Day six: Farewell Burn to Nikolai

I've read about the horrible experience of waking up from trailside bivies to new bad weather, or petrified muscles, or a sinking cold. No one ever writes about waking up to The Smell. It's so familiar to me now that I can wince just thinking about it, but I can't really describe it - sweet and salty, faintly chemical and toxic; it's the smell of the trail, and your tired, beaten body, exuding unending hard effort, which has soaked into clothing that's been wrapped around your clammy skin for six days. Out on the bike, The Smell filters and dissipates. Inside a humid sleeping bag, it collects and ferments. I woke up to a stench just this side of death; it scared me more than it repulsed me. I groped for my candy bar breakfast and tried to choke it down in the sickening haze. I managed to stuff down about half of it and added up the calories in my head. 400. Good enough.

I wriggled out of my bag and took my first look at the fresh air outside. About three hours had gone by since I laid down, and it was now 2 a.m. The sky hung still and calm and dark - the Northern Lights were gone. The night left behind a deep and piercing cold that I could scarcely imagine, and there I was, living it. It needled into my skin even without wind and wracked me with shivers before I had even taken a few steps away from my bag. I darted for chemical warmers in my bike bag and tore open five or six. They were as solid as blocks of ice, and just as cold. I massaged them inside my mittens, but nothing happened. They were as dead as the night.
All around me, soft things had frozen to rigid hardness ... my backpack, my bike pogies, the top of my bivy sack. Everything covered in thick frost. I felt like a tomb was closing in around me and I could scarcely believe it. I was in the middle of nowhere. I did not dare, DID NOT DARE, look and my thermometer. Some cyclists who passed me at 11:30 p.m. estimated it was about minus 25 when they went by. It could have easily dropped down to minus 30 or minus 35 in that area overnight. It can definitely be worse, but that was beyond anything I had ever experienced, and I couldn't deal with it. I crawled back into my bag and shivered until I stopped. Then I ate the rest of my chocolate bar, sipped a little water before kicking the icy bottle to the foot of my bag, and went back to sleep.

I tried to get out of my bag one more time overnight with similar results. I briefly considered just abandoning my bike and sprinting what I figured to be 25 miles into Nikolai, but finally decided to wait until the sun hit my bag before waking up. That didn't come until 10 a.m., nearly 12 hours after I crawled into the sack in the first place. It was in hindsight a horrible waste of time. I didn't sleep well and didn't make any forward progress. Veteran racers still gawk when they ask, "Did you really bivy for 12 hours out on The Burn?" Yes, I really did bivy for 12 hours out on The Burn. At the time, I felt I had no choice.

I climbed out of my bag one last time into the sun, knowing something would have to happen. A stiff wind had kicked up overnight, driving down the windchill, but the sunlight at least made the air feel tolerable. I reached into my bag and grabbed my water bottle. It was frozen solid. It had frozen. Solid. Inside the bag. My Camelbak, which I had left out overnight, was almost certainly in a similar condition. I stomped around and screamed, at no one, really. There was only The Iditarod Trail. And The Iditarod Trail did not care. It had no sympathy for for the fact that I had 25 miles to grind out, into the wind across a flat frozen expanse with no wind protection, all the while with no water, and the wind blowing so hard that I was doubtful whether I could get my stove to light in order to melt snow. The Iditarod Trail did not care. And I had no choice but to accept it.

I packed up and stuffed the insulation of my frozen Camelbak bladder with the chemical warmers I had torn open the night before, which I managed to ignite by sticking them under my arms inside my sleeping bag. I then stuffed the bladder inside all the layers wrapped around my torso, an ice baby against my chest and abdomen. I hoped my body heat would melt a little of the block ice I was now hoisting as dead weight. Then I ate a little snow, and pushed on, into the wind, toward Nikolai.

Drifted sugar snow obscured the trail and made long stretches impossible to ride. Even packed stretches were a chore to grind out at anything faster than 5 mph. Blasts of wind regularly knocked me right off of the bike. Across the long, open swamps, I could often hear a gust long before it hit me. I would step off my bike, put my head down, and brace for the furnace blast that tore through the air vents in my goggles and layers and layers of clothing protection and kicked up zero-visibility ground blizzards for hundreds of feet in all directions. When the wind wasn't gusting, I would sweat profusely. My thirst was hitting fever pitch, but I was too terrified that one of those gusts would freeze me solid to take off any layers. The Burn was no longer a joke to me. I really was among the walking dead.

About 12 miles from Nikolai, I came to an abandoned fish camp with a small cabin on the shore. I joyfully sprinted up to the structure - here was a wind-protected place where I could at least melt some snow and quench my raging thirst. But snow had drifted in against the door and frozen to concrete consistency. I kicked at it and kicked at it but I couldn't get it to budge. There was no way inside. As I did this, a plane flew over my head. It doubled back against the wind and flew over again. "Oh great," I thought, "they're looking for me now." I knew I had been going really slow. I knew I had stopped a lot. I knew I was suffering, but I also knew I was OK. I did not want to be rescued. I tried to wave at the plane, but I wanted to be careful not to send a distress signal. I made a small wave with one hand that I'm unsure the pilot even saw. I then pulled the Camelbak out of my coat, opened the bladder, and tipped it up against my parched tongue. To my extreme surprise, crisp, cold water came trickling out. It wasn't much, but it tasted like the nectar of heaven and it gave me a surge of strength and sense of well-being. I knew I could survive the last 12 miles. It would likely (and in fact, did) take me three hours to traverse, but I could survive it.

I arrived in Nikolai trail-battered and humbled. The tiny community of about 60 people suffers from a scourge of economic depression and out-migration. The buildings are weather-beaten and the youth are all moving away. Those who remain live by subsistence off the land and a handful of government jobs. They get by, but they know they are very poor compared to urban dwellers. But as I stumbled into the Interior Bush town, I believed they had everything, and I was grateful for all of it. I was taken in by Nick and Olene, and older Native couple who every year open their home to battered Ultrasport racers, feed them and given them a place to sleep. I was practically in tears when Olene offered me a cup of coffee and a big bowl of moose stew with white bread. "You probably won't like moose stew," she said. "It's the most delicious thing I've had yet," I answered. We talked for a while about Nikolai and her childhood in a fish camp, how all of the families moved into the town when the school opened, and how all of their children were now moving to the cities. All the while, Nick massaged the bloody skin of a beaver before stretching it out to dry on a rack in his living room. And there I was, Jill from Juneau, home. Night descended and I was not ready to leave. I did not want to leave. Ever.

Day five: Rohn to Farewell Burn

I continued to toss and turn in the tent as Rob milled around and other racers started to trickle in. This was the worst feeling of the race. Worse than the cold, the muscle soreness, the loneliness. The uncertainty was consuming my health from the inside out. I began to feel tired, restless, achy and sick. Finally, at 2 a.m., I knew something was going to have to happen. Something would have to happen. I couldn't lay in that tent indefinitely. I didn't have the strength. The nothingness was becoming too much to bear. And in the pre-morning haze, moving on started to seem like the more comfortable option. At least if I started moving forward, that would be something.

I packed up my bike and started down the Kuskokwim River, windblown of nearly all of its snow. The trail followed rocky, driftwood-strewn gravel bars and long patches of glare ice. It was treacherous riding, and there I was, half-addled and without a helmet, riding it. But the simple act of turning those pedals brought back a wave of confidence that I hadn't felt since I left Puntilla Lake nearly two days before. The wind blew hard at my side. The temperature hovered well below 0. I did not care. I could do this thing, I told myself. It actually was possible. I had the footprints and tire tracks of those who came before to prove it.

The trail began to climb out of the river valley and onto the surrounding bluffs through a very narrow corridor hidden in the trees. Snowmachines had left rolling moguls so tall and deep that hardly a half mile went by before I lost control of my bike and launched off the handlebars into a series of bank-side snow angels. The handling seemed nearly impossible and I wondered if it was all the extra weight on my front fork, or simply my own fatigue that caused me to steer like a clueless yuppie piloting a rental bike on the Slickrock Trail. If I slowed down, I would too easily lose my flow and swerve sideways off the trail. I started to walk longer stretches. I was so frustrated. This was the first rideable trail I had seen since Puntilla.

After about seven miles, I met a cyclist walking backward on the trail. The Italian, Antonio Frezza, had left Rohn nearly three hours before I had, and now seemed to be headed back that way. "Why are you going back?" I asked him. He shook his head. He did not know what I meant. "Is the trail bad?" I asked, louder, as though volume would suddenly help him understand English. He shook his head again. "Impossible," he said. "Impossible." He walked with me around the corner until I saw exactly what he meant. The trail dead-ended at a canyon-wide waterfall, trickling open water atop a wash of glare ice that sloped at a pitch of at least 8 degrees. "That can't be the trail. No way," I said in disbelief, to no one, really, because Antonio did not understand me. "Impossible," Antonio said again. I shined my headlamp around until I caught the gleam of a reflective marker at the top of the waterfall. This most certainly was the trail.

I had brought a pair of ice cleats with me, but had discovered one mile into the race that they wouldn't stay on my boots to save my life. Now, they were my only option. I strapped them on and began to stomp up the ice. When one cleat would slip off, Antonio would yell, "Hello!" I would have to set my bike down, sit down on the ice, and slide on my butt until I could grab it. Often, I kept going. About halfway up the waterfall, the bike's tires washed out and I lost my balance trying to catch it. A wrenching pain shot through my right hip as I twisted sideways and slammed into the ice before Pugsley and I slide 25 feet down the waterfall together. I laid on the ice for a few seconds as the pain in my hip pulsed and screamed and finally subsided to a manageable throb. "Hello?" Antonio called out to me. "Impossible," I called back.

Finally, with the ice cleats back on, I took careful, deliberate steps and reached the top of the waterfall. I stood at the top for a while and tried to direct Antonio to places where he might be able to climb around and retrieve my cleats before going back to get his bike. But after several minutes, he disappeared behind a rock outcropping. I didn't know where he had gone to, and I was becoming chilled just standing there, so I guiltily moved on.

About 45 minutes later, Antonio passed me, grinning. He motioned as though to indicate he had actually somehow carried his bike over the rock outcropping. I gave him a big thumbs up. It was one of the proudest moments of my trip.

As the day wore on, the pain in my hip grew worse. The trail climbed out of the river valley into an endless expanse of rolling hills. Each one seemed steeper than the next. My hip refused to let me motor up them, but the walking was even worse. When I would come to the bottom of the hill, I would stop for several seconds to rev myself up. Then I would take a few deep breaths, plow into the hill, take three or four laboring steps and stop until the pain subsided. Then I would take four more steps, stop, and repeat, until I reached the top of the hill. My progress was becoming glacial, but there wasn't much I could do about it out here. Rescue is not a given. Either you keep moving, or you die. Something has to happen.

I reached Bison Camp around 4 p.m., walking with a severe gimp in my right leg but otherwise feeling good. Antonio was already there with the wood stove burning, eating his dinner. I walked outside to gather snow for drinking water and stuck my deep-frozen tuna packet in a coffee can on the stove. As I rifled around through my pack, I realized that sometime during the day, I had lost my headlamp. That should have come as a devastating blow, but instead I just shrugged, walked outside with a knife to cut the headlight off my bike rack, and milled around the wall tent looking for materials with which to create a spare headlamp. Antonio beckoned me to try some his "fine Italian cheese," and I passed him my tuna packet with a spoon. We shared dinner in silence as I fashioned a new headlamp out of duct tape and an MSR strap. How quickly we become residents of the trail.

I finished dinner and chores around sunset and, despite my hip, was still feeling strong and raring to hit the trail. I thought the 45 more miles to Nikolai would be perfectly doable as an overnight ride, given the promise of flat plain with almost no hills left to climb. I limped up the last hill and looked out over the region known as the Farewell Burn. This is an area that was decimated by wildfire several decades ago, and it is just starting to come back to life. The Iditarod Trail cuts a thin white line through an seemingly endless expanse of spruce trees that are all exactly the same age, each about six feet tall. It has the appearance of a haunted Christmas tree farm.

I had been warned by Iditarod mushers and Ultrasport veterans alike not to venture into the Burn at night. It's an enchanted place, they cautioned. You will lose your mind to the monotony and your strength to a kind of cold you never thought possible. You will meet God and The Devil and you will sell your soul to both. As I pedaled at 7 mph into the night, I could feel the remoteness sinking in. The spindly branches of black spruce clones cut hard shadows into the moonless night. Over my head, a wash of green northern lights sparkled and flowed. Streaks of red and white light shot across the sky. As the laser light show grew in intensity, I began to feel more calm, more complacent. I forgot to stop to eat. I forgot to stop to drink. I was a zombie moving through a world of ghosts, one of the walking wounded and living dead. I probably could have continued forever in that setting and never noticed the passing of time, never felt a single moment of pain or a single reflection of fear or anxiety. But unlike the denizens of that ghost world, I was still a living being. And while I wasn't paying attention, my calorie stores again depleted to critical lows. Suddenly, without warning, I was laying in a snowbank. I had no idea how I ended up there. I didn't remember falling. I stumbled back onto my bike and began to pedal again, but again I wavered. I felt like I was falling asleep at the wheel. I fell off my bike and laid for several minutes, helpless, in the snow. I couldn't believe it. I had bonked again.

I thought about trying to stuff down food and continue on, but I could hardly keep my eyes open. I stumbled down the trail on foot for several more yards before I scouted out a nice spot in the snowbank. It looked so inviting. My skewed recollection of my harrowing bivy on Rainy Pass made a night in the bag seem like a stay at the Hilton. All I wanted was sleep, any way I could get it. I rolled out my bivy sack and crawled inside with my water bottle and a 5 oz. chocolate bar. I told myself I would eat it in the morning. I did not look at my thermometer before I zipped up the bag. I did not care.

Day four: Rohn

I couldn't believe how much better I felt after I woke up from my four-hour nap. Of course it's all relative; I still had the sensation of sandpaper scratching against my tongue, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and the deep chill of 4 a.m. seeping in through my half-dozen layers. But I was alive! Something about that fact made me so happy that I didn't even care I still had a 15-mile push into an outpost checkpoint where I was told I would be lucky to find a propane-heated tent.

I took off at a pace much faster than the night before ... at least cracking the odometer: 2.1 mph ... 2.2 mph. With all of the walking I was doing, I had been grateful for choosing light and comfortable mountaineering boots over the floppy and cumbersome overboots I had worn in both Susitna 100 races ... that is, until I came to the first open stream crossing in the Dalzell Gorge. The trail disappeared into an creek more than five feet wide that appeared to be running at least knee deep. I stood, stunned, as though I had reached a brick wall. I followed the leaders' footprints upstream to a spot that ran much more narrow and deep. It appeared they had jumped across the opening onto a steep, icy incline that slid precariously back into the water. How they cleared it with their fully loaded bikes eluded me. They must have helped each other. I knew the only way to get myself across would be to walk across the wider, shallower opening. So I rifled through my bag for the old dog musher standby: Heavy duty garbage bags. I slid one up each leg and wrapped duct tape around the bunched-up openings just above my knees. Then, before I could psych myself out of it, I hoisted my bike and stepped into the stream.

The rush of water blasted my legs and I wavered for a single terrifying moment. As I lurched to recapture my balance, my grip loosened on the bike and I could feel it sinking downward. My stomach plummeted with it. As the tires hit the water I lunged sideways to catch it upright before it fell over and soaked all of my gear. In grabbing it, I kneeled into the stream just deep enough to feel the rush of water pour into the garbage bag wrapped around my right leg. The icy water hit my foot like a hammer, soaking into the sock and the insulation like first taps from the fingers of death. I darted for the shoreline, pitching the bike forward in a surge of adrenaline before crawling onto the snow, gasping and heaving. "Don't panic; don't panic; don't panic," I said out loud. Endless darkness hovered over the canyon. I knew I had just made a race-ending mistake. I did not care. "This is not a race. This is my life," I thought. All I could do now was walk into Rohn and hope the hoofing helped heat my wet foot. If that didn't work, I would have to pull on one of my down booties and walk in it until it shredded. All that mattered now was getting to Rohn.

The hike remained hard and daylight started to envelop the canyon. I did not feel cold. I felt beaten. I stumbled into the checkpoint at 11 a.m. It was every bit as remote as I had been promised ... a single cabin and a few tents. Two snowmachines. No planes. The cabin was exclusively for Iditarod Sled Dog Race checkers, and I was not to go inside, I had been told. But the Ultrasport tent was nowhere to be seen. I took a moment to survey the damage to my bike. The front wheel bolts had been frozen in. The derailleur was frozen as well and would not shift out of granny gear. The brakes rubbed, but I was able to work them free. Still, my bike was every bit as frozen as my boot. The situation seemed more discouraging by the minute.

As I lingered outside, a man swung open the cabin door and beckoned me to come inside. He said his name was Jasper, he was from Minnesota and he had volunteered to cook for the Iditarod dog mushers for many, many years. He offered to make me pancakes even though it was nearly noon. He told me to set my boots by the wood stove and stay for a while. When I explained to him that my bike was frozen, he offered to let me bring that inside to thaw out as well. Then another volunteer laid out a sleeping pad on his own bunk and urged me to lay down. I couldn't believe these Iditarod volunteers were being so nice to me, an intrusive Ultrasport racer who did little else than get in their way. I suspected special treatment for being a woman, but I wasn't complaining. Instead, I laid in the bunk and shivered with nervous apprehension.

On the outside, I felt rested and healthy, ready to go on with the heat of day. But inside, I was a mess of fear and doubt. I had made it over the Alaska Range and had a sip from the bitter cup of hardship. But ahead of me lay the Real Cold; the Real Remote; the Real Unknown. The Interior. This is insane, I kept telling myself. I am Jill from Juneau. I am no wilderness survivalist. I never even made it past Brownie level in Girl Scouts. What the hell am I doing out here?

The Ultrasport checker, Rob, finally came into the cabin and told me he hadn't had a chance to set up the tent because he and the other volunteers had just arrived. Apparently, they couldn't get their snowmachines over the pass, which is why everyone had to break trail. Most of the leaders had already gone on. The only racers in camp were me and Ted, who hated The Push with venom and had already resolved to scratch the race then and there. I knew I had no reason to scratch so I made excuses why I couldn't yet go back out. I needed a little sleep. A little more food. A little more time to dry my boot.

At about 6 p.m. I was outside trying to work up more courage when Bill and Kathi Merchant rolled up on their bikes. The Merchants are the race organizers and were themselves pedaling to Nome. I figured they had passed Geoff at some point, so I excitedly ran up for word about how close he was to Rohn. "I have so been enjoying Geoff," Bill said. "We were having such a great time at Finger Lake."

"Geoff's at Finger Lake?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Geoff had to scratch," Bill said.

My heart dropped.

"Yeah," he continued. "He was having real problems with his ankle. Then he started compensating for that. Then he hurt his knee. I'm worried I may have coaxed him back out with my trail stories. He limped out toward Puntilla, but then he came back to Finger Lake."

Knowing Geoff was out of the race was about the worst news I could have received at that point. Bill could have told me the weather forecast called for the storm of the century, 60 below windchill and zero visibility in the coming days, and I would have been more comforted to hear that than to hear that Geoff was off the trail. I was crushed. I was so, so alone. I wanted to scream, but there was nothing to scream at. The Iditarod Trail? The Iditarod Trail did not care. There was nothing to break on the Iditarod Trail except myself. And I did not want to be broken. I couldn't face that possibility, and yet I couldn't quite turn away from it. I decided the best thing for me to do would be to crawl into the now-staked but still-unheated Ultrasport tent and go to sleep. Things always look better in the morning, I said to myself.

Day three: Rainy Pass

I stepped out of Puntilla Lake Lodge into intensely beautiful weather. Direct sunlight cascaded off the crystalline snow as the last pink light of sunrise faded into the horizon. In the blindness of night I had climbed into the mountains, and suddenly they were so close I could touch them. The air felt much warmer than 0 degrees; in the sun I wore only a single hat and let the frost petrify my strands of hair. I decided this would go down as one of my favorite morning rides ever.

After a few miles, the trail climbed beyond treeline and became much too soft to ride. My position in 12th or 13th place gave me a direct view of what came before me. As the footprints piled up deeper and deeper on the trail, I knew none of the leaders, none of the really strong and really skilled snowbikers had been riding, either. Their footprints cut up the middle of the trail as their bike tires rolled to the right. All of my "bike push" training had me rolling my bike to the left, and I didn't feel completely comfortable switching positions, but I had no choice but to follow their trail. I expected to walk a lot of Rainy Pass and didn't feel discouraged about the prospect. I just turned on my iPod and chanted my new mantra ... "So! The Push!"

As the trail left the last valley in its route over the range, the incline pitched up steeply and my shoulders burned white hot as I plowed Pugsley through the soft snow. They say in an event like this, you will begin to feel every ounce: every extra chemical warmer, every battery, every last candy bar. I packed for comfort and safety and I packed a ton. Veterans go ultralight and rookies bring their insecurities. As I hobbled up toward the highest elevation of the entire trail, I realized how quickly insecurity can weigh a person down. I crested the pass right at sunset, having traveled maybe 20 miles in nine hours. I was already feeling exhausted, and questioning my ability to make it to Rohn, still more than 20 miles away. But a frigid wind whipped up the canyon and I could already feel the deep cold settling in again. I knew I would have to at the very least seek shelter from the wind.

I had heard that once you make it to the pass, the downside of the trail is usually rideable - even an icy, harrowing downhill run. But as I plowed Pugsley over the last hill and looked through the last remaining sunlight at the trail below me, all I could see were more knee-deep footprints punched in an expanse of power snow. I would find out later that no snowmachine had been able to make it over the pass all year long, and that morning, the dozen leading cyclists actually broke their own trail by sidestepping the open water down the steep Dalzell Gorge. What I followed was a mess of postholes that was probably better than literally breaking trail, but slowed me down so much that my odometer wouldn't register forward motion - slower than 1.5 mph. Lifting the front of my bike off the ground became routine. All the while I knew I had 20 miles to push to Rohn, the deep cold of night was settling in, I was crashing quickly and even as I tried to keep the food coming in, every bite just made me feel worse.

After about six miles of fighting the inevitable, I finally realized that I was going to need to recover or risk literally passing out on the trail. I plowed my bike into the waist-deep snow just off the trail and began to punch out a snow hole. I rolled out my bivy sack, grabbed some nuts and chocolate to eat for dinner, and crawled inside with my water bottle and Camelbak. Before I pulled the backpack inside, I checked the thermometer on the outside. The mercury had bottomed out at 20 below. All around me, the deep cold needled into the now-still air. Inside my bag was amazingly warm and humid. I was so, so grateful that I could rest and be warm, but so nervous that I couldn't stop hyperventilating. After about 20 minutes of nibbling on my food and sipping my water between dozens of gasping breaths, my mind finally began to accept that this sleeping bag really would keep me warm. I drifted off to sleep, cuddling the Camelbak that held my precious water, breathing a settling peace from the food and the warmth, vocally expressing gratitude to my sleeping bag and mumbling a clairvoyant message to my mom that all was OK. I had never felt so alone.

Day two: Skwentna to Puntilla Lake

The first person I saw at Skwentna was a wild-eyed Jay Petervary, fresh awake from his nap and gulping down soup in the kitchen. I couldn't believe I had caught one of the leaders, even if he was technically a few hours ahead of me. I asked him how he felt and he practically screamed, "Great! Great! Awesome!" His energy was magnetic and I could see in his eyes the intensity it takes to dominate a race like this. "Had a long sleep," he sniffed. "Three hours. Gotta rest up when I'm going to Nome."

"But you're still going to win the race the McGrath, right?" I grinned.

He didn't even smile back. He just nodded. "Oh yeah."

As Jay packed up I sat down to my daily trail meal ... spaghetti with meat sauce. It tasted like ketchup-coated starch strings with rubber balls. It was heavenly.

I woke up the next morning after my own three hours of sleep and took a toilet-paper bath in the luxurious indoor plumbing-equipped bathroom. I was pleased that I still looked somewhat like a normal person. I tried to eat a Clif Bar for breakfast and could only choke down half of it. This was the beginning of the end of my goal for healthy food intake during the race. In the end, I would run a calorie deficit that would cause me to lose five pounds in six days and bonk out in the dark, cold wilderness more than once. But for now, I just decided I wasn't hungry quite yet.

I set out into the Shell Hills with Ted Cahalane, who quickly outpaced me as the trail began to work its way up toward the Alaska Range. Alone again, I basked in the warmth of sunrise and pushed hard up a few hills to jolt my metabolism. This race couldn't possibly be this easy, I thought. I immediately tried to shake that thought out of my head before the Iditarod Trail demons decided to smite my arrogant rookie self with a monster storm. I stopped at the Shell Lake Lodge for a big breakfast with a European cyclist who didn't speak any English. This would become an ongoing theme for me in this race - meeting up with racers who I couldn't even communicate with well enough to remember their names, but with whom I share an intimate understanding and respect. Again, I had a hard time choking down my breakfast. At one point, I thought I might need to run outside to vomit. But it didn't seem like that serious of a problem. The appetite would come, I told myself.

Headwinds into Finger Lake made the going slower, but the trail was still hardpacked and 100 percent rideable - phenomenal conditions this far into the route. As I pulled into the 130-mile checkpoint, I was caught by none other than Pete Basinger, another favorite in the race. I found out he broke one of his pedals on the Skwentna River, waited overnight for a replacement to be flown in, fixed the pedal and still managed to plow up the trail at a pace that was quickly advancing him toward the front of the race. The quantum mechanics of such an effort astounded me. I didn't want to seem like too much of a star-struck groupie, so I tried to advert my eyes as he packed up his drop bag - looked to be mostly candy bars - reloaded his mp3 player, and left without even eating. My own drop bag was loaded with 10 pounds of food and fuel to replace the less than one pound I had consumed so far. I picked out a few choice items and left 90 percent of it in the discard pile. The checker then coaxed me to eat my own meal - chicken with rice and beans - before I hit the trail myself.

I was told the 35-mile climb into Puntilla Lake would likely be the most physically challenging section of the race. The trail gains the most elevation in this stretch, through a series of rolling hills that means a lot of elevation lost must be gained again. Even a firm-packed trail is often so steep that uphills become a grunting hike-a-bike, and the trail was starting to become much softer. The European cyclist I had breakfast with could only say, "So, The Push!" We walked together until he, too, outpaced me. I watched my progress slowly bring me closer to the jagged peaks in the distance, until darkness fell. Then all I had to watch was my progress in a five-foot-diameter circle of light on the trail, telling only a story of footprints and tire tracks, a monotonous sequence of hills and The Push.

The temperature began to drop - to minus five and then minus 10. The water in my insulated bottle holder and Camelbak bladder grew more slushy and solid by the hour. Every sip felt like drinking near-boiling water on a 100-degree day. My body didn't like this cold water and it didn't like the cold air. I could scarcely steer as eyelash icicles obstructed my vision. I kept thinking about the humor of the situation - here I was, Juneau Jill of The Rain, trying to ride a bike up a mountain in negative 10 cold. I had no idea how easy I had it.

I arrived at Puntilla Lake very late - 4 a.m. - having pulled out a 21-hour day and losing most of the beauty of the Alaska Range approach to the cold night. But this is the nature of the race - if you only traveled by day, you wouldn't even be moving half the time you were out there. Night still dominates this time of year. So one must travel when one can and stop when one needs to. The checker at the tiny Puntilla Lake Lodge gave me my next gourmet meal - clam chowder served boiling hot directly from the can and "pilot bread," a quintessential Alaska Bush food that I can only describe as a giant soggy sodium-free Saltine cracker. Again, my dinner tasted like heaven. I was glad to have my appetite back. I crawled onto a hard wooden bed in the bunk room and drifted quickly to sleep, my knees burning and toes wrapped in blisters from walking, but otherwise feeling fresh, fresh as I need to be to climb Rainy Pass, I told myself.

Day one: Knik to Skwentna

Sunday afternoon burned clear and calm as the racers of the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational lined up at the edge of Knik Lake, next to a rowdy roadhouse just outside the limits of Anchorage suburbia. All manner of gear-laden fat bikes and bundled sleds leaned against the log building. People in expedition parkas, insulated overboots and polypro tights milled around in the pre-race haze. Against the backdrop of classic Alaska culture with its snowmachines and Carhartts, we must have looked like astronauts preparing to go to the moon. In a way, we were.

The road to the beginning of the Iditarod Trail has been a long and strange route for me. I feel like I have crossed the galaxy in my transformation from someone who was once too afraid of the dark and unknown to be willing to go for a hike at night, to someone gearing up to cross the Alaska Range alone with a bicycle in the winter. But as I looked across the frozen lake to the place where the trail disappeared into the woods, those fears of the dark and unknown came rocketing back. I couldn't believe this was me standing at this point, facing this human-powered journey that only a few hundred people have ever attempted. Only a small fraction of those have been women.

I took slow, heavy breaths and tried to look calm as the chaos reached fever pitch. My watch chugged toward 2 p.m. I rolled my bike next to Geoff, who was cinching up the harness on his sled. After months of training together, preparing together and working together, we were finally standing at the starting line, together. We shared a long, clasping hug of two people who understood we were at the final crossroads, about to go our separate ways. "I'm going to see you real soon," I said, knowing his fast foot pace would keep him near me for most of the race. "Don't count on it," he said, in his way of encouraging me to give the bike effort everything I had.

I never heard anyone say "go." Just like a lapse between one dream and another, we were suddenly pedaling across the lake, hopping over the torn-up tracks of freewheeling snowmachines and finally climbing into those all-encompassing woods. The field of racers stretched out quickly. Within four miles, I couldn't see another person behind or in front of me. I passed the last group of well-wishers at Seven Mile Lake, and the only cyclist I would ever pass at mile 11. From there, all I had to look forward to were long, long periods of quiet interrupted only by checkpoint chaos.

To many participants of this race and its well-known big brother, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the Iditarod Trail becomes a living thing, infused with all of the personality and sinister motivations that humans are prone to bestowing on the things they can not control. The trail can be benevolent one mile and unspeakably cruel the next. It changes by the hour and even by the minute. No two travelers will ever see the same trail. As it snakes its way over frozen rivers and swamps, the ice and the weather - not people - choose its final path. It is a trail forever in flux; an imaginary line embedded in the geography of Alaska; a ghost trail. A person could potentially follow it forever, and never really find its end. According to race organizer Bill Merchant, many people return to the race and the trail year after year. The Iditarod embeds itself in their souls, he says. They're still looking for its end.

On the first day of the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational, the trail was unbelievably kind. Hardpacked and smooth, it allowed me to motor my 70ish pounds of bike, food, water and gear at 10 mph in comfortable touring mode. The temperature still hovered near the 20s at sunset as I rolled over the so-called Dismal Swamp, now cool and calm and bathed in breathtaking gold alpenglow. The high mountains of the Alaska Range captured incandescent pink hues in the far, far distance. "Denali," I said to myself. I turned onto the Yentna River as night descended. The moguls of the snowmachine trail rolled like frozen waves. I pictured myself in a little canoe paddling into the wilderness. A golden moon climbed into the sky behind me as low northern lights flowed across the northern horizon. "This is it, out here, the real Alaska," I said to myself. Little did I know that, compared to the bewildering remoteness beyond the Alaska Range, I was still in the suburbs. But for now, I would relish in my innocence. I would be strong and fast. I would be a cyclist, and not a trekker. For now.

I rolled into the Skwentna Roadhouse just after 2 a.m. I couldn't believe that I had traveled 90 miles in 12 hours. A pace like that in the Susitna 100 would have been phenomenal for a person like me, and here I was setting it at the beginning of a potentially week-long race. And still I felt as fresh as I had at Knik Lake. I wanted to drive on toward Finger Lake; the audacity of attempting a 36-hour push the first day of the race was the only thing that stopped me. I checked into a room at the roadhouse and imagined what kind of pace I could set in the morning if the trail held up even half as well. I was still innocent. I was still a racer, and not a survivor. For now.

Report from McGrath

I can't believe I'm actually here. It's going to take a few days to process the experience, but I spent some time reading up on all the race coverage. I followed the coverage religiously last year, and it's amazing to me how differently my race was interpreted from what was going on in my head. I set a solid pace in the beginning because the trail conditions were phenomenal and I was doing the sleep deprevation thing ... three hours the first night, four hours the next. But after Puntilla Lake, it became a very different race. Everyone had to do the slog over Rainy Pass ... the leaders broke trail; those of us behind had to negotiate the postholes. That's 45 miles at an average pace of 2 mph. My bike weighs more than half what I do and I struggled with the slog. I eventually bonked and had to bivy several miles below the pass in a kind of deep cold I have never before experienced for that long. I was well prepared for the possibility, but it's a different experience when you have run out of energy and you are nested in a snow bank, huddled in a sleeping bag and cuddling with your ice water. You know you're going to be OK, but it's hard to not be scared. Still I woke up several hours later fired up for more race. I just wanted to get to the Rohn checkpoint and pressed hard again. I came to an open stream crossing that was running knee deep, which at subzero temperatures is a big deal. But I was in a hurry so I wrapped my garbage bags around my legs and quickly duct taped the tops, then hoisted my bike and stepped right into the creek. But the bike's weight and rushing water were too much for me to handle, and I dropped the bike. In my panic to keep it from falling over I leaned into stream and water rushed down one of my legs. Luckily, I managed to only get the wheels wet. And he derailluer froze. But I had a soaked boot. Also luckily, I was only about 10 miles from the checkpoint and it was a hard walk the entire way, so I never had to deal with the potentially serious consequences of a wet foot. But that was a big mistake. A bad decision. I checked into Rohn and spent 17 hours drying my boots and thinking about the error of my ways. My decision to continue on was based in a resolve to set a more comfortable pace and make good decisions. And I did make good decisions. From there on out I was surrounded by the immensity and awe of Interior Alaska, apprehensive at times but never in danger. There will most definitely be a long and detailed trip report to come, with whatever pictures survived my camera's habit of cutting out in temps below 0. Thanks again to everyone who has followed along.