Day seven: Ghost trail to McGrath

Bathed in comfort at Nick and Olene's house, I made the mistake of reverting back to the status of a real person. I sat in discouragement as I examined my legs, a cacophony of bruises, swollen ankles and throbbing knees. I grabbed the loose skin around my abdomen and realized I had lost some weight. I had lost a lot of weight. Most of it was probably water, but still, it hadn't been that long. My head throbbed from a serious dehydration hangover and my stomach lurched from my frantic efforts to stuff down calories. Then I made the mistake of going online. I learned how worried people at home had become for my well-being. And then I checked the weather report. "Severe Wind Advisory" it screamed. "35 mph winds gusting to 50 mph. Wind chills to 60 below 0." I just shook my head. That couldn't possibly be real. I asked Nick, the wizened local, how he dealt with traveling in such weather. "I don't travel in this kind of weather," he said matter-of-factly.

It was late in the evening and I figured I had at most 24 more hours to ride into McGrath, and likely closer to 12. But I had seriously underestimated how many batteries I would need for the race and figured at the time I only had five, maybe six hours of good lithium battery power for my headlamp and about two hours of desperately low battery power with my one set of (near useless) alkaline batteries. If I left at 9 p.m., I would likely be caught out in utter blackness in the storm at 2 a.m. My only option was to leave around 4 a.m. and hope I had the strength to push into McGrath before the next night. Waiting until pre-dawn would also give me more rest, more time to rehydrate, more time to let the wind calm down, I told myself. I tossed and turned with words of Nick's wisdom ringing in my head. "I don't travel in this kind of weather."

At 4 a.m., the wind was as strong as ever. I remembered the way it tore at my face through my goggles the day before, and it was much, much colder now. Maybe 20 below, before wind chill. I put on every layer I had. The clothing provided a good climate zone for my body, but I could feel the fingers of death clawing at the air only centimeters away. "I will go two miles," I told myself. "And I will see how insane this really is. And then I will turn around." However, what I didn't know was that outside of Nikolai, the trail makes a sharp angled turn onto the river, back almost the way it came. And pretty quickly, I realized that the 35 mph wind gusting to 50 mph wasn't just no longer in my face. It was full on at my back.

In the arctic blast, Pugsley and I flew down the Kuskokwim River. I had to keep the tire pressure really low - about 6 psi - to punch through all the soft sugar snowdrifts across the trail. But for long, hardpacked stretches we would fly at 12 mph, 14 mph, without even trying. I felt like I was piloting an airplane. After an hour, a small chill began to set in near my chest and I started to shiver. I noticed that every time I sat down on my bicycle seat, it felt like a burning block of dry ice. It stole more and more heat away from my core until I couldn't feel my butt any longer. I quickly stopped, pulled three of the four chemical heat packs out of my mittens, stuffed one down my bike shorts for each butt cheek and one between my legs. The chemical warmers improved my situation nearly 100 percent. Later, in McGrath, I would notice a deep red burn on the top of each butt cheek. That may have been the beginning of tailwind-induced butt frostbite.

It was a reminder of how quickly things can go wrong, even when you feel on top of the world with a 35 mph tailwind. I did not know it then, but at nearly the exact same time, another competitor, a woman walker, was fighting that same wind into Nikolai. A headwind for her, the monster gusts would ravage her eyes until they froze shut. Completely blinded, she would grope around for her sled but somehow become disoriented and unable to get in her sleeping bag or even zip up her jacket. She would wander around helplessly until another racer, a cyclist, met her from behind, put her in her sleeping bag, and rode as fast as he could into Nikolai to send back help. She would acknowledge that she would likely have died if this cyclist did not meet her and help her when he did. I was heartbroken when I learned this later that night. How quickly everything changes.

As day broke, the trail became more and more drifted in. I suspected this would happen in the wind, especially where the river narrowed, but I still couldn't hold back the frustration after I had foolishly allowed myself to believe I could make a six-hour run over the final 50 miles to McGrath. For miles, the trail would be covered in anywhere from one inch to 12 inches of fine, sugar-like snow. Often, I couldn't even distinguish the trail from the rest of the river. I would scout around with my front wheel until it dropped down into the waist-deep snow just off the trail. Then I would climb back out, walk tentatively forward, and continue scouting until the wheel fell out from under me, again. My average pace dropped from over 10 mph back down to 2 mph. I still had 20 miles to push into McGrath. At first daylight, an average pace of 2 mph would put me in town right at sunset. I began to fret about my batteries, again.

I would later talk to Kathi, the first woman cyclist who was just under a day ahead of me, about this final stretch. She is arguably the most experienced female Alaska winter cyclist alive, and is hugely optimistic and open to anything. She would call it "a slog." She wouldn't even refer to the push over Rainy Pass with this derogatory of an adjective. She called Rainy Pass "a fun walk." So when Kathi calls something a slog, you have to know it's really A SLOG. To me, temporarily losing the trail every once in a while was frustrating. But the movement itself felt like wading through a giant, endless bowl of granulated sugar. My calves burned with the effort of the soft steps and my heart rate pounded. And all the while, the landscape of the open river lingered like an anchor caught at the bottom of the sea. I was the sailor tirelessly cranking away at the pulley, but the anchor never gave up its hold. Walking down a frozen river is the definition of monotony. I would fixate on a single tree and watch it take a half hour to reach me. Bluffs could take over an hour. I was losing my will, losing my mind. I stopped to eat a fruit leather. I ripped off the package with my teeth and the howling tailwind tore it out of my mouth and sent it fluttering down the trail. I watched it dance down the river until it disappeared from sight. It followed the exact path I wanted to take. I was so angry that my wrapper could travel to McGrath faster than I could.

I tried to keep my mind occupied. I thought about Geoff and what he must have gone through to let go of the race even when he had no choice. I thought about bicycle touring and how different touring really is during the summer. I thought about cycling and how different "cycling" really is from this endless effort I was experiencing. I thought about my frantic family and hoped they hadn't checked the weather report. I thought about the foods I might like to eat and decided I no longer cared about food. I thought about Juneau and my job, and I wondered how I could ever go back to it all. How I could ever really leave this trail. I caught The Wrens' "Happy" on my iPod shuffle and set it on repeat for at least six playings ... "is this how it's going to be? ... is this how you wanted me? ... broken down again ... it's almost over now." I could not think about the end in McGrath. The end was still so far, far away.

The hours passed by like minutes, and sometimes like days. My knees began to burn and throb, not unlike my right knee had at the end of the 2007 Susitna 100, right before I spent several months injured. I worried about the future, but in a way, I didn't care. The only thing that mattered now was step after step and The Slog. Then I started to see the signs outside of McGrath. "Ultrasport: 10 more miles" the first one read. Then, an eternity later, nine more miles. Then eight. Then I turned off the river onto completely blown-in snowmobile trails. Then seven. I walked as though locked in a slow-motion dream, where every effort I had to give amounted to nearly nothing.

After the six-mile sign, a gust of wind caught me from the side and knocked me off the trail. I laid in the snow, with my 70-pound bike on top of me, and I wondered whether or not I would be able to get up. I laughed because the thought of being pinned there was funny, but then, just like that, I started to sob. I had not cried once during the entire race. And there I was, six miles outside McGrath, bawling so hard that I had to gasp for air as my tear-filled eyelashes froze shut. I cried and cried and cried. I cried for my frozen water and heavy bike and burning knees and throbbing calves and piles of food I could not eat. I cried for the hard, unwarming sun and the wind and the driving cold. I cried for the distance and for my aloneness and for the remoteness and the mean, mean, unmerciful nature of it all. I cried because my adventure was nearly done. I cried because I knew I was going to survive it. I cried because I knew there was an end to the suffering. And I cried because I knew there would be no end to the drive.

About three miles outside of McGrath, the trail veered onto a road. A full-on, two-lane snowpacked-but-plowed road. People in Subarus and snowmachines puttered by, waving often but not even doubletaking the alien bicycle lumbering up the road. Riding the first road I'd seen since Day One, I decided I was going to sprint the final three miles into town. I was going to give it every thing I had. I laid into the pedals with my burning knees and pushed, pushed, pushed. My lungs seared and head throbbed. The bicycle odometer inched up to 9 mph and dropped back to 8. Eight mph. That was all I had to give.

I felt a subdued sort of peace as I rolled into driveway with the big Alaska Ultrasport sign, the warm home of Peter and Tracy, a couple in McGrath who open their lives to the dozens of stinky trekkers who push into their small town. I was told by Jeff Oatley that McGrath is an oasis in the tundra, a heaven where angels feed you grapes and wrap you in warm blankets. Peter's and Tracy's home did not disappoint. I rolled in at 4:20 p.m., just in time to sit down to family dinner. Bill and Kathi were still there, as were a few other Euro racers, and I didn't even have time to strip off all my layers before Peter sat me down at the table with a tall glass of orange juice and a big meal of pork chops and potatoes.

As I sat at the table, chatting about strange topics with the strange crowd and trying to stuff down the food I still was not hungry for, I could feel a piece of me being ripped away. I went into the race believing I would change out on the trail. Less than an hour into being done, I couldn't believe how changed I felt. How severe the final shift, it's still hard to say. But as I stumbled upstairs to take a shower and looked at my emaciated body in the mirror, I couldn't help but mourn the person I had lost. I was still Jill from Juneau, but I would never be the same. I had followed the ghost trail to McGrath and in a way had become a ghost, forever in flux, forever searching for an end.

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.