2012 in photos

Wow, the end of 2012 snuck up from behind, didn't it? The annual "year in photos" post is one of my favorite to make, but this one is a bit more thrown together than years past. Still, it is fun to view the fading year through the lens of a single favorite photo for every month. I have a lot of favorites from this year, so it was hard to pick only one — especially when it meant choosing between different amazing places that I was fortunate to visit during this full year.

 I took the above photo in early January near Shell Lake, Alaska. Beat and I were killing time while waiting for a plane to pick us up, and went for a walk across the lake. It was 25 below zero, and an ice fog had just lifted off the lake an hour before the sun set. The air was so clear that we could see individual flakes of frost sparkling in the distance.

February: Two cyclists push their bikes up the Yentna River on the second day of the Iditarod Trail Invitational. My pilot friend Dan Bailey and I flew over the river to look for Beat and cheer for racers as they slogged their way through fresh snow on the ice. Although it's impossible to convey the scale of the Iditarod Trail with any photo, I like the effect of this image — tiny snow bikers, a thin white line, and a wild expanse.

March: A winter trail cuts through a burn in the foothills of the White Mountains north of Fairbanks, Alaska. I love stark black-and-white effects in real life, which is one of the reasons I'm so drawn to these winter landscapes.

April: Evening ride with Leah above Rodeo Valley, in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco. Leah calls the Headlands "magical" and I'm inclined to agree. For a place so close to civilization, these hills offer a quiet respite to go along with punishing climbs and ripping descents.

May: Beat runs along a trail in Point Reyes, California. Life in California has renewed my appreciation of the Pacific Coast. The sparkling ocean instills the same kind of awe I feel when I look at big mountains.

June: Leah rides down Usal Road during our Lost Coast bike tour in northern California. What a great tour this was. In five days, we traveled some of the most remote and stunning terrain that coastal California has to offer.

July: Friends stand on the summit of Peak One in the Tenmile Range outside Frisco, Colorado. Our friend Daniel lives in an enviable location where one can walk out of his front door and in less than two hours climb to this spot, where we watched the sunset from nearly 13,000 feet.

August: My favorite photo of the year — the formidable Mont Blanc, as seen from 12,600 feet at the Aiguille di Midi station on the border of Italy and France. The day before the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, my friends Martina, Sandra, and I spent the whole day riding gondolas and trains to various high points around Chamonix. At the time, I still believed I'd was going to circumnavigate Mont Blanc during UTMB, and took several minutes to stand outside in the subfreezing cold and soak in the scale of this incredible mountain.

September: A couple of weeks after the last photo was taken, while Beat was racing the Tor des Geants in Italy, I embarked on a string of incredible day hikes above the Aosta Valley. I took this photo from the original UTMB route — the Tour du Mont Blanc trail — outside Courmayeur. I've fallen in love with the Alps, in a way that might get me into a lot of trouble in 2013 (more on that soon.) But for now, I can look at photos from innocent times and feel happy.

October: This month was a difficult one to narrow down because it was full of beautiful adventures, but I decided on a photo of the Utah desert. I shot this photo during a bike ride on the Kokopelli Trail above Onion Creek Valley, north of Moab, Utah. I managed to time my autumn travels perfectly with fall colors — late September in Northern Utah, October in the high desert, and November in Southwestern Utah.

November: Beat scouts a route up Mount Timpanogos. I shot this photo during an outing with him and my dad that was supposed to be a snowshoe hike, but turned into a hard day of hiking mixed with light mountaineering. We failed to gain the high meadow we were aiming for, but had a lot of fun trying. (Or, I should clarify — I had a lot of fun trying. Few people love a good slog as much as I do.)

December: Here's a photo I took today, December 29, in Fairbanks, Alaska. Originally I picked a photo of a mist-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge, but I am a sucker for Alaska winter shots. I've been able to embark on some beautiful snow bike rides while visiting Fairbanks, and today's ride took me onto a fun loop of narrow winter trails in the Goldstream Valley. After winding through the trees, I came out into a frozen swamp where I caught my first glimpse of the hills, painted bright red by the glow of the low-angle sunlight. It was a stunning contrast. I'll post more snow-biking photos soon. Until then, Happy New Year. Thanks for reading.

Photo posts from years past:
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010 part one, part two
2011

Tolovana Hot Springs

While enjoying Christmas Eve pizza with friends here in Fairbanks, our friend Ed told us about one of his favorite holiday destinations, Tolovana Hot Springs. The backcountry springs are a challenge to access — 45 miles northwest of Fairbanks as a raven flies, and for humans, eleven miles of rugged trail after a two-hour drive to a remote point on the Elliot Highway. Those who make the beautiful journey up and over Tolovana Hot Springs Dome are rewarded with board game-stocked cabins and access to natural springs that run hot even when it's 30 below.

It sounded heavenly, but Ed offered a caveat — his winter trips are almost never without mishaps. Usually the mishaps involved difficulties starting cars after the long ski out when the wind was fierce and temperatures were minus a lot. Once, somebody brought a pot of moose chili that was not properly food handled, resulting in a "vomitorium" full of food-poisoned people. One guy was so sick that his friend had to tow him out in a sled, on foot. Still, Ed lamented that he couldn't visit Tolovana this winter because was spending New Year's in Juneau. But as we considered it further, a few of us wondered — why not plan a last-minute Boxing Day trip?

We gathered a group of five — me, Beat, Ed, Tom, and Trevor — a former Fairbanks resident who is visiting from Washington, D.C. — and reserved one of the cabins for Wednesday night. Ed promised to make a special dinner and I was excited to see what it felt like to sit in a hot spring in potentially sub-zero weather. I secretly hoped it would be minus 20 or lower so I could freeze my wet hair into a white cone hat, but then I remembered Ed's stories about frigid trailheads and frostbite, and took heart in a forecast that called for "mild" temperatures near zero.

The trail into Tolovana Hot Springs is interesting, in that it draws the straightest line it can to the closest point on the highway. This would be ideal for human-powdered travel, were it not for the 2,120-foot mountain in the way. The result is strenuous climbs and technical descents for skiers, but I thought the hike in would still be relatively mellow. And hey, we get to climb a mountain.

Again, I underestimate sled dragging. We enjoyed a two-mile fast run from the high ridge where the trailhead is located to a low-lying valley. At the bottom, I noticed all kinds of nagging pains from our White Mountains sled-dragging trip, further solidifying my conviction that to be in shape for winter-specific activities, you actually have to engage in winter-specific activities. Beat is much better at adapting to new physical strains than I am, but I struggled to pull with my tight hamstrings and sore lower back.

Since we were in the back of our group, Beat didn't want to leave me behind, but it was clear he was exasperated by how slow I was moving. In this photo, you can see I am about to get in trouble because I am wasting time by pulling my camera out to take a photo. The problem was that Beat would become too chilled when he stopped to wait for me, and I was being honest when I told him I was working as hard as I could.

After we gained the ridge at a saddle appropriately named Windy Gap, we entered a mile-long section of deep, drifted snow. Of course the skiers just glided over this stretch, but we were bogged down by punchy powder that ranged from shin- to thigh-deep. To make things worse, I was dragging the sled that sits atop two skis, so it tipped over whenever it went even slightly off-camber. Every time it flopped on its side, I had to detach my harness, grab the metal frame with my bare hands (since I use trekking pole pogies, I don't usually wear gloves), and hoist the 35-pound sled back onto its skis. After five or six repetitions of this, I finally gave up on putting the harness back on, and just lifted and carried the sled or dragged the metal pole with my hands, still bare, because I was frustrated and too hurried to stop and put on gloves.

The battle with my sled through thigh-deep drifts was a fully anaerobic effort. I gasped and sputtered and pulled my balaclava down to take deep breaths of the frigid air. Whenever I force my body into intense efforts in cold temperatures, an instinctual kind of fear creeps in — subconscious, most likely, but acute to the point of mild panic ... "You're sweating too much! You're burning all of your matches! You'll never make it out alive!" The logical side of my brain fought this overreaching fear, because I had no choice but to torch energy reserves just to get my sled over some of the drifts. Still, the effort finally pushed me to the point where I had to kneel in the snow, convinced I was about to vomit.

It was a mighty struggle that I endured alone, mainly because I was the weakest member of the group. Beat didn't have nearly as hard of a time getting his sled up the mountain. When I finally reached the top of the dome, I expected him to be angry with me for dawdling, even though I had been maxed out for thirty minutes. Instead, I found him happy with his down coat on, watching the moon rise over the mountains.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Beat took a fantastic shot of the moon rising over the trail while he waited for me.


I was shattered by the time I reached the cabin. Beat had been able to run most of the way down the dome, but I could only manage a half-hearted shuffle. I couldn't even join the guys for the first soak of the evening because I had to huddle next to the stove, drink hot cocoa, and shiver my way to recovery. My body temperature had dropped during the descent, because after I burned up my energy reserves on the climb, my body stopped making heat. I knew I needed to eat a candy bar to stop this from happening, but I was still nauseated from the hard effort. If I hadn't been so close to a cabin, I would have stopped and put on my down coat and dealt with it right away. Instead, I just slogged along until I reached the cabin, and by then I was deeply bonked, and thus deeply cold. Really, for an eleven-mile pleasure trip it's embarrassing, but the hike into Tolovana Hot Springs turned out to be quite the epic for me ... and only me.

The guys came back to the cabin about an hour later, and by then I was a little less shivery and more coherent. Ed's special dinner was three frozen pizzas that everyone was quite excited about. These cabins are privately owned and equipped with a source of electricity, so there's a cooking stove and LED lamps. It's quite the luxury. While the group played Scrabble, there was a cooking mishap and two of the pizzas ended up on the floor. We were in the middle of nowhere so we ate them anyway, minus most of the toppings, while joking about rat feces and "floor-tossed pizza." Still, based on Ed's stories, if that's the biggest mishap of the trip, I'll take it.

Ed salvaged the pizza disaster with two dozen fresh-baked cookies and a pint of ice cream. All was forgotten amid the satisfying sugar rush.

We went out after dinner for a moonlight soak, with the temperature at a balmy 6 degrees above zero. So not cold enough to freeze my hair standing up, but still icy. The springs were blissfully warm — funneled into three tubs set on platforms above a gurgling creek. On a dare, Beat, Ed and Tom ran naked and barefoot from the middle tub to the lower tub, a trip of at least a hundred meters on packed snow. The nearly full moon was so bright that the snow-covered mountainside looked like a bluer shade of day. It was heavenly.

The hike out was much easier, at least for me, even though that direction had about a thousand more feet of elevation gain. The trail had been smoothed over by two snowmobiles, and the worst drifts were on the downslope, where gravity made off-trail travel more manageable. At the summit, I stopped to help a guy whose snowmobile broke down the night before. He was traveling to one of the cabins with his wife and two children, towing a big sled, when the clutch gave out near the summit. The poor guy had to help his family walk four miles into the cabin, and then hike out the next day by himself to get assistance. I was able to grab a few bars on my cell phone at the top of the dome, so I waited to see if he could make a call, but it didn't go through. There is something to be said about the self-reliance of human-powered travel. Machines can become big liabilities when they break down.

Of course, I was plenty grateful when I arrived at the trailhead to find the truck had fired up, no problem. It was a great trip without major mishap, a Boxing Day miracle.

Frost immersion

"It's like landing on an alien planet," Beat said as the plane approached Fairbanks. Below us was a swirling pattern of white swamps, black ice, and skinny spruce trees sticking out of the ground like skewers. As the island of artificial light grew closer, a yellow glow illuminated motionless wisps of water vapor. The Alaskan sitting next to us showed us his phone — current temperature, 39 below zero. "But it's a dry cold," he grinned.

Much of my time in Alaska has been spent near the coast, so most of my extreme cold experiences have been accompanied by wind. I stepped outside of the airport expecting a shocking furnace blast of air that was a hundred degrees colder than the place I left eight hours earlier. Instead, the air sat still and lifeless, like a tomb. "It doesn't feel that cold," I thought. Five seconds later, my nostrils froze shut.

We were happy to receive an invite to a cabin in the White Mountains on Sunday, but the short notice required a quick turnover to unpack three large duffels and organize everything we needed to survive a night in the Alaskan wilderness at 40 below. Important necessities included food and fuel, so first thing in the dark morning, I set to the task of starting the truck. Our friend who owns the place where we are staying is out of town, so his truck had been sitting for more than a week. I chipped hard ice off the windshield while his roommate blasted the alternator with a hot air gun. Unplug the engine block heater, jump into the cab, and crank the starter. Rrrr, rrr, rrr. After a minute the engine grumpily fired up, and continued to whine as the truck crept down the snow-packed road. It didn't seem to want to go faster than twenty miles an hour, which was just as well, because the brakes weren't really catching, either. By the time I got to Fred Meyer, my feet were frozen. I walked through the store with tears in my eyes as painful tingling brought them back to life, and passed casually dressed shoppers with a kind of rapt fascination. Day-to-day life seems so hard here. How do they do it?

Our gear was still the better part of a junk show at the Wickersham Dome trailhead, where a fierce wind blew along the ridge and the sun was sinking into the southern horizon at 1:30 p.m. Our group was small but eclectic — Tom was on skis, Jay was on a fatbike, and Beat and I were on foot dragging very large sleds. Beat was taking a nearly full Nome load for practice with the weight and also to test out a bunch of his gear. I took just about the same amount of stuff because I always partially believe I'm going to die out in these frozen expanses. Tom and Jay started down the trail as Beat and I futzed with gear, tying snowshoes on the back of the sleds, pulling gaiters over our feet, and becoming more and more chilled with adjustments we didn't have time to make back in Fairbanks. Finally, just before 2 p.m., we were on our way.

 First winter trip of the year is hard. First winter trip of the year in deeply subzero windchill is a cold shock. We didn't know what to expect so we just picked a system and hoped it was somewhere close to appropriate. A strenuous hike up the dome cranked up the heat quickly, and I believed I was overdressed. But then a wind gust would whip around a corner, and I'd question the comfort of taking off a layer. I opened zippers to vent heat, and zipped them up in quick succession, again and again.

 The wind became constant at the spine of the rolling ridge, and Beat suggested we try running. Every time I become overconfident about my strength as a runner, all I need to do is try to run while dragging a sled to be humbled by the reality that I am not strong. My lungs burned as I pumped my arms and legs like a body builder trying to pull a semi-truck. I felt like I was running hard, but watching Beat gain more distance on me made me aware that I was probably not moving any faster than I had been when I was hiking. The cold wind seemed to be laughing at me, tossing icy powder at my face.

The first few miles were tough, and I think even Beat felt a bit unnerved by the demands of this relatively small distance. But as the last pink light faded into a clear view of the distant Alaska Range, we started to find a groove. Our trail-running-trained bodies adjusted to the slower, softer surface, and well-heated cores finally started to share the warmth with our fingers and faces. By the time we were running, slowly, down the steep face of the Wickersham Wall, I felt alright.

 The long twilight faded almost imperceptibly into bright moonlight. I didn't turn on my headlamp once, even though we were out for three hours after the sun set. The hike by moonlight was beautiful, with an otherworldly silvery glow outlining stark shadows. Despite cramped glutes and tired legs, I wanted to keep walking, and was almost disappointed to see the soft glow of windows in Eleazar's cabin at the top of a long climb, twelve miles and four hours in.

Still, cabin life is great fun. Tom and Jay had the wood stove cranking and melted snow ready to drink. Beat and I made Cup Noodles for dinner while the guys made something much better (I only had about twenty minutes at the store to gather all of our supplies, and the food was picked out randomly as I rushed down the aisles.) But the guys did generously share part of a quart of ice cream that Tom hauled in. We swapped adventure stories late into the evening, hoping to see the Northern Lights come out (the moonlight was too bright to see much, although Tom did spot a weak aurora around 6 a.m.)

Breakfast was bagels and instant coffee, and we were out the door at first light on Christmas Eve, just before 10 a.m. We moved purposefully in an attempt to not be the last  ones back at the trailhead.

 The cold snap was starting to break and the wind had dissipated, but the morning felt colder than the evening before. Temperatures in the low-lying valley were still well into the minus twenties, and the climb back up to the ridge didn't do much to break the chill.

 Still, I was feeling stronger than the day before, finally breaking into my trekking groove. Beat had dressed lighter for the daytime hike out, and was having a hard time staying warm. It kept us moving at a good clip, even though my hammies and glutes protested mightily. The low-angle sun cast orange and pink light throughout the short day, a palette of continuously warm light to contrast the cold hues of the landscape. In my opinion, four hours of light this stunning more than balances out twenty hours of darkness. Even our Alaskan friends thought we were a little nutty for traveling up to this latitude so close to the winter solstice, but I think my friend Ed is right — Christmas really is one of the best times to be a tourist in Fairbanks.

There's just something about this kind of outing that gives me a deep and purposeful sense of joy — although reasons why are difficult to parse with words. As a physical exercise, snow slogging is ridiculously tough; I'm never so tired after four hours of almost anything else. The cold wages a continuing battle, simultaneously burning my face with frozen breathcicles and freezing my thighs as sweat steams up from my core. People eventually figure this stuff out, but it takes time if you're out of practice. Still, I admit I enjoy being out of practice, feeling the cold shock and new discoveries every time. It's a visceral feeling of being alive — moving and breathing and cranking out heat in a place as quiet and cold as a tomb. And it's also a small taste of something beyond life, where breaths dissipate into swirling clouds, and the land is encased in ice, motionless and unmovable.

Jay and Tom caught up to us about three miles from the trailhead, and just like that, our 24-hour cabin adventure was drawing to a close. We had been away from California all of 48 hours, and were already nodding our heads in agreement when the guys said about the projected negative-single-digit temperatures, "it's getting warm out." Beat squeezed in a good session of gear testing, setting up his tent in the wind and melting snow with an Esbit stove. More testing will necessitate more trips as we finish up the year in the Far North.