Symphony of cold IV

Movement IV, sonata

A wind gust swept shards of snow over the trench as I struggled halfway inside my sleeping bag, trying to kick my pad into place. Loud pops followed small bursts of yellow light on the Shell Lake, about a mile and a half away and a few hundred feet below our bivy spot. I was impressed by the stamina of the children, who for most of the evening had been launching an impressive arsenal of fireworks in shifts — each one lasted about as long as they could stand in the harsh wind and 15 below zero temperatures. But now it was nearly midnight and they were really letting loose.

"Three more minutes," Beat said, his voice muffled inside his own bag.

"This bag is not cooperating tonight," I growled, squinting against another stinging blast of micro-ice.

"Are you going to freeze?" Beat asked.

"Hope not. I'll let you know."

I was nearly inside my bag when I heard Beat say, "It's midnight. Happy New Year."

"Happy New Year, sweetie." I poked my head out of the bivy, sat up, and threw my torso over the wall of my trench like a beached seal. Beat heard me do this, nuzzled his own face out of his down cocoon and strained his body toward mine. With a few more lunges I successfully touched my lips to his. "Happy New Year," I repeated. "Isn't this romantic?"

"Something like that," Beat said, but I saw him smile.

As we nestled in our snug down bags in a shallow snow hole cut into the side of the Shell Hills, 2011 transitioned seamlessly to 2012. The camping trip was really just a bedtime experiment. We had actually spent New Year's Eve in a much more traditional fashion, consuming large quantities of ham and smoked salmon at the Shell Lake Lodge. We played dice with men and women wearing bulky snowmachine overalls, laughed at the children running back inside the cabin with bright red cheeks and blue lips after lighting their fireworks, and listening to a survivalist explain to us in detail the importance of knowing how to build a snow cave, finishing his lecture with the matter-of-fact assertion, "When it's 70 below, and you don't build a cave, you will die. It's not a question. You will die." (That very night, it hit 60 below in McGrath, where the race Beat will be participating in next month ends.)

The huge dinner in the crowded, overheated lodge, followed by doomsday warnings about 70 below, did take the sting off camping at -15 in a -30 windchill just a couple of miles away. I felt downright cozy, and exhausted from our ongoing snowshoe adventures, enough so that when Beat woke up several hours later and proclaimed the experiment a success, I refused to leave. "I like it here," I said. "It's nice. I think I'll stay til morning."

Our weekend in the Shell Hills was idyllic, with subtle reminders of the hardships of winter in backcountry Alaska. We stayed with Anne and her husband, Mike, in a cabin on property they've owned for many years. The cabin was basic by most standards but luxurious by Alaska standards: A single room with a loft and a wood stove in the center, a diesel heater as backup, an outhouse, gas-powered stove and refrigerator (mostly used to "warm" food after a deep freeze), and even a shower in the Arctic entry that utilized a plastic solar shower bag and lake water warmed in a big pot on the stove. Anne and Mike were very kind to let us share their space, and Anne even cooked several delicious meals. During one breakfast that featured eggs, biscuits and reindeer sausage, Beat held up the sausage and said, "So this is what happens to reindeer after Christmas."

On New Year's Eve we trekked up the Shell Hills, aiming to reach a high ridge for a better view of the Alaska Range and Denali. It was mid-day, although you'd never know it by looking at the sky. The wind blew hard, and despite the hard work in deep unbroken snow, I felt more chilled than I had yet during our trip. Before we gained the ridge, we found ourselves neck-deep in a struggle with hidden alder wells, sometimes literally. Anne eventually punched through so deep that she couldn't extract herself. She pulled her gloves off and started clawing at her snowshoes, which were difficult to reach and tangled in branches. Beat and I inched closer, trying to avoid the trap ourselves and establish a good hold for our own weight so we could help her. After four or five minutes we finally had her by the arms, leveraging both of our weight to pull her out. But not before her fingers became painfully cold, and her face was a little white — no doubt processing what she might have done and what would have happened if she had been alone. We turned around.

On New Year's Day, we decided to stick to the established route and hike toward Finger Lake on the Iditarod Trail. We went about five or six miles across wide open swamps with brilliant views of the mountains, then turned around. Despite the sugary trail and ambitious pace, it felt like an easy stroll without the sleds in tow.

We did catch a glimpse of Mount Foraker and Denali in the distance. This was actually the only bluebird day we experienced the entire two weeks we were in Alaska.

We also tried a bit of snowshoe running. Although this was mostly a shakedown training expedition for Beat's ITI bid, I learned a few things that I think will help me during next month's Susitna 100. I've already thought through a few adjustments to my kit and know exactly what I'm going to minimize (this of course will be based on the forecasted weather the night before the race.) I'm also strongly considering using snowshoes in the race. I'm definitely going to at least carry them on my sled, and will likely use them for a better percentage of the run depending on trail conditions.

Snowshoes serve as a great equalizer for many different kinds of trail conditions, and worked well to stabilize my stride and provide a flat platform to kick my feet off, avoiding the muscle fatigue and mental frustration of uneven, punchy snow (and almost all snow trails have this quality to some degree. I could see evidence of the kind of footing that bothers me in Anne's deep and often off-camber footprints, compared to my shallow and even snowshoe prints.) Snowshoes are not popular with winter runners, possibly because they're heavy and somewhat awkward, but I still think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for me. I used mine for the entire trek, and it got to the point where I was so comfortable with them that I forgot I was wearing them.

On our final day at Shell Lake, we planned to fly out early, but a thick ice fog moved in and blanketed the entire region. Mike just barely got out in his small plane, and didn't think he'd be able to return to make the shuttles as planned. We called an air taxi service but they were also tied down by the fog. Because the oil heater had already been shut off and the wood stove only had enough oomph against the extreme cold to keep the cabin at 50 degrees or so, we retreated to Shell Lake Lodge. The lodge is maintained by Zoe, a woman in her late 60s who, with help from her son, Hank, keeps the lodge running all year long. As you can see from the mountain of firewood out front, that's not an easy task. Zoe was very sweet, served us up New Year's leftovers for lunch, and repeatedly called the air taxi pilot to relay weather reports and updates.

I went on an exploration safari, and spent quite a bit of time watching the chorus of birds out in front of the lodge. These Alaska Chickadees displayed an impressive activity level amid the frigid temperatures. It was 18 below zero when I shot this picture.

The fog lifted off of Shell Lake and temperatures continued to plummet. I watched the thermometer at Shell Lake Lodge drop to -22 and then -23. The pilot was in a rush to make several scheduled runs and said there was no way he could pick us up before dark, and would have to reschedule for morning. Beat and I were disappointed by this news, as we had a red-eye flight back to California that night. Of course, we had only ourselves to blame for cutting our schedule so close. In Alaska in the winter, you can't really count on anything working out the way you hope.

I thought the pilot saying there was no way he would come that day meant there was no way he would come that day, so Beat and I set out across the lake and into the hills to find some sun and frost.

Frost gives everything a delicate, almost ethereal beauty.

Then back across the lake as the sun went down, carrying the temperatures even farther down with it. When we returned to the lodge, Anne told us the pilot was going to make it after all and we better hurry and get ready to go or he was leaving without us. Whoops. This is another thing I learned this weekend about Alaska bush culture — nothing is certain until it's certain.

And just like that, we let go of a week of deep-cold adventure with a one-hour flight in the disappearing light. I have said goodbye to the Susitna Valley this way before, in this exact same plane, the day that I was evacuated from Yentna Station with frostbite in 2009. But instead of the cold finality of that goodbye, this one felt more like a warm hello. Thank you, Alaska. I will be back. 

South Pole on a bike

I will post my last Alaska symphony piece soon, but recently I've been participating in several social media discussions about a woman who is currently attempting to use a bicycle to reach the South Pole, and I wanted to distill these discussions on my blog.

Helen Skelton, a 28-year-old British television personality who I admittedly had never heard of before last month, is currently in the process of traveling 500 miles in Antarctica using an ice bike, skis, and a kite, toward the South Pole. In doing so, she's raising money for a charity called Sport Relief and also bringing the adventure and intrigue of Antarctica to thousands of young fans. It's a laudable goal with a few holes that immediately caused me to react with suspicion rather than the admiration she certainly deserves.

First of all, the media coverage surrounding this effort (at least initially) presented her expedition as an attempt to break "the world record for the longest ride on snow." This has since disappeared from most the coverage, almost certainly because too many North Americans called them out for conveniently ignoring the successful 1,000-mile rides to Nome, Alaska, on the Iditarod Trail. The southern route records are held by the husband-and-wife superteam Jay and Tracey Petervary, and the northern route records by Tracey Petervary and Mike Curiak. Curiak has also pioneered the only known self-supported snow bike expedition of that distance, successfully riding to Nome without a single resupply in 2010. Since the Iditarod Trail is entirely ice and snow (or, at its very worst, wind-scoured frozen tundra), any claims to the longest bike ride on snow, currently, would have to take place there.

Another aspect of Skelton's expedition that gave me pause is the fact that she has little to no cold-weather or snow-biking experience. She has a few crazy adventures on her resume, including a high-wire walk between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station, in London, and a solo kayak voyage down the length of the Amazon. The kayak voyage is especially impressive, but it does make one wonder what that has to do with managing a wide variation of equipment and survival techniques in the extreme environments of Antartica. True, she does have a large television crew and support team that presumably will come to her aid, as well as a guide who will be biking and kite skiing with her. But media coverage has practically praised her complete lack of preparation and experience, and her blog included descriptions of her first time winter camping, ever, just two months ago, and this gem about her bike: "I've tried it out on sand and it didn't work very well but the experts tell me it will definitely work better on ice and snow. It better!"

The bike she chose is another curious part of the expedition. It's a custom-built Hanebrink all-terrain bike, with several modifications that take extreme cold in account. However, it appears the designers failed to take into account the fact she will actually have to ride it in Antarctic conditions, which involve uncompacted wind crust, bottomless sugar snow, sasturgi (wind-blown ridges of snow that are similar to sand dunes), chunks of ice, and other technical obstacles. The 40-pound bike features a frame made from aluminum aircraft tubing, the components are simple and purposely sturdy, but the wheels are what the designers say are the key — a small wheelbase with eight-inch tubeless tires. The tires are steel-belted to add sturdiness and presumably prevent flats, because there's almost no chance she'd successfully repair a tubeless flat in extreme low temperatures. The tires and wheels combined weigh upwards of nine pounds each. Presumably they're so small to avoid weighing much more, because small wheels are usually a handicap when negotiating technical terrain.

"They're a lot like the tires for golf carts," one of the designers, Kane Fortune, told the BBC. "They are designed to leave the smallest impression as possible, so the grass on the green isn't damaged."

The problem is, Skelton isn't trying to leave golf course grass undamaged. She's trying to steamroll over incredibly difficult terrain features and float atop dry, sugary snow — while dragging an 82-kilogram sledge. It seems strange to me that with all of the research now out there on larger wheel-base snow bikes, and the fact that they have been extensively tested in extreme conditions and are now commercially marketed, that Skelton and her team would choose to use what amounts to 1990s sand bike technology. Although I'm not the expert on the mechanics of bicycle riding, I have a hard time envisioning how Helen and her guide are even propelling those things forward. All I can see is those little wheels spinning deeper and deeper trenches into the brittle crust as the sledge holds them in place like an anchor.

There is also the matter of what happens to the components of a bicycle in the extreme cold that Skelton will almost certainly encounter in Antarctica. In 2004, Mike Curiak and his friend Pat Irwin set out to scout a remote route in the Yukon that resulting in them spending several days pushing through temperatures in the negative 50s. After their struggle to survive, the Anchorage Daily News ran a piece about their trip in which Mike explored their mechanical failures.

"At 40 below zero, we started to have tube failures," Curiak wrote. "We had WTB (Wilderness Trail Bikes), Kenda and Avenir tubes with us, and they all pulled apart at their seams. The flats were so prevalent that we no longer had to look at our thermometers to know when the temp had hit minus 40. After the race, a product manager explained to me that 40 below zero falls a bit outside of the design parameters for bicycle inner tubes."

Skelton's bike has tubeless tires, which will mitigate the problem of exploding tubes. But the fact remains that rubber rendered inflexible in the cold can crack. Any air it is holding can escape. Even steel belting can't necessarily prevent this. And the fact is, no one has really extensively tested bike performance in extreme cold. Curiak noted all sorts of mechanical problems that the Anchorage Daily News reported:

• At 25 degrees below, the suspension seat post on his bike froze solid.

• At 30 degrees below, the headsets on the bikes started to freeze, making it hard to turn the handlebars.

• At 40 degrees below, the tube failures started.

• At 47 degrees below, the plastic head on his tire pump shattered.

• At 52 degrees below, the headsets on the bikes became so stiff that the handlebars wouldn't turn more than 10 degrees.

• At 55 degrees below and colder, it was time to forget riding and start pushing, because tubes wouldn't hold up at these temperatures and patching them was impossible.

• And at 60 degrees below, the only thing that mattered were the words of Hudson Stuck: "One must keep going."

Curiak has, in my opinion, already pioneered the current best possible system for a long self-supported snow bike expedition during his 2010 ride to Nome. He rode a titanium Moots frame with standard 26" 100-mm rims and used no trailer or sledge, instead adopting a more minimalist approach and piling up everything he needed on his bike using a rack and pannier system. With this system he successfully rode 1,000 miles to Nome without resupply, carrying all of his food, fuel and survival gear from the start.

Admittedly, Nome in the winter is a less extreme situation than an expedition to the South Pole at any time of year. Weather is almost certainly milder, a trail is generally set in place, and there are evacuation options if things go wrong. But Curiak's 2010 ride is currently the most ambitious winter bicycle expedition ever undertaken, and no one has yet successfully piloted a bicycle self-supported all the way from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole (which, in my opinion, must be the parameters for the first official bike ride to the South Pole.)

It would be wonderful if a woman were the first person to do it. However, I don't think that woman will be Helen Skelton. I do wish her the best, hope she raises a lot of money, inspires a lot of kids, and has an amazing life experience. I admire her adventurous spirit, and the fact that despite all of the obstacles, she is still charging forward all the same.

I just threw this photo in for fun. A blog friend, Claire, sent this to me from "Down at South Pole" back in 2008.

Symphony of cold III

Movement III, minuet

I woke up in the night with an unexplainable sort of ice cream headache. It was mild but it was definitely there, scooping away at my skull. Anne had told the Northwoods owners we wanted our cabin to be "hot," and they definitely cranked up the heater. It had to be at least 75 degrees in the room. I was down to my underwear and still drenched in sweat. The heat woke me up several times and twice I stepped outside just to cool down. That didn't take long.

And yet, even in the overheated cabin, I had a cold headache. This fact so perplexed me that I eventually got up to find my little hairbrush/mirror combo that I use as a camp hair de-tangler, switched on my headlamp and examined my forehead. Small red spots speckled the skin around my eyebrows; in the flat light it looked like a few might even be forming blisters. I concluded I had probably mildly frostnipped my skin while I was sporting the ice unibrow the previous day. That didn't necessarily explain the headache, but it did fixate my attention on other cold-related maladies: My scratchy throat — raw from breathing -35 air all day even though I filtered it with my balaclava; and my fingertips — sore and a little swollen from gripping a cold camera and going numb while I repeatedly tried to thaw my ice-lashes. Cold has a way of being hard on bodies in ways you don't immediately realize. "My legs and hips are sore, too," I thought. I acknowledged that may have had more to do with 56 miles and 16 hard hours of sled-hauling than it did with the cold.

It was 15 below and still pitch dark when we set out in the morning, a little later than we hoped, just before 9 a.m. The temperature felt downright comfortable after the previous day — a credit to the adaptability of human bodies, even as delicate as they are. The first hints of dawn arrived just as we emerged from the wooded swamps along Lake Creek onto the wide-open plain of the Yentna River. In Alaska winter racing circles, the big rivers are often dreaded for being "flat" and "boring" and "going on forever and ever." I actually love trekking the big rivers, even more than I do wending through the woods. They fit my aesthetic of stark open spaces, places so big that I can watch as the world opens up around me. I looked north to see hints of salmon-colored light rippling on the jagged Alaska Range, south to round mountains as they reflected deeper shades of gold, west to rows of birch trees glittering with hoarfrost, and all around as the Yentna cliffs grew closer, pinching the flow of a great river that was presently as quiet as anything can be. I imagined a rush of water under our feet, roiling and crashing against a thin veneer of ice. When I realized this was exactly what was happening, I had to stop thinking about it, because it made my knees feel weak.

As we approached the tiny village of Skwentna, I felt a giddy sort of excitement. On what was starting to feel like my own nostalgia tour of the Iditarod Trail, I remembered the Skwentna Roadhouse as the place where I took my first long break during the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational. I had arrived just before 2 a.m., having ridden my loaded Pugsley ninety miles in twelve hours — for me, an unfathomably fast pace. I shared a small meal with Jay Petervary (dinner for me, breakfast for him) and moved upstairs to dry my clothing and take a short nap. I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror, scanning my face for signs of frostbite, and seeing only an expression of mixed pride and astonishment. I couldn't believe what I had set out to do. I couldn't believe I was doing it. It was, for that moment, my greatest accomplishment.

"I like Skwentna," I told Beat. "I was happy there." That it had taken me two and a half days to reach a place I once pedaled to in twelve hours didn't matter. I was glad to be back, and on these terms — older, possibly wiser, definitely slower — it felt right. We shook off our frost and stomped inside. The owner, Cindy, was wearing a bath towel on her head and appeared to have just woken up, which made perfect sense to me, being that it was the more civil winter hour of 11:45 a.m. She and her husband only bought the lodge about a year ago, so she wasn't there in 2008. But she was excited to see the three of us all the same. "You're our first runners for the year!" she exclaimed. She offered us all-you-can-consume Christmas cookies and coffee, which we warned her was a dangerous gesture given our status as cold and hungry runners. Cindy just laughed and directed us to the plates.

We ordered grilled cheese and fries for lunch and chatted with a local man, a former contractor from Anchorage who was now living full-time in a cabin he built on the edge of the river a couple years earlier. "I don't have a boat, so I just spend the whole summer here," he said. "I don't leave except to run freight in the winter. I love it. I'm glad I did it."

We grinned and nodded although I think everyone was wondering exactly he did all summer long, how he avoided cabin fever, why he didn't become lonely or cold or scared. The usual things that we civilized folk tend to wonder when one of our own sloughs off the frenetic lifestyle that we all work so hard to achieve and sets out to find his or her own version of happiness. I admired the guy for doing what he wanted to do, even if most people viewed it as strange and even fruitless. That is, after all, exactly how most people would view what I was doing out here.

I was sad to leave Skwentna, mostly because it meant we only had seventeen or so miles left in our trek before we reached Shell Lake. Although I started out thinking our plan was ambitious for what was essentially just a training run, by the end I was startled by just how doable it was. I mean, we were walking thirty miles a day, in conditions that made every step nearly as difficult as a solid run. We were outside for eight hours or more each day in temperatures that never even flirted with rising above zero, working just as hard to keep our bodies warm as we did to keep them moving, and rarely did we stop moving. It had been hard, but in other ways, so simple. I enjoy the process of occasionally reducing my existence to moving, eating and breathing. It reminds me just how simple existence really is, in the end, and at the same time so rich and meaningful, even if it's impossible to define its meaning.

This observation carried some insight about why I love Alaska so much, because in Alaska I see reflections of my own sense of meaning everywhere I look. The snow portrays a fleeting beauty, the open swamps a lasting wisdom. The trees and animals are perseverance, enduring the worst of winter for the rich reward of summer. The mountains are the great unknown, that powerful force that will always drive me forward. I realize that all of the entities exist in lots of places in the world, but they do seem to resonate deeply for me in these northern latitudes. I'm perfectly content to live where I do right now, but Alaska remains a wonderful place to visit.

We climbed into the Shell Hills, brushed with the pink light of another sunset. Those seventeen miles seem to go by in what felt like a single breath, a dream. I was entirely surprised when we dropped onto the windswept ice of Shell Lake and pressed against the wind toward Anne's cabin. Before going inside, we stopped to light Beat's stove and melt some snow, so he could practice the process of making water in cold temperatures at the end of a long, sweaty day. The experiment went well, but I was still hesitant to walk in the door, almost searching for excuses to stay out longer. I reminded myself that we still had a full New Year's holiday to spend at Shell Lake, and our adventure certainly wasn't over yet.