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.