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.