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.