin ice, and the sheer canyon walls ensured there was no way around these brittle bridges.


Picking our way across wet, glare ice with sleds that did whatever the hell they wanted was a formidable task. I was glad to have microspikes. Beat had custom machined carbide studs in his shoes, but they didn't quite cut it, and he had to grab branches to keep from slipping onto the thin ice over the creek's center. Even the mircospikes slipped out on occasional exposed rocks, and all the while Dalzell Creek continued to rage beneath our feet. I could hear water gushing; it was driving me mad. Later we learned Rick broke through the ice in this section, up to his knees in creek water. I skirted around leads that were definitely deep enough and flowing fast enough to suck a person under the ice, never to be seen again. Already pronounced phobias of bad ice did not help me keep my cool in the Dazell Gorge. Sometimes, when Beat was farther ahead, I let a cathartic bout of hyperventilation release pent-up panics that threatened to shut down movement altogether.

 I breathed a sigh of relief when the Dalzell Gorge finally spit us out on the Tatina River, after what felt like endless bends in the increasingly narrower canyon. The Tatina valley is much wider, but after a half mile of skirting puddles and flowing streams of river water over the ice, open water became impossible to avoid. I tried my hardest but eventually plunged both shoes up to my ankles in puddles. I thought I should be really upset about this — wet shoes. The checkpoint at Rohn was only a wall tent with a tiny camp stove that does not generate enough dry heat to even begin to dry sopping wet shoes in the span of four or six hours. Beyond Rohn was the Farewell Burn, where an Interior cold snap could break this heat wave into splinters before we even had time to react. In all likelihood, I would have to deal with wet shoes for the next 150 miles, and I wanted to be really upset about it. But mostly, I was still happy that my body was not underneath the ice in the Dalzell Gorge.

A half hour after dark, we walked across the landing strip for the Iditarod checkpoint of Rohn — which is just a BLM public use cabin, a landing strip, and nothing else. The ground was utterly bare — not even wisps of snow to be seen — and the dirt was soft and wet. It felt like I was dragging my sled over a saturated sponge. My survival joy was wearing off, and I was back to being angry about bare ground and wet shoes, when Rob appeared out of the woods. He wrapped his big bear arms around my shoulders in a genuine hug, and offered a bratwurst that he was warming on a tiny grill out in front of his wall tent — Rob's Hilton.

Rob was a perennial volunteer for the Iditarod Trail Invitational since he raced the route on foot in 2003. He also was an avid outdoorsman and participant in the Alaska Wilderness Classic, a point-to-point overland race across a different mountain range every three years. Rob tragically died during the Wilderness Classic in August after his packraft flipped in the Tana River. He was a great guy and will be missed by all in this community, in particular those who benefited from his warmth and kindness in this far-away outpost.

It was Rob who transformed Rohn from a spartan wilderness encampment to a warm and inviting stop-over. He collected spruce bows from the woods to build up a thick mattress, stoked the tiny wood stove all night long, heated cans of soup and cups of Hot Tang, and apparently this year, cooked bratwursts! I devoured mine greedily as he teased me about forgetting my bike and asking me what I thought of the hiking adventure. I inquired about the state of the trail beyond Rohn, and Rob just shook his head.

"It's dirt," he said. "For at least twenty miles. There was a dusting of snow before but it's all gone now. It was fifty degrees here today."

I sighed with sincere defeat. "I guess now would be a good time for a backpack."

The crowd of our roving Iditarod party built up inside of Rob's wall tent, so I finished another delicious freeze-dried meal and ventured outside to set up my bivy in an empty snowmobile cargo sled. It was still hot outside, so I kept my fifty-below down sleeping bag open and slept on top of it, inside the bivy. It seemed like the moon was emerging, but I couldn't be too optimistic. And sure enough, about a half hour later, it started to rain.

As droplets pattered outside my bivy sack, I curled into a fetal position and mulled how I would address this. Should I just ignore it and hope it stops? Or ignore it had just not care how wet my sleeping bag gets? I came up with several more options that all began with "ignore it" before Rob shook my shoulder.

"Are you asleep?" he asked. "It's raining now. You should come inside the tent."

I crawled out and punched my down booties on the wet mulchy ground, feeling the cold water soak through to my socks as I pulled them out with a loud "slorp" sound. "I can't believe it's raining in Rohn. Raining in Rohn!"

"It's weird," Rob shook his head. "In all my years, I've never seen rain."

I threw my sleeping bag, still inside the bivy, into a narrow notch between Beat and Steve on Rob's spruce mattress, then plopped my damp body on top.

"This is maddening," I thought. "Can't someone make it stop?"

But it had only, still, just begun. 

Iditarod Again, part five

Winterlake Lodge is a high-end backcountry retreat, about as luxurious as accommodations can be more than a hundred miles from the nearest road, in a location where many feet of snow fall during the winter and temperatures regularly dip to thirty below. Once, when I was mulling an independent bike tour of the Iditarod Trail, I called for a quote as was told rooms cost $600 a night, which included breakfast and dinner prepared by an award-winning chef. Although the Invitational is not exactly a budget vacation, racers don’t contribute near this amount to stay at this single checkpoint. So you’re pretty happy with what you can get at Winterlake — in 2008, it was an unheated carpark tent (used for storage in a place with no cars.) This year, we moved up to coach class, with accommodations in the shell of an unfinished building complete with a single propane heater. We placed the heater in the entryway next to a ladder where we could hang all of our damp clothing, putting it to a more useful task than emitting fumes and vaguely warm air in the plywood room where we slept.

We shared this space with Tim, Loreen, Steve, and Rick. Even though Tim snores like a 600-pound grizzly bear with sleep apnea, total exhaustion was finally working in my favor and I crashed into four more hours of dreamless sleep. Although we’d eaten our allotted meal of a small amount of rice, beans, chicken, salsa, and a tortilla prepared by a quiet kitchen helper upon arrival, Beat learned last year that $5 would get us a second disassembled burrito. And because the time was now something vaguely close to breakfast, we also received an egg. And coffee! True luxury — and I’m not being sarcastic. It may not be the five-star treatment, but a hard pull on the Iditarod Trail expands perspectives about how wonderful simple luxuries can be. 

We hauled out just as wisps of dawn emerged once again. The Skwentna River Valley had narrowed as we made our way through the zig-zag swamps in the dark, and mountain slopes towered over the canyon. Thick forests surrounded tiny lakes, and pillows of deep powder covered the ground. Winter in interior Alaska often looks like someone tried to plant anemic little spruce trees on the moon, but this side of the Alaska Range features more classic winter scenery — an idyllic Christmas card.

My drowsiness this morning was crushing, and the sled was again fully loaded down with the resupply I picked up at Winterlake Lodge. I scanned the sky for pink light that would bring the much-rejoiced sun, but a thick gray persisted until I had to admit that this sluggish dawn was in actuality just an overcast day. The air was thick and humid, and soon accompanied by snow flurries. Snowflakes clumped together in large chunks. This was an alarming development, because chunky snow means temperatures are near freezing, and precipitation is precariously close to what is arguably the most difficult weather for an Alaska backcountry traveler during the winter — rain. 

It had been a weird winter in Southcentral Alaska, and the threat of rain was always high. This was one of the reasons Beat backpedaled on his unsupported attempt, because the gear one needs to survive in temperatures down to fifty below — such as down coats and sleeping bags — do not hold up well through wet weather. Once insulated gear gets wet, it’s useless, and if you can never venture inside a heated space to dry the gear, it stays useless. In January, we took a trip with Steve to Yosemite National Park, dragging our sleds through a 37-degree storm that dumped an inch of rain onto already soggy snow. This training trip left our gear so soaked that we had to abandon plans to camp overnight, and it also helped us formulate a strategy to keep our stuff dry should we encounter similar weather in Alaska. But in order to not tip the sled scales too dramatically, this plan amounted to dry bags for our crucial gear, and trash compactor bags to wrap around the duffle. This would hold out the rain but make everything inside inaccessible during the storm. And wearing damp clothing at 33 or 34 degrees is more of a hypothermia risk than being dry at 30 below. Rain was an unnerving prospect. 

Between the threat of rain, the sinking gray atmosphere, the stinging snow, and a desire to plop down on one of the snow pillows and drift into what could all too easily become forever sleep, my mood this morning would qualify as grouchy. After Finger Lake, the Iditarod Trail follows a series of steeper climbs and descents as it winds through the foothills of the Alaska Range. In 2008, a fellow cyclist referred to this section as “The Push,” and now, with a sled, this was still the best title to characterize this segment. Both Steve and Beat were considerably stronger than me on the climbs; Steve marched out of sight quickly. Along the flatter sections, I frequently increased my effort to a running stride to shorten Beat’s waiting time. The surface snow was becoming softer and marching was exhausting work. I can’t even quantify it with a comparison to trail running, but if I were to try, I would say it was like attempting to haul a tire up a 25-percent grade that never ended. 

The whine of a snowmobile broke a long silence. The driver turned out to be Craig Medred, a long-time Alaska journalist who covers outdoor sports for the Alaska Dispatch News. He’s well-known for writing scathingly critical articles about anyone who makes a mistake in the backcountry. Back when I worked at the Juneau Empire, I’d occasionally come into the office late after over-shooting a ridge walk, and my co-workers would joke that they were glad I hadn’t disappeared in the mountains because they didn't want to talk to Medred about me. He did interview me shortly after I returned from my last Iditarod with frostbite on my right foot. I braced myself for the criticisms that were sure to rain down from online commenters the next day, but he ended up making little mention of my mishap in his article. He covers both the human-powered and dog-sled Iditarod races in depth every year, and does it well. Still, I can’t shake that old paranoia that if I mess up during one of these adventures, Medred will write about it and I'll be the most hated person in Anchorage for a day. It's funny that fear of bad publicity seems to trump fear of injury and death. 

“How’s it going?” Medred asked me.

“So far much better than last time,” I said enthusiastically, referring to the frostbite incident. 

“Don’t you wish you had your bike?” he asked. “This is a bike year.” He listed several cyclists who had already made it to McGrath, less than 72 hours into the race, and that he expected Heather Best, the lead female cyclist, to arrive soon as well. Records were being shattered. 

I shook my head in amazement. “I figured as much. That’s awesome. But it’s a different experience. The thought of biking rarely even crosses my mind." 

This was the truth. I still believe there’s nothing more exhilarating than soaring over a snow-covered trail on a fat bike. But the Zen peace and simplicity of foot travel are incredibly satisfying. February’s long thaw may have made 2014 the fastest year for cyclists that the Iditarod Trail has seen yet, but I never regretted my decision to travel on foot. I felt an urge to wax lyrical about hours of quiet meditation, about absorbing incredible scenery that I never saw in 2008 because I was always looking down at the trail — cyclists are forever searching for the best line in the snow. I wanted to explain how this slow speed afforded extensive inner and outer explorations, and how rewarding it had been to free myself from mechanical dependence. Instead, I just shrugged, silently wishing that Medred hadn’t caught me while I was in the throes of a grumpy low point. 

Medred warned that there was rain in the forecast, then continued down the trail. Beat and I continued up into the socked-in gray clouds, flowing like shredded curtains that disintegrated into snow. Based on maps I knew there were tall mountains all around us, but we could only see the low cloud ceiling, and faint outlines of rocks hinting at hidden grandeur. 

Four hours and twelve miles after leaving Finger Lake, we arrived at the Happy River Steps — a series of three steep descents into a deep gorge where the Happy River pours into the Skwentna River. Grades top thirty-five percent, and we approached each step by unhooking our harnesses, letting our sleds fly free, and butt-sliding down after them. It was a short but exhilarating hit of adrenaline in what is decidedly an endorphin sport. At the confluence, we bypassed a series of open leads that spiked my heart rate again with panic responses from a persistent fear of falling through bad ice. This was unduly draining my energy reserves, but it did give me the boost I needed to haul the obese sled up the thirty-five-percent grades leaving the gorge. The pitch is so steep that in 2008 I had to leverage my bike like an ice ax, and the sled has no sharp edges with which to dig in. My floppy clown shoes were the only thing keeping the anvil from pulling me back down the hill, and the only way to avoid slipping was to march as quickly as possible. My heart raced at what had to be close to my anaerobic threshold, and lactic acid flooded my already tenderized glutes and calves. I would pay dearly for this surge, but at least I didn’t have to resort to crawling. 

Over the next five miles, the trail gains nearly a thousand feet of elevation while continuing along steep rolling hills that add to the overall climbing. From a trail-runner’s perspective these numbers don’t sound like much, but sled and snow resistance seem to make exponential demands on energy expenditures. I’d been struggling on the flats; with these hills, I was battling real physical limits — the kind where my calves would begin quivering halfway up a hill and I’d wonder if my leg muscles were about to fail altogether. Mentally I was not faring much better, with clouds stealing the views and moist, warm air leaving me drenched in sweat from within even as increasingly sleet-like precipitation soaked my outer layers. Emotionally, I wavered between stoic and reeling in near-meltdowns.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I’d chant out loud. “It’s a hard day. And that’s okay.” (Did you ever watch Stuart Smalley “Daily Affirmations” skits on Saturday Night Live? This is exactly what I was picturing as I said “and that’s okay” to myself.)

We crossed Shirley Lake and Finnbear Lake, with a couple of cabins that did not appear to be currently occupied. The trail now skirted along a bench above the Happy River gorge, squeezing through a narrow chute beneath still invisible mountains. The route cut laterally across steep sidehills, where the trail was more frequently blocked by short sections of slanting ice. These "overflows" develop when groundwater seeps over the snow and re-freezes. There were no choices but to cross off-camber ice made incredibly slippery by the wet precipitation, knowing that any slip could send us careening down the hillside. We donned microspikes over our shoes, but the sleds still had no traction. They’d swing downhill until they were pulling directly at our sides, throwing off balance with every step. One overflow was a veritable waterfall, plummeting down a steep slope where remnants of the trail emerged at the bottom. The ice was so bad that Beat waited for me even though I was at that point nearly twenty minutes behind, and offered to take my sled down for me. I felt grateful that he had, as I struggled to pick my way down the icefall without the extra weight. In all likelihood, I lacked the strength to manage the sled’s downward pull with only microspikes to leverage against gravity. If I were alone, I would have had to choose between risking injury from slipping with the sled attached to me, or risking losing all my gear to the Happy River Gorge by releasing the sled on its own. 

The gray day faded to a darker shade of twilight, which was nearly black by the time I arrived at Puntilla Lake Lodge. Over the past hour, sleet had deteriorated into drenching rain. Beat and I held onto hope that ascending to higher elevations would keep us above snow level, but the opposite turned out to be true. It was raining, hard. 

The distance between Finger Lake and Puntilla Lake is a mere thirty miles, but it had physically been my most difficult day yet. Before I entered the tiny log cabin reserved for racers, I organized my sled so I could bring every soft thing inside, out of the rain. There were a lot of people crammed in the building — Tim, Loreen, Rick, Steve, Beat, me, Donald the Scottish biker, another biker who had come down with frostbite and was considering evacuation, and Anne. Jason Boon would arrive in a few hours. The race organizers had flown in cans of soup that we could heat in vats of water on the wood stove, but I chose to use the heated water to hydrate one of my freeze-dried meals, and helped myself to packets of hot chocolate left behind by some blazing-fast bikers. 

Everyone was distraught about the rain. Even Tim agreed that it would be foolish to set out for Rainy Pass during a downpour, soaking our clothing and shoes before descending into the Dalzell Gorge, where temperatures could swiftly swing back to thirty below and there were no spaces to dry gear for more than a hundred miles. We set alarms for midnight with a plan to assess the weather when we woke up. Despite exhaustion I again struggled to sleep. The air inside the cabin was hot and dry, and the day’s overexertion radiated from my skin. I tossed and turned and listened to my iPod to shut out Tim’s grizzly bear snores. At midnight, it was still pouring, so we set alarms for 2 a.m. I slept some, and woke up feeling much better, but it was still raining. Tim agreed to a 4 a.m. alarm, but asserted that we didn’t have the luxury to wait this out much longer. He was right. The pull over Rainy Pass is a harrowing one, with navigation difficulties and avalanche dangers lurking near the pass. It’s not wise to start too late in the day.

Iditarod Again, part four

In the loft of Cindy’s cabin, we offered the bed to Tim and Loreen, and Beat and I made a nest of blankets and one pillow on the floor at the foot of the bed. One important aspect I forgot to explain in my last installment is the fact that Beat and decided to abandon his unsupported goal for this leg to McGrath, and joined me for indoor stays. He and I have discussed this since, and neither of us can remember exactly why he made this decision so early in the journey. He was still hauling his 75-pound sled and eating frozen peanut butter out of Ziplock bags and freeze-dried meals spiked with butter powder. I think ultimately it boiled down to a desire to hang out with me and “have fun” rather than suffer for an arbitrary goal. Beat told me, “I’m good at racing; I’m not so good at training.” What he meant is that it’s easier to maintain outlandish goals when there aren't opt-outs, even if such requirements are only maintained by the arbitrary but rigid parameters of a race. “Training” efforts are more fluid, and open to adjustments. 

I was quietly glad Beat made the decision to stick with me. I tossed and turned for ninety minutes, still not sleeping, before we got up to leave around midnight. As we repacked our sleds and dropped back into the frigid sink of the river corridor, I battled a gnawing fear of nighttime, dark and cold. I was considerably more prepared for cold temperatures than I was in the morning, wearing extra layers that would be much easier to remove from a warm body than add to a cold body. Yet I remembered how I cold felt all morning, and was shaken by the experience. The fatigue of nearly eighty sled miles and forty-two hours without sleep weighed on every emotion, giving unjust power to doubt and apprehension. Yawning blackness spread all around, wisps of high clouds shielded the stars, and when I looked over my shoulder, I could no longer see the amber-tinted light pollution of Anchorage. It was very dark. 

When I looked ahead, my headlamp caught the glare of reflective tape on Beat’s trekking poles and backpack, swaying back and forth with an outline that looked just like a hockey goalie anticipating a shot. The rhythmic motion was soothing and reassuring; I matched Beat’s long stride even as the pace tugged at my hamstrings and revved my heart. The effort wasn’t too difficult as long as it meant I wasn’t alone. Memories took me back to 2008 and the many hours I spent entirely by myself, just me and the Iditarod Trail, going as long as a day without encountering another human being. It still amazes me that I managed that deep of solitude in such a menacing environment without falling apart, and didn’t succumb to panic that I still felt creeping around the edges, even with six years of experience beyond that, and with Cindy’s cabin just a mile or two behind us. I managed it then because there were no opt-outs. No one was coming to help me, so I had to help myself. And yet, as I chased Beat into what looked and felt like infinite darkness, I was incredibly grateful for the fluidity of life, the option to have him here with me, now. 

I fixated on the glowing hockey goalie and slipped further into a trance until twelve miles passed and we crossed into the comforting aroma of wood smoke. Surrounded by tall spruce trees and not much else, the Skwentna Roadhouse is a most welcoming oasis, with a friendly proprietor named Cindi. You don’t have to be a racer to enjoy Cindi’s hospitality; she served up chili and cornbread for my pilot friend Dan and me after we landed on the snow-covered landing strip for visits in 2012 and 2013, and free Christmas cookies when Beat and I walked in for a visit during a New Year’s training trip with Anne in 2011. After an extended stay at trail angel Cindy’s, we hadn’t planned to stop long at this official race checkpoint just four hours later. But the heated interior of the building hit me like an anvil, and I collapsed in a chair in the front room. 

“I’m just really tired,” I told Beat. “I’m shattered.” 

Photo by Shawn McTaggart

We decided to rent a room at the roadhouse, set an alarm for 8 a.m., then have a quick cup of coffee and go. Although grateful, I felt guilty about this second extended stop. That’s just what happens when you put your mindset in “race” mode. We may have chosen the slowest mode of travel, and we may have not even been in the running to win that division — but we were still there to test ourselves and our limits, we were still determined to finish as well as we could, and we were still most assuredly racing. But I was crashing. Cindi led us upstairs to a cozy private room with a queen bed, crisp sheets, a fluffy quilt. I peeled off all of my clothing except for my underwear and wrapped myself in the incredible snugness of this bed, feeling the cool sheets against the hot tingling of my skin. Skwentna beds are the ultimate guilty pleasure — “it’s like we’re comfort touring the Iditarod Trail” I mumbled to Beat as I slipped into three hours’ worth of deep, dreamless sleep. 

I woke up stiff with a swollen face and knees, but if you asked me about my health I would have told you I felt like a million bucks. Beat and I savored bottomless cups of coffee and ate a piece of Cindi’s famous pumpkin roll. After that, I probably would have claimed that I could easily go another ninety miles — although I still had nearly three times that mileage to travel, at this point in a long race, bold assumptions about any distance are an invitation for disaster. No matter, because I felt great. We packed up our sleds as golden beams from the rising sun streamed through the trees. Carole and Shawn were just arriving, Steve was eating breakfast, and Tim, Loreen, and Rick left just an hour or two earlier. We were still a roving party. 

The views of the Alaska Range were becoming more extensive and clear. The mountains seemed to wrap all the way around the valley as we crossed a long swamp before climbing into the Shell Hills. After sixty miles of terrain that was almost entirely flat, it felt great to finally engage the glutes and do some real climbing, even though the sled tugged my harness so aggressively that I thought it might pull us both backward down the hill. Rick caught up and joined us for the hard climbs followed by giggling — complete with real running — descents. When we passed Rick earlier, he was lying next to his sled with a sleeping bag draped over his body like a blanket. Rick didn’t like to waste too much time indoors, and developed a clever strategy of stopping at the warmest time of the day to nap and dry his down bag in the sun. Temperatures were in the single digits above zero, which was still about twenty degrees too cold for my always-chilled feet. I could never stop for long on the trail, but I fantasized about lying down on my sled and closing my eyes, just for a minute. 

One snowmobile passed on a steep corner, and the three of us stepped off the trail together. As I shimmied to pull my sled out of the way, I plunged my leg into a thigh-deep pillow of snow that ended in a creek bed. When I pulled the leg out, my men’s-size-11 shoe was missing. Beat and Rick had already started back up the trail, and I held my sock foot up in erratic one legged hopping until I gained enough balance to kneel down on the drift and dig frantically with my bare hands (during the “warm” part of the day, my trekking pole pogies provided ample insulation, and I didn't wear gloves.) I fished out the shoe, which was sitting in a trickle of flowing water beneath the snow — luckily shallow enough that it didn’t submerge anything above the Gore-Tex barrier. 

In a deeper stream or in the frigid night, this little mishap could have easily turned into a small disaster — if it was too dark to find the shoe, or if I froze my fingers digging for it, or if it became soaked. But in this context, it was just funny. I didn’t say anything to Beat or Rick, because it was still embarrassing that I was marching through a 350-mile race in clown shoes so large that they slipped off my feet freely. 

The giggling and running got us eighteen miles to Shell Lake by early afternoon, and we stopped into Shell Lake Lodge for a can of Pepsi. The proprietor Zoe, a gruff older woman who is fiercely independent and generous to all Iditarod travelers, has a reputation for taking her time in the kitchen. We wanted to make the most of the remaining warm daylight, so we didn’t order any food. Despite this rushing, the friendly sun was already well into its downward arc when began the gradual climb into toward the foothills of the Alaska Range. 

On this shelf above the Skwentna River, the Iditarod trail traverses a series of swamps that I call the “Zig-Zag Swamps,” because this section involves crossing a long, open plain, taking a hard right to cut through a forested strip of spruce trees, then a hard left to traverse another long, open plain. This process goes on perpetually, sometimes skirting the edge of little lakes instead of swamps, although you’d never know the difference. While marching I occasionally slipped into beautiful Zen mode, which was too easily broken by the jarring scenery change of the forests. Other swamps invited long bouts of fixating on sore shins and feet. The friendly sun gave way to a gorgeous sunset, with luminous silver and gold streaks across the sky. 

Then it was dark and cold again. Perception of time became fuzzy. We crossed through a row of trees and entered another swamp, and I was taunted by a suspicion that we were walking in circles through the same forest and the same swamp. Beat and I discussed our individual foot pains and decided to stop, add lube, and change our socks. I made quick work of the chore and laid down on top of my sled with my down coat draped over me, dozing off Rick-style. My feet woke me up after three minutes with needling pain. 

“What time is it? What year is it?” We crossed through a forest and into a swamp, again. The zigs remained short but the zags grew longer. My headlamp would catch the glare of reflector tape on distant wooden lath that officials from Irondog snowmachine race used to mark the trail a few weeks earlier. I’d see the sparkling glow of the tape and convince myself it was exterior light of building, that we had finally reached Finger Lake — but time after time, this wasn’t true. 

Beat marched ahead, and I struggled to keep pace as I fell farther behind, until I could no longer see the soothing reflection of a hockey goalie swaying from side to side. The Irondog reflectors must have been especially powerful, because I continued to catch these in full brightness even though all I could see of Beat was a faint headlamp beam cut in half by his shadow. These bright glares just had to be electric lights, I told myself — but time after time, they weren’t. 

Only iPod was left to break the monotony of an incessant loop. I listened to “Reflektor” by Arcade Fire and sang out loud, because no one was close enough to hear me, and time had stopped anyway — “Trapped in a prism, a prism of light. Alone in the darkness, the darkness of white.” 

I zigged, the swamps zagged, and there were more bright reflectors fastened to what turned out to be more wooden lath.

“I thought I found a way to enter. It’s just a reflektor. I thought I found a connector. It’s just a reflektor.” 

The sky opened up. The cold sank deeper, but there were stars, finally, and enough ambient light to reveal the profiles of river bluffs along the Skwentna. The canyon was narrowing. 

“I want to break free. But will they break me? Down, down, down. Don’t mess around.” 

Still there were zigs and zags. Only zigs and zags.  “There is just no way, no way we’re not there yet. Finger Lake is only twenty miles from Shell Lake. This is impossible,” I thought. Out loud, I sang. 

“It’s just a reflection! Of a reflection! Of a reflection! Of a reflection!”

Oh, iPod. At least you understand me. 

Finally we reached a wooden lath with a sign next to it, and an arrow. It was too good to be true. Winterlake Lodge sits on the far edge of Finger Lake, behind a bluff, so the buildings remain hidden from the trail. Darkness persisted. It had been too good to be true. But what was that sign? A reflector? Fatigue and fuzziness reigned, and there were no longer any assurances about what was real and what was imagined. I was flabbergasted. Then I heard a dog bark. Five minutes later, we finally saw buildings. They were eerily dark — a generator hummed, but no energy was being wasted on exterior lights. It was just as well. Finger Lake was an official race checkpoint, which meant someone there was probably waiting up, and would be willing to give us something to eat at 1 a.m. Warm food vindicates all. 

Iditarod Again, part three

Out on the frozen tundra, sleep can be as elusive as wisps of Aurora, pulsing and fading. This shelf above the Susitna River wasn’t terribly cold — 5 degrees, according to my thermometer — which was warm enough to keep my face pressed out of the bag and breathe freely. But my heart continued to beat rapidly, prompting frantic leaps between exhaustion and alertness. Almost as soon as I dozed off, my lungs would fill with chilled air and my unadjusted panic response would jolt my brain awake — what is this cold fire? Where are we? But nuzzling into the sleeping bag was worse; I couldn’t shake off the panic response that now thought I was suffocating. Still, my body was reclined, my feet — encased in Nunatak down booties — were so toasty, and actually this whole not walking thing was pretty damn wonderful. 

I was still lying there, staring at the outlines of birch branches in search of green light, when the group began to rouse. A couple moved out and then a couple more, and I continued to lie there because I was still stoked on not walking. Finally Beat started rustling in his bag, so I sat up. “What time is it?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “Almost 5 a.m. We slept four hours.”

“I didn’t sleep at all,” I said. “Pretty sure not at all.” 

“It will come,” Beat said. “Don’t worry.” 

I peeled the used socks off my torso. They were still damp to the touch, so I stuffed them back in and zipped up my down coat to pack up. My head was foggy, there was no coffee, and I was forgetting all the steps. I rolled up my bivy bundle before I remembered to extract my water bottle from the interior, and packed up the mittens I intended to wear.

“I didn’t practice this enough,” I said to Beat. 

“It will come,” he assured me again. 

We trundled to the lip of the Wall of Death, which is not really all that scary if you’re not riding wheels or skis, and broke out into sprints as our sleds chased us down the steep pitch. Temperatures plunged as we dropped onto the river, and I gasped at the sudden stabbing sensation in my throat. I pulled up my face mask and looked at my thermometer. “It’s minus 10 now,” I announced, though Beat was marching too far ahead to hear. 

I shivered and started marching harder because I believed hard efforts would help me warm up. And then I remembered that, yes, breakfast would help me warm up too, so I reached into my feed bag to fish out some dried cherries and pistachios. My “feed bag” was a chalk bag that I fastened to the chest strap of my harness, for easy access. Subzero cold doesn’t really afford the luxury of stopping, so it’s wise to figure out simple ways to eat while walking. Strategies include choosing food that’s bite-sized, high-calorie-density, doesn’t need to be unwrapped, and won’t break your teeth when frozen solid. In my opinion (an opinion that some disagree with), high-carb food is best for endurance efforts in subzero cold, because it burns fast and warms you up quick. Others swear by high fat — and these people are lucky because they get away with half of the weight in food — but I’ve never made fat work for me as an energy source for strenuous activities (majority-fat foods usually just sit like an unignitable log in my gut and make me feel ill. Peanut butter and some nuts are about all I can stomach.) I had pre-prepared thousand-calorie Ziplock bags of Jill Feed. Half were marginally healthy — dried fruit and nuts. The other half were unapologetically all candy — peanut M&Ms, mini peanut butter cups, chocolate-covered pretzels, bite-sized Twix, and bite-sized Snickers. It was simple enough to pull my hand briefly out of the pogies on my trekking poles, cram fifty to a hundred calories into my face, and jam my hands back in my mitts before fingers went numb. 

Five in the morning seemed like something that should be vaguely close to dawn, but darkness persisted as we marched for miles along the fortress-like bluffs of the Susitna. A breeze kicked up and I began to regret not adding more layers when I had the chance. When I crawled out of my sleeping bag that morning, my capilene shirt and windproof tights were damp and clinging to my skin, and my polartec pullover felt clammy. But these layers had been good enough for all of the day before, so why not now? I didn’t account for the depletion in glycogen stores, the muscle fatigue, and a fifteen-degree drop in temperature on the river, which kept on dropping. I had added a windproof fleece jacket, but needles of cold found their way into openings around my neck and minimal fabric around my knees and butt until an electric chill reverberated down my spine. It happened so suddenly; one minute I was debating whether it was worth stopping for a few minutes on this wind-exposed river to put on another hat, mittens, primaloft shorts, perhaps my Gore-Tex shell — and the next minute, it felt like stopping for any amount of time was not an option. 

This clothing was all readily accessible inside my sled, but my panic response warned me that any pause in motion would be the tipping point between uneasy discomfort, and violent shivering. I had the means to recover from a bout of violent shivering — and if I were trekking across Antarctica, I would have no choice. But we were only twenty miles or so away from Yentna Station. And the sun would surely come up soon. Oh, beautiful sun. Even though logic told me just a few more layers would help me overcome this urgent discomfort, I was terrified of violent shivering, and couldn’t bare the thought of stepping over the narrow margin my body was straddling. So I marched harder.

We took a hard left at the confluence of the Yentna River. The breeze bit my nose, so I pushed my frozen face mask closer to my skin. My hands went numb, so I decided it was no longer an option to take them out of my pogies. My feed bag bounced against my chest, taunting me. I felt very hungry, but exposing my hands and face to move a few calories from the feed bag to my mouth was not an sacrifice I was willing to make. My core temperature was dangling, slipping, and every minute seemed more dire. I should have stopped back there on the Susitna, I thought. But now it really wasn’t an option. I kept marching. And darkness persisted. 

Blame pressed at this sense of urgency. “You need food. You need a coat and mittens. It’s not hard. They’re right there.” So I fired back, “It’s the first morning. I wasn’t ready. I live in California. It takes some time to remember what it means, this cold.” My jaw began to quiver and teeth chattered softly. My core temperature was still dropping. Beat was just a hundred feet in front of me this whole time, and sometimes right behind after waiting for me to catch up. He’d ask me how I was doing and I’d reply that I was fine, because I was embarrassed that I was so cold, that my fingers had become stiff, that I’d stopped eating and drinking. It was silly, of course, but stopping to ask Beat to help me grab a coat still meant stopping. So I kept marching. 

Lavender light filled the sky, followed by a pink strip across the southern horizon. Finally the sun slumped over distant mountains, but bluffs kept the Yentna River interminably in shadow. It was funny, really, that I’d decided waiting for the sun was the best solution for my miserable state of cold, as though I’d forgotten I was in Alaska and maintained a delusion that sun’s 9:30 a.m. arrival on the low horizon had any capacity to warm this sink of frigid air. But the anticipation had its own unique quality — a futile optimism that stretched toward the river bends where sunbeams touched the ice. Always stretching, always marching. 

When we reached Yentna Station, there actually was a spark of solar radiation, and my fingers began to tingle. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in five hours, and traveled more than twenty miles since I “woke up” from a sleep I hadn’t actually had, and yet the only thing I’d really felt since then was cold. Food, water, and rest are nice luxuries when they’ve only been missed for a few hours. But when it comes down to it, the body knows what it needs first.  

Heat. Fire was roaring in a wood stove when we stepped inside the snowmachiner stop-over at the far end of the Yentna's oxbow bend. I peeled off the ice helmet that my balaclava had become, and took off my shoes to make sure my toes still had hints of color. They were faintly blue, but they weren’t gray, which is what matters when you’re looking for frostbite. The black blisters come later, after thawing. I whispered a quiet “yay” and vowed to do better every morning from here on out. 

Anne and Shawn were slumped on the couches next to the stove, eyes half closed. Tim, Loreen, and Rick were waiting at the dining room table for the breakfast they ordered. 

“Why do I keep doing this to myself?” Tim asked rhetorically as Beat and I joined them at the table.

“I’m trying to make an executive decision,” Loreen said as she held two freeze-dried meals in her hands, deciding whether to pitch the eighteen ounces of extra weight. I was ravenous. Beyond any kind of ravenous I was familiar with, spilling over into the kind of hunger that can drive a civilized person to start spooning handfuls of goop out of Crisco container … which, incidentally, was something I caught myself eyeing greedily when I glimpsed the label on a shelf in the kitchen. Loreen said she could never eat much during these types of efforts because she felt too sick. I felt bad for her, but couldn't emphasize. My body was telling me to eat all the food, so it could store it away in glycogen and fat — the biological version of stacking firewood in anticipation of a long, cold winter. 

I ordered breakfast, and the roadhouse owner asked if I wanted hash browns or toast with my scrambled eggs. “Um, yes?” He brought me a heaping plate that I mowed through with several cups of coffee, then ate Loreen’s unwanted toast. All of the distress and discomfort I’d endured drained away. This was the ticket. Kilojoules. Kilojoules are everything. 

We left Yentna Station just a few minutes behind the Pennsylvanians. By early afternoon there was real warmth to the air, with solar heat radiating off the white expanse of the river. We had thirty more miles to travel to the tiny “town” of Skwentna, following the lazy curves of the Yentna to its confluence with the Skwentna River. From an outside perspective, dragging a forty-five-pound sled for thirty miles up a wide, flat river probably seems like a torturously boring task. Like the anchor that it is, the loaded sled and higher resistance of snow cancels out inefficient attempts at running strides — making running an unwise expenditure of energy. A good comparison would be attempting to run up all the hills in a hundred miler — you might move 25 percent faster at first, but the chance of burning out too soon is high. A small number of athletes, such as Dave Johnston, can and do run on snow with loaded sleds. But for me, and I imagine most people who engage in this foolish activity, sled-dragging is a walking motion that drains as much energy and stresses the cardiovascular system and many muscles as much or more than running on trails. So not only are you traversing a wide, flat, and almost colorless landscape, but you are “running,” sort of hard, at three miles per hour, and it’s going to take a long damn time to get anywhere. Once the danger cold retreats under the afternoon sun, there’s not even an immediate survival factor to keep the mind engaged. I think people have nightmares like this sometimes, in which they’ve died of boredom and gone to Sisyphean Hell. 

I’m not sure how to even qualify this statement, but I love the frozen river slog. It’s like a white curtain draped over my mind, a soothing place where my heart beats fast and rhythmically, my legs move robotically, and my mind is as open and blank as the surface of an ocean. I’ve never made an effort to meditate in the traditional sense, but I imagine this is what meditation is like. The cauldron of thoughts and emotions simmers down, and on this rare smooth surface I briefly glimpse what’s reflected from beyond rather than what’s churning from within. I breath. I walk. I’m at peace. 

It’s not always like this, out on the river — and wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had the discipline to harness this mindset in my own home? But I slip into this state naturally when my body is tired from exertion, and my mind is tired from battling fear and anxieties, and the wide, meandering trail brings no immediate obstacles to concentrate on, no sudden turns to navigate. The body and mind say, “let go,” and I do, and these interludes are too wonderful to attempt to qualify with outward justifications such as, “The views of the Alaska Range were amazing,” or “It was clear and the air had this sharp sweetness to it,” or “I had fun conversations with friends.” But these things were true, too.

For most of the afternoon we walked with Tim and Loreen, sometimes talking, sometimes just enjoying the scenery. Our friend Dan flew over in his Cessna, circling back several times and tipping his wings as he passed overhead. For the past two years I’ve been in that plane with him, watching racers traverse the Yentna River from above. “The view is actually not so different from down here,” I thought. But the journey had been much deeper than an hour-long flight from Merrill Field in Anchorage. And this was still, almost unfathomably, just the beginning of this race. 

Shortly after the sun set, we passed another bend in the river inviting Iditarod racers inside. Cindy has lived on the Yentna for nearly two decades, and recently became took on the role of a “trail angel” for human-powered travelers. I still don’t fully understand what compels a person to become a trail angel — to invite exhausted strangers into their home to disrupt their evenings, devour their food and spread stinky bodies across their furniture and floors — but I do know that trail angels are wonderful people. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Cindy offered a delicious soup and homemade bread, and cake for desert, and then offered her own bedroom for Tim, Loreen, Beat and me to lie down for an hour or two. Someone else would later curl up on a couch in the small front room/kitchen, and this and the upstairs room were about all there was to Cindy’s tiny cabin. Anne and Shawn had taken an unheated cabin outside. 

“Where will you sleep?” I asked. 

“I’ll be all right,” Cindy replied. 

The people who live in rural Alaska have no choice but to work very hard just to maintain the most basic amenities, for something that most Americans would view as a spartan and impoverished existence. When just surviving is a full time job, no one would fault you for looking out only for yourself and your own family. At yet, rural Alaskans are some of the most generous people you’ll ever meet. 

Iditarod Again, part two

The official start of the Iditarod Trail Invitational is always informal and mildly amusing. Race rules stipulate that competitors only need to hit a handful of checkpoints along the route — how they get there is entirely up to them, as long as it’s under their own power. A large majority of competitors stick to the Iditarod Trail — it’s the only established route. But race veterans have their secret tracks and shortcuts, and occasionally participants will test wild deviations. In 2009, two cyclists diverted from an L-shaped section of the Iditarod Trail to try their luck on the direct line formed by the frozen Kuskokwim River. After fifty miles of increasingly difficult surface conditions, the men hit a dead-end of open water with no other options but to backtrack two days' worth of travel. A pilot who was flying over the Kuskokwim happened to spot the cyclists in this most unlikely location, and landed to make sure they weren’t dying. The pilot offered to shuttle them one by one to McGrath, so they took the ride and scratched from the race. No one has attempted such a bold route deviation since.

 Still, because there’s no required route, most cyclists opt to deviate from the start on a “shortcut” that’s about eight miles longer than the established Iditarod Trail, but includes plowed roads and a power line access trail. Runners, whose top speeds don’t waver much, always stick to the shortest route — which is hillier, more remote, and has a higher chance of soft trail conditions. The official race starting line is simply a banner strung across birch trees on the edge of Knik Lake, an oval-shaped puddle that nearly touches saltwater on the shore of Knik Arm. Knik Lake would never be noticed by anyone were it not officially mile zero of the Iditarod Trail. The race start is same every year: Most of the bikers make a U-turn back toward the road, and all of the runners launch forward across the lake, sprinting as fast as their sleds will allow.

They always run. It’s a race with a “sprint” distance of 350 miles, but everyone launches off the line as though the gun just sounded for a 5K. Mix an explosive release of cortisol with showboating for three dozen spectators, and just about everyone’s fastest speeds in the race take place in the first hundred yards. Reality sets in very shortly thereafter, when the trail takes a sharp turn off the lake to climb a steep embankment. Those who haven’t already stopped to readjust their sleds scramble up the hill like scared cattle, throwing arms and trekking poles into churned powder as they clamor for the lead. At the top of this hill, everyone will be entirely out of breath and finally ready to accept that this is a race of days, not minutes. Paces adjust accordingly.

 Beat and I planned to run our own races rather than try to stick together. He still intended to run the 350-mile distance self-supported and not go inside checkpoints, which would clash with my plan to sleep indoors whenever this option was available. Clashing with these intentions were more deep-set motivations — I was sled-dragging this year to not only experience the trail in a new way, but also to share the experience with Beat, who values his yearly sojourn on the Iditarod Trail possibly more than anything else he does. Still, I understood the difficulty of linking mismatched paces in an environment where motion is our best source of heat, and also the rewards of solitude in a difficult journey, for both of us. I also suspected Beat was conflicted about partnering up, but if Beat wanted to hang out with me, I would gratefully accept his company.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

The small foot division was an eclectic group of familiar faces. Tim Hewitt, the Pennsylvania attorney who had completed the thousand-mile journey to Nome an unprecedented seven times — including fully unsupported in 2013 — was returning for an eighth. His wife, Loreen, was a three-time finisher of the 350-mile race making a second attempt on the full distance. Having stopped in McGrath in 2013, she was determined to see this journey through to the finish, along with their friend Rick Freeman, who called off his first Nome attempt in 2012 (along with everyone else that year). Shawn McTaggart, a recent transplant to Southcentral Alaska, was the only woman to have completed the trek to Nome on foot within the perimeters of the race, and was aiming for a finish on the Northern Route. Anne Ver Hoef, another Anchorage resident and regular participant in the short race, was also aiming for Nome. Steve Ansell joined Beat and me in the California-based contingent. John Logar of West Virginia was back for the full meal deal after completing the trek to McGrath in 2013. Jason Buffington, who the previous year placed well in the cycling division, returned to make an attempt on foot — upending the singularity of being the only veteran to embrace a new mode of travel that year. Jason would eventually team up with Parker Rios in a five-day blitz of the route. There were three rookies — Jason Boon from Minnesota, Carole Holley from Anchorage, and Peter Ripmaster, a fifty-states marathoner from North Carolina who showed up for the 350-mile race with an expedition sled that weighed ninety pounds. And then there was Dave Johnston — an unassuming Susitna Valley local with a knee-length pony tail and a playful demeanor that masked fierce determination. Dave won the previous year’s race in near-record time — a record that many considered untouchable. This year, he intended to break it.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Even though Beat and I started at a leisurely pace, by the time I scrambled to the top of the fifty-foot embankment of Knik Lake that should be called “Reality Hill,” my calves were already searing and my hamstrings were alarmingly sore. I brushed this off as “phantom pain” brought on by nervousness, but my sled dragged behind me like a reluctant pet willfully pulling backward, and I had to admit that I was probably undertrained for this effort. California living, while providing ample opportunities for warm January mountain biking and delicious sushi, is not conducive to training for snow-based efforts. Snow, even packed snow, demands different motions and more difficult efforts than one might expect, or remember while training on dirt. Add forty-five pounds of extra weight, and difficulty scales tip toward unsustainable. I’d made some efforts toward improving my strength. I increased my hill training, and frequently set out for jogs/hikes while dragging a two-wheeled bike trailer loaded with seventy pounds of cat litter, which Beat outfitted with disc brakes to add resistance and mimic the effects of snow. These efforts helped, but they didn’t really make me strong enough to drag a loaded sled 350 miles over hills, mountains, and rivers, in the span of a week.

 It’s my belief that women in general have to work harder to build strength for weight-based efforts. Historically men did all of the “man-hauling” in big expeditions, and even today mountaineers and polar explorers are male by a large majority. Women of course are more than capable of the strength for man-hauling — look at all of the women backpackers and firefighters out there. But with less muscle mass and lower body weights, most of us really do have to work harder to achieve the abilities that come more naturally to men. I admittedly did not work for it. I could have been lifting weights, pursing strength-building workouts … but I was having too much fun riding my mountain bike through California’s warm, sunny winter. It was my fault that I did not feel strong. And I still had 349 miles left to pay for my lassitude.

Still, the first miles were too wonderful to lapse into despair, just yet. The day had a crisp beauty, with expanses of sparkling snow and sharply detailed mountains on the horizon. We could see the towering peaks of Denali in high definition, and it was both gratifying and unnerving to realize that this journey would take us on a long arc around this massive mountain. Everyone’s mood was buoyant as the stress drained away and adrenaline remained. A mile from the start, Dave breezed by with a radiant grin on his face. He had walked with his family for a short distance before launching into a steady run — a pace he intended to hold for the remainder of the race. Most of the rest of us marched in single file along the trail, laughing and conversing like friends out for a Sunday stroll. I chatted with Carole, who had a pink skirt and a refreshingly laid-back attitude. We shared stories about our mutual friend, a previous 350-mile finisher who I spent some time riding with in 2008. He had been trying to talk Carole into the ITI for years, but she wasn’t much of a cyclist. “But I like running,” she said. “So I thought, why not try it on foot?”

Carole pulled hard up the many steep hills that ripple across this former glacier moraine of a valley, and I envied her strength and her home court advantage. When I said as much, she promised me she was struggling as well, that her sled had only recently been purchased at REI and she wasn’t yet sure what to do with it. She told me about a near-disaster in the minutes before the race, when a pole attachment broke and she barely fixed it in time to start. She still wasn’t sure whether her repair would hold. I supposed that there was a fair chance that most of us, even the locals, didn’t really know what we were doing out there.

 Except Tim, of course. As of the start, Tim still hadn’t decided whether he’d accompany Loreen for the entire distance, or make an attempt on an achievement that has eluded him in the past — the Northern Route record. Tim holds the overall record on the Southern Route, but believes the Northern Route can be blitzed in nineteen days or less. After knee surgery and a long recovery, he admitted that his knee probably wasn’t up to the task this year, and was conflicted about leaving Loreen to take on the difficult journey all alone. Tim was hanging back for now, but he and Dave were two people I did not expect to see again after the first day.

In general, the Iditarod Trail is not a difficult route to navigate. For most of its distance, the trail cuts through regions so remote that this thin ribbon of tree clearings, tripods, and snowmobile tracks is unmistakably the only way to go — as long as you can see any evidence of a trail at all. The only exception to this is the first thirty miles, where the Iditarod meanders through a maze of rural properties, dog mushing trails, seismic lines and trapper routes. Quite a few people have gotten lost during the Invitational, but it almost always happens on the first day. We were following Tim’s signature serpentine sled track and nearly took a wrong left turn, but were pointed in the right direction by Tony Covarrubias, a previous 350-mile finisher who ran out to cheer for his wife, Shawn. Most everyone else in front and behind our group of four — Beat, me, Carole, and Steve, plus Shawn — took the tripod-marked wrong way.

 The glittering sunlight faded away surprisingly soon, which is what happens when a 2 p.m. start meets a 6 p.m. sunset. Traveling at three miles per hour, we hadn’t even yet reached the fifteen-mile mark at the Little Susitna River before twilight began to settle. In 2008, I was turning onto the Yentna River near mile forty when the sun went down. With these landmarks still fresh in my memory, the difference in effort expended versus distance covered was disheartening. I think on some level I’d let myself believe that snow biking was not that much different than sled dragging. On some level, it’s not — as long as you’re pushing the bike, not riding it. This was going to be 350 miles with four miles an hour as a top speed, and no coasting. The reality of that was beginning to sink in.

We pulled off the trail to layer up, because in these low river valleys, the day’s balmy twenty degrees can plummet to minus twenty degrees as swiftly as turning off a light. Salmon-colored light stretched across the sky, and the profile of Mount Susitna — “the sleeping lady” — became a placating beacon on the horizon. Steve lingered to take it all in — the frozen meadow, the pipe cleaner spruce forests, the far-reaching mountains.

A biting breeze whisked around my cheeks and nose, and my toes began to hurt almost as soon as I stopped. During the limited gear testing we were able to complete over Christmas break in Fairbanks, I’d decided on a system that I believed would keep my feet warm without subjecting them to the sweat marination that resulted in painful trench foot, which I’d endured in all of my winter foot races so far. Gortex trail-running shoes, a pair of Drymax socks, and a pair of Acorn fleece socks — the kind they make for people who like to curl up on their couches and sip hot chocolate. If it was really cold, I’d add gaiters, and possibly an extra layer of fleece socks. My shoes were more than large enough to accommodate anything I wanted to stuff inside. I’d ordered them online — Montrail Mountain Masochist. In my previous races, I used women’s size ten, and decided I wanted to go a half size up. Ten and a half wasn’t available, so I ordered elevens. The problem is, I accidentally clicked on men’s shoes in the sizing chart. These were men’s size eleven. For perspective, my usual women’s eight and a half is 9.6 inches long, and these shoes were 10.9 inches long. They were enormous, and brand new. I’d ordered them too close to the start, and there was no turning back. 

Maybe it was because my shoes had too much open space inside of them, or maybe I should have better chosen my layers, but my feet became cold and stayed that way, almost constantly. I had led myself to believe that runners never get cold feet, and yet I could barely keep the blood circulating even I was moving. When I stopped, a vice of pain and numbness clamped down fast. Still, I was still so terrified the hot-coals pain of trench foot that I couldn’t bear the thought of putting on the pair of vapor barrier socks that I brought for extreme cold and emergencies. I decided that if I started to feel real numbness, I’d deal with it, but as long as I simply felt tingling pain, I’d just cope.

At mile eighteen, there’s a randomly placed wooden sign that points the way to Nome. Tim and Loreen caught up to us again just before this sign after finding their way back from their wrong turn before the Little Su. Tim yelled to us that we were going the wrong way, and we argued that “the Nome sign is this way,” and it turned out we were right. It was starting to feel late. We stuck in a loose group of six before dropping onto a slough Flathorn Lake, where Beat and I wanted to try a “sneak” the bypassed the lake on a direct line through the woods. The trail was hilly but solid, and we soon caught up to Anne and two others (maybe Jason and John), who had been following the tracks of four cyclists who took the traditional trail. The cyclists had apparently turned around, and Anne wanted to as well. I argued that the Iditasport 200-mile race used this trail three weeks earlier, and I was certain it went through.

 After several minutes of cold-foot arguing we continued forward, but Anne became more agitated about the possibility of hitting a dead end. When we reached the crossing of another slough of Flathorn, she made the decision to cut down the slough toward the Lake, and Beat decided to follow. I was a little too far behind the main group to argue, but I was strongly against crossing the slough. This was the slough where, at its mouth on Flathorn Lake, I broke through a pressure crack in the ice and soaked my right leg five years ago, ultimately freezing my foot. Sloughs are notorious for bad ice, and it had been a warm winter — the Susitna River Valley was only then coming out of a long thaw that left the whole valley nearly stripped of snow.

As I followed the group’s tracks, my heart raced and I began to hyperventilate. Old and well-earned fears of bad ice and this slough specifically swirled in my head until I thought I might not be able to fight off a panic attack … and wouldn’t that be embarrassing thing to succumb to less than twenty-five miles into this difficult and dangerous race? I concentrated on breathing and placing my feet precisely into Beat’s unmistakable set of large footprints, trying not to think about cold feet and bad ice and that one time I narrowly avoided a fatal plunge to the bottom of Flathorn Lake.

 No one broke through the ice, and as we re-entered the forest, my surging adrenaline lost steam and plunged into a lake of fatigue. “Has it even been ten hours yet? It’s way too soon to feel so tired,” I scolded myself as our dispersing group trickled onto the moonscape of the Dismal Swamp. A train of headlamp beams stretched across the frozen expanse. To the north, a fluttering display of Aurora Borealis stretched over the distant peaks of the Alaska Range. Using the string of faint torches as a trail guide, I turned off my own handlamp and gazed up at the sky, craning my neck to fixate on the arching glow. Phantogram was playing on my iPod, and marched in a trance, utterly mesmerized. In a way, it was like those silly dance clubs that felt so transformative when I was a teenager — those same soaring feelings still resided in my jaded 34-year-old body, only now they were flowing with the incandescence of the universe — the emerald Northern Lights, the white stars, the faint reds and blues of the Milky Way. Fatigue eradicated and fear forgotten, I stretched toward a sensation as close to transcendence as any I have felt.

 Immediate reality returned when the woods closed in again, and the fatigue came back more crushing than before. I focused on breathing as we marched up to the bank of the Susitna River, at a point on the trail known as The Wall of Death. This harrowing title is derived from the fact that the trail drops off the river bank at a near-vertical angle — a horizon line you can’t see until it’s too late, you’ve hit the ice patch at the lip, and you are going to crash brilliantly onto the river twenty feet below.

 My favorite encounter with The Wall of Death happened during the 2011 Susitna 100. It was my first attempt at a hundred-mile ultramarathon, a few months after Beat and I started dating. Beat stayed with me throughout the duration of what would turn out to be a 41-hour race, coaching me and offering words of encouragement. By mile seventy, I was in some of the most persistent broad-spectrum pain I had ever felt, I was sick and nauseated, and I had slowed down to the point that math was not working in my favor to reach the finish before the 48-hour cutoff. When Beat pointed this out, I threw a temper tantrum, declaring that “there would be no more hundred milers, ever” and that I didn’t even care whether I finished this one. Beat moved on ahead to give me more space while I went through the motions of angry muttering, sobbing, and finally defeated numbness. After twenty minutes of this, I crawled up the Wall of Death and found Beat sitting just off the trail. He had rolled out his sleeping pad and laid out a smorgasbord of chocolate, jerky, and crackers — he made a picnic for me.

 “Here, sit down and have something to eat. You’ll feel better,” he said.

 I curled up next to him and nibbled on chocolate until my pain and nausea faded behind feelings of peace and security. The gesture was so endearing that I let myself believe there was nothing that could prevent me from finishing Susitna — as long as I had Beat with me.

 Now, three years later, Beat and I had returned to the Wall of Death, spreading out our sleeping pads beneath a stand of tall birch trees. Before the race started, we agreed that we’d rest for a few hours just before dropping into the Susitna, because the next thirty miles was wide-open river with nowhere to camp before the next checkpoint. As it turned out, Anne and at least three others had the same idea. A few minutes later, Tim, Loreen, and Rick showed up at our crowded encampment. “Wow, it’s a party,” Tim said as they unpacked their gear. I don’t think Tim had ever thought to stop to rest this early in the race, but it was the best idea for the others who were planning to go all the way to Nome.

Before crawling into my bag, I added some snow to fill up my Hydroflask thermos before stuffing it into the down cocoon for body-heat thawing, then changed into two pairs of dry socks so I could put the wet socks against my torso to dry — because dry feet are the key to happiness. Most everyone else was snoring by the time I finished my little chores, and I whispered goodnight to Beat. I was far from alone on the Wall of Death, but I was really glad he was here with me.

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8,000 Miles Across Alaska

by Jill Homer

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