Iditarod Again, part five

Winterlake Lodge is a high-end backcountry retreat, about as luxurious as accommodations can be more than a hundred miles from the nearest road, in a location where many feet of snow fall during the winter and temperatures regularly dip to thirty below. Once, when I was mulling an independent bike tour of the Iditarod Trail, I called for a quote as was told rooms cost $600 a night, which included breakfast and dinner prepared by an award-winning chef. Although the Invitational is not exactly a budget vacation, racers don’t contribute near this amount to stay at this single checkpoint. So you’re pretty happy with what you can get at Winterlake — in 2008, it was an unheated carpark tent (used for storage in a place with no cars.) This year, we moved up to coach class, with accommodations in the shell of an unfinished building complete with a single propane heater. We placed the heater in the entryway next to a ladder where we could hang all of our damp clothing, putting it to a more useful task than emitting fumes and vaguely warm air in the plywood room where we slept.

We shared this space with Tim, Loreen, Steve, and Rick. Even though Tim snores like a 600-pound grizzly bear with sleep apnea, total exhaustion was finally working in my favor and I crashed into four more hours of dreamless sleep. Although we’d eaten our allotted meal of a small amount of rice, beans, chicken, salsa, and a tortilla prepared by a quiet kitchen helper upon arrival, Beat learned last year that $5 would get us a second disassembled burrito. And because the time was now something vaguely close to breakfast, we also received an egg. And coffee! True luxury — and I’m not being sarcastic. It may not be the five-star treatment, but a hard pull on the Iditarod Trail expands perspectives about how wonderful simple luxuries can be. 

We hauled out just as wisps of dawn emerged once again. The Skwentna River Valley had narrowed as we made our way through the zig-zag swamps in the dark, and mountain slopes towered over the canyon. Thick forests surrounded tiny lakes, and pillows of deep powder covered the ground. Winter in interior Alaska often looks like someone tried to plant anemic little spruce trees on the moon, but this side of the Alaska Range features more classic winter scenery — an idyllic Christmas card.

My drowsiness this morning was crushing, and the sled was again fully loaded down with the resupply I picked up at Winterlake Lodge. I scanned the sky for pink light that would bring the much-rejoiced sun, but a thick gray persisted until I had to admit that this sluggish dawn was in actuality just an overcast day. The air was thick and humid, and soon accompanied by snow flurries. Snowflakes clumped together in large chunks. This was an alarming development, because chunky snow means temperatures are near freezing, and precipitation is precariously close to what is arguably the most difficult weather for an Alaska backcountry traveler during the winter — rain. 

It had been a weird winter in Southcentral Alaska, and the threat of rain was always high. This was one of the reasons Beat backpedaled on his unsupported attempt, because the gear one needs to survive in temperatures down to fifty below — such as down coats and sleeping bags — do not hold up well through wet weather. Once insulated gear gets wet, it’s useless, and if you can never venture inside a heated space to dry the gear, it stays useless. In January, we took a trip with Steve to Yosemite National Park, dragging our sleds through a 37-degree storm that dumped an inch of rain onto already soggy snow. This training trip left our gear so soaked that we had to abandon plans to camp overnight, and it also helped us formulate a strategy to keep our stuff dry should we encounter similar weather in Alaska. But in order to not tip the sled scales too dramatically, this plan amounted to dry bags for our crucial gear, and trash compactor bags to wrap around the duffle. This would hold out the rain but make everything inside inaccessible during the storm. And wearing damp clothing at 33 or 34 degrees is more of a hypothermia risk than being dry at 30 below. Rain was an unnerving prospect. 

Between the threat of rain, the sinking gray atmosphere, the stinging snow, and a desire to plop down on one of the snow pillows and drift into what could all too easily become forever sleep, my mood this morning would qualify as grouchy. After Finger Lake, the Iditarod Trail follows a series of steeper climbs and descents as it winds through the foothills of the Alaska Range. In 2008, a fellow cyclist referred to this section as “The Push,” and now, with a sled, this was still the best title to characterize this segment. Both Steve and Beat were considerably stronger than me on the climbs; Steve marched out of sight quickly. Along the flatter sections, I frequently increased my effort to a running stride to shorten Beat’s waiting time. The surface snow was becoming softer and marching was exhausting work. I can’t even quantify it with a comparison to trail running, but if I were to try, I would say it was like attempting to haul a tire up a 25-percent grade that never ended. 

The whine of a snowmobile broke a long silence. The driver turned out to be Craig Medred, a long-time Alaska journalist who covers outdoor sports for the Alaska Dispatch News. He’s well-known for writing scathingly critical articles about anyone who makes a mistake in the backcountry. Back when I worked at the Juneau Empire, I’d occasionally come into the office late after over-shooting a ridge walk, and my co-workers would joke that they were glad I hadn’t disappeared in the mountains because they didn't want to talk to Medred about me. He did interview me shortly after I returned from my last Iditarod with frostbite on my right foot. I braced myself for the criticisms that were sure to rain down from online commenters the next day, but he ended up making little mention of my mishap in his article. He covers both the human-powered and dog-sled Iditarod races in depth every year, and does it well. Still, I can’t shake that old paranoia that if I mess up during one of these adventures, Medred will write about it and I'll be the most hated person in Anchorage for a day. It's funny that fear of bad publicity seems to trump fear of injury and death. 

“How’s it going?” Medred asked me.

“So far much better than last time,” I said enthusiastically, referring to the frostbite incident. 

“Don’t you wish you had your bike?” he asked. “This is a bike year.” He listed several cyclists who had already made it to McGrath, less than 72 hours into the race, and that he expected Heather Best, the lead female cyclist, to arrive soon as well. Records were being shattered. 

I shook my head in amazement. “I figured as much. That’s awesome. But it’s a different experience. The thought of biking rarely even crosses my mind." 

This was the truth. I still believe there’s nothing more exhilarating than soaring over a snow-covered trail on a fat bike. But the Zen peace and simplicity of foot travel are incredibly satisfying. February’s long thaw may have made 2014 the fastest year for cyclists that the Iditarod Trail has seen yet, but I never regretted my decision to travel on foot. I felt an urge to wax lyrical about hours of quiet meditation, about absorbing incredible scenery that I never saw in 2008 because I was always looking down at the trail — cyclists are forever searching for the best line in the snow. I wanted to explain how this slow speed afforded extensive inner and outer explorations, and how rewarding it had been to free myself from mechanical dependence. Instead, I just shrugged, silently wishing that Medred hadn’t caught me while I was in the throes of a grumpy low point. 

Medred warned that there was rain in the forecast, then continued down the trail. Beat and I continued up into the socked-in gray clouds, flowing like shredded curtains that disintegrated into snow. Based on maps I knew there were tall mountains all around us, but we could only see the low cloud ceiling, and faint outlines of rocks hinting at hidden grandeur. 

Four hours and twelve miles after leaving Finger Lake, we arrived at the Happy River Steps — a series of three steep descents into a deep gorge where the Happy River pours into the Skwentna River. Grades top thirty-five percent, and we approached each step by unhooking our harnesses, letting our sleds fly free, and butt-sliding down after them. It was a short but exhilarating hit of adrenaline in what is decidedly an endorphin sport. At the confluence, we bypassed a series of open leads that spiked my heart rate again with panic responses from a persistent fear of falling through bad ice. This was unduly draining my energy reserves, but it did give me the boost I needed to haul the obese sled up the thirty-five-percent grades leaving the gorge. The pitch is so steep that in 2008 I had to leverage my bike like an ice ax, and the sled has no sharp edges with which to dig in. My floppy clown shoes were the only thing keeping the anvil from pulling me back down the hill, and the only way to avoid slipping was to march as quickly as possible. My heart raced at what had to be close to my anaerobic threshold, and lactic acid flooded my already tenderized glutes and calves. I would pay dearly for this surge, but at least I didn’t have to resort to crawling. 

Over the next five miles, the trail gains nearly a thousand feet of elevation while continuing along steep rolling hills that add to the overall climbing. From a trail-runner’s perspective these numbers don’t sound like much, but sled and snow resistance seem to make exponential demands on energy expenditures. I’d been struggling on the flats; with these hills, I was battling real physical limits — the kind where my calves would begin quivering halfway up a hill and I’d wonder if my leg muscles were about to fail altogether. Mentally I was not faring much better, with clouds stealing the views and moist, warm air leaving me drenched in sweat from within even as increasingly sleet-like precipitation soaked my outer layers. Emotionally, I wavered between stoic and reeling in near-meltdowns.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I’d chant out loud. “It’s a hard day. And that’s okay.” (Did you ever watch Stuart Smalley “Daily Affirmations” skits on Saturday Night Live? This is exactly what I was picturing as I said “and that’s okay” to myself.)

We crossed Shirley Lake and Finnbear Lake, with a couple of cabins that did not appear to be currently occupied. The trail now skirted along a bench above the Happy River gorge, squeezing through a narrow chute beneath still invisible mountains. The route cut laterally across steep sidehills, where the trail was more frequently blocked by short sections of slanting ice. These "overflows" develop when groundwater seeps over the snow and re-freezes. There were no choices but to cross off-camber ice made incredibly slippery by the wet precipitation, knowing that any slip could send us careening down the hillside. We donned microspikes over our shoes, but the sleds still had no traction. They’d swing downhill until they were pulling directly at our sides, throwing off balance with every step. One overflow was a veritable waterfall, plummeting down a steep slope where remnants of the trail emerged at the bottom. The ice was so bad that Beat waited for me even though I was at that point nearly twenty minutes behind, and offered to take my sled down for me. I felt grateful that he had, as I struggled to pick my way down the icefall without the extra weight. In all likelihood, I lacked the strength to manage the sled’s downward pull with only microspikes to leverage against gravity. If I were alone, I would have had to choose between risking injury from slipping with the sled attached to me, or risking losing all my gear to the Happy River Gorge by releasing the sled on its own. 

The gray day faded to a darker shade of twilight, which was nearly black by the time I arrived at Puntilla Lake Lodge. Over the past hour, sleet had deteriorated into drenching rain. Beat and I held onto hope that ascending to higher elevations would keep us above snow level, but the opposite turned out to be true. It was raining, hard. 

The distance between Finger Lake and Puntilla Lake is a mere thirty miles, but it had physically been my most difficult day yet. Before I entered the tiny log cabin reserved for racers, I organized my sled so I could bring every soft thing inside, out of the rain. There were a lot of people crammed in the building — Tim, Loreen, Rick, Steve, Beat, me, Donald the Scottish biker, another biker who had come down with frostbite and was considering evacuation, and Anne. Jason Boon would arrive in a few hours. The race organizers had flown in cans of soup that we could heat in vats of water on the wood stove, but I chose to use the heated water to hydrate one of my freeze-dried meals, and helped myself to packets of hot chocolate left behind by some blazing-fast bikers. 

Everyone was distraught about the rain. Even Tim agreed that it would be foolish to set out for Rainy Pass during a downpour, soaking our clothing and shoes before descending into the Dalzell Gorge, where temperatures could swiftly swing back to thirty below and there were no spaces to dry gear for more than a hundred miles. We set alarms for midnight with a plan to assess the weather when we woke up. Despite exhaustion I again struggled to sleep. The air inside the cabin was hot and dry, and the day’s overexertion radiated from my skin. I tossed and turned and listened to my iPod to shut out Tim’s grizzly bear snores. At midnight, it was still pouring, so we set alarms for 2 a.m. I slept some, and woke up feeling much better, but it was still raining. Tim agreed to a 4 a.m. alarm, but asserted that we didn’t have the luxury to wait this out much longer. He was right. The pull over Rainy Pass is a harrowing one, with navigation difficulties and avalanche dangers lurking near the pass. It’s not wise to start too late in the day.

Iditarod Again, part four

In the loft of Cindy’s cabin, we offered the bed to Tim and Loreen, and Beat and I made a nest of blankets and one pillow on the floor at the foot of the bed. One important aspect I forgot to explain in my last installment is the fact that Beat and decided to abandon his unsupported goal for this leg to McGrath, and joined me for indoor stays. He and I have discussed this since, and neither of us can remember exactly why he made this decision so early in the journey. He was still hauling his 75-pound sled and eating frozen peanut butter out of Ziplock bags and freeze-dried meals spiked with butter powder. I think ultimately it boiled down to a desire to hang out with me and “have fun” rather than suffer for an arbitrary goal. Beat told me, “I’m good at racing; I’m not so good at training.” What he meant is that it’s easier to maintain outlandish goals when there aren't opt-outs, even if such requirements are only maintained by the arbitrary but rigid parameters of a race. “Training” efforts are more fluid, and open to adjustments. 

I was quietly glad Beat made the decision to stick with me. I tossed and turned for ninety minutes, still not sleeping, before we got up to leave around midnight. As we repacked our sleds and dropped back into the frigid sink of the river corridor, I battled a gnawing fear of nighttime, dark and cold. I was considerably more prepared for cold temperatures than I was in the morning, wearing extra layers that would be much easier to remove from a warm body than add to a cold body. Yet I remembered how I cold felt all morning, and was shaken by the experience. The fatigue of nearly eighty sled miles and forty-two hours without sleep weighed on every emotion, giving unjust power to doubt and apprehension. Yawning blackness spread all around, wisps of high clouds shielded the stars, and when I looked over my shoulder, I could no longer see the amber-tinted light pollution of Anchorage. It was very dark. 

When I looked ahead, my headlamp caught the glare of reflective tape on Beat’s trekking poles and backpack, swaying back and forth with an outline that looked just like a hockey goalie anticipating a shot. The rhythmic motion was soothing and reassuring; I matched Beat’s long stride even as the pace tugged at my hamstrings and revved my heart. The effort wasn’t too difficult as long as it meant I wasn’t alone. Memories took me back to 2008 and the many hours I spent entirely by myself, just me and the Iditarod Trail, going as long as a day without encountering another human being. It still amazes me that I managed that deep of solitude in such a menacing environment without falling apart, and didn’t succumb to panic that I still felt creeping around the edges, even with six years of experience beyond that, and with Cindy’s cabin just a mile or two behind us. I managed it then because there were no opt-outs. No one was coming to help me, so I had to help myself. And yet, as I chased Beat into what looked and felt like infinite darkness, I was incredibly grateful for the fluidity of life, the option to have him here with me, now. 

I fixated on the glowing hockey goalie and slipped further into a trance until twelve miles passed and we crossed into the comforting aroma of wood smoke. Surrounded by tall spruce trees and not much else, the Skwentna Roadhouse is a most welcoming oasis, with a friendly proprietor named Cindi. You don’t have to be a racer to enjoy Cindi’s hospitality; she served up chili and cornbread for my pilot friend Dan and me after we landed on the snow-covered landing strip for visits in 2012 and 2013, and free Christmas cookies when Beat and I walked in for a visit during a New Year’s training trip with Anne in 2011. After an extended stay at trail angel Cindy’s, we hadn’t planned to stop long at this official race checkpoint just four hours later. But the heated interior of the building hit me like an anvil, and I collapsed in a chair in the front room. 

“I’m just really tired,” I told Beat. “I’m shattered.” 

Photo by Shawn McTaggart

We decided to rent a room at the roadhouse, set an alarm for 8 a.m., then have a quick cup of coffee and go. Although grateful, I felt guilty about this second extended stop. That’s just what happens when you put your mindset in “race” mode. We may have chosen the slowest mode of travel, and we may have not even been in the running to win that division — but we were still there to test ourselves and our limits, we were still determined to finish as well as we could, and we were still most assuredly racing. But I was crashing. Cindi led us upstairs to a cozy private room with a queen bed, crisp sheets, a fluffy quilt. I peeled off all of my clothing except for my underwear and wrapped myself in the incredible snugness of this bed, feeling the cool sheets against the hot tingling of my skin. Skwentna beds are the ultimate guilty pleasure — “it’s like we’re comfort touring the Iditarod Trail” I mumbled to Beat as I slipped into three hours’ worth of deep, dreamless sleep. 

I woke up stiff with a swollen face and knees, but if you asked me about my health I would have told you I felt like a million bucks. Beat and I savored bottomless cups of coffee and ate a piece of Cindi’s famous pumpkin roll. After that, I probably would have claimed that I could easily go another ninety miles — although I still had nearly three times that mileage to travel, at this point in a long race, bold assumptions about any distance are an invitation for disaster. No matter, because I felt great. We packed up our sleds as golden beams from the rising sun streamed through the trees. Carole and Shawn were just arriving, Steve was eating breakfast, and Tim, Loreen, and Rick left just an hour or two earlier. We were still a roving party. 

The views of the Alaska Range were becoming more extensive and clear. The mountains seemed to wrap all the way around the valley as we crossed a long swamp before climbing into the Shell Hills. After sixty miles of terrain that was almost entirely flat, it felt great to finally engage the glutes and do some real climbing, even though the sled tugged my harness so aggressively that I thought it might pull us both backward down the hill. Rick caught up and joined us for the hard climbs followed by giggling — complete with real running — descents. When we passed Rick earlier, he was lying next to his sled with a sleeping bag draped over his body like a blanket. Rick didn’t like to waste too much time indoors, and developed a clever strategy of stopping at the warmest time of the day to nap and dry his down bag in the sun. Temperatures were in the single digits above zero, which was still about twenty degrees too cold for my always-chilled feet. I could never stop for long on the trail, but I fantasized about lying down on my sled and closing my eyes, just for a minute. 

One snowmobile passed on a steep corner, and the three of us stepped off the trail together. As I shimmied to pull my sled out of the way, I plunged my leg into a thigh-deep pillow of snow that ended in a creek bed. When I pulled the leg out, my men’s-size-11 shoe was missing. Beat and Rick had already started back up the trail, and I held my sock foot up in erratic one legged hopping until I gained enough balance to kneel down on the drift and dig frantically with my bare hands (during the “warm” part of the day, my trekking pole pogies provided ample insulation, and I didn't wear gloves.) I fished out the shoe, which was sitting in a trickle of flowing water beneath the snow — luckily shallow enough that it didn’t submerge anything above the Gore-Tex barrier. 

In a deeper stream or in the frigid night, this little mishap could have easily turned into a small disaster — if it was too dark to find the shoe, or if I froze my fingers digging for it, or if it became soaked. But in this context, it was just funny. I didn’t say anything to Beat or Rick, because it was still embarrassing that I was marching through a 350-mile race in clown shoes so large that they slipped off my feet freely. 

The giggling and running got us eighteen miles to Shell Lake by early afternoon, and we stopped into Shell Lake Lodge for a can of Pepsi. The proprietor Zoe, a gruff older woman who is fiercely independent and generous to all Iditarod travelers, has a reputation for taking her time in the kitchen. We wanted to make the most of the remaining warm daylight, so we didn’t order any food. Despite this rushing, the friendly sun was already well into its downward arc when began the gradual climb into toward the foothills of the Alaska Range. 

On this shelf above the Skwentna River, the Iditarod trail traverses a series of swamps that I call the “Zig-Zag Swamps,” because this section involves crossing a long, open plain, taking a hard right to cut through a forested strip of spruce trees, then a hard left to traverse another long, open plain. This process goes on perpetually, sometimes skirting the edge of little lakes instead of swamps, although you’d never know the difference. While marching I occasionally slipped into beautiful Zen mode, which was too easily broken by the jarring scenery change of the forests. Other swamps invited long bouts of fixating on sore shins and feet. The friendly sun gave way to a gorgeous sunset, with luminous silver and gold streaks across the sky. 

Then it was dark and cold again. Perception of time became fuzzy. We crossed through a row of trees and entered another swamp, and I was taunted by a suspicion that we were walking in circles through the same forest and the same swamp. Beat and I discussed our individual foot pains and decided to stop, add lube, and change our socks. I made quick work of the chore and laid down on top of my sled with my down coat draped over me, dozing off Rick-style. My feet woke me up after three minutes with needling pain. 

“What time is it? What year is it?” We crossed through a forest and into a swamp, again. The zigs remained short but the zags grew longer. My headlamp would catch the glare of reflector tape on distant wooden lath that officials from Irondog snowmachine race used to mark the trail a few weeks earlier. I’d see the sparkling glow of the tape and convince myself it was exterior light of building, that we had finally reached Finger Lake — but time after time, this wasn’t true. 

Beat marched ahead, and I struggled to keep pace as I fell farther behind, until I could no longer see the soothing reflection of a hockey goalie swaying from side to side. The Irondog reflectors must have been especially powerful, because I continued to catch these in full brightness even though all I could see of Beat was a faint headlamp beam cut in half by his shadow. These bright glares just had to be electric lights, I told myself — but time after time, they weren’t. 

Only iPod was left to break the monotony of an incessant loop. I listened to “Reflektor” by Arcade Fire and sang out loud, because no one was close enough to hear me, and time had stopped anyway — “Trapped in a prism, a prism of light. Alone in the darkness, the darkness of white.” 

I zigged, the swamps zagged, and there were more bright reflectors fastened to what turned out to be more wooden lath.

“I thought I found a way to enter. It’s just a reflektor. I thought I found a connector. It’s just a reflektor.” 

The sky opened up. The cold sank deeper, but there were stars, finally, and enough ambient light to reveal the profiles of river bluffs along the Skwentna. The canyon was narrowing. 

“I want to break free. But will they break me? Down, down, down. Don’t mess around.” 

Still there were zigs and zags. Only zigs and zags.  “There is just no way, no way we’re not there yet. Finger Lake is only twenty miles from Shell Lake. This is impossible,” I thought. Out loud, I sang. 

“It’s just a reflection! Of a reflection! Of a reflection! Of a reflection!”

Oh, iPod. At least you understand me. 

Finally we reached a wooden lath with a sign next to it, and an arrow. It was too good to be true. Winterlake Lodge sits on the far edge of Finger Lake, behind a bluff, so the buildings remain hidden from the trail. Darkness persisted. It had been too good to be true. But what was that sign? A reflector? Fatigue and fuzziness reigned, and there were no longer any assurances about what was real and what was imagined. I was flabbergasted. Then I heard a dog bark. Five minutes later, we finally saw buildings. They were eerily dark — a generator hummed, but no energy was being wasted on exterior lights. It was just as well. Finger Lake was an official race checkpoint, which meant someone there was probably waiting up, and would be willing to give us something to eat at 1 a.m. Warm food vindicates all. 

Iditarod Again, part three

Out on the frozen tundra, sleep can be as elusive as wisps of Aurora, pulsing and fading. This shelf above the Susitna River wasn’t terribly cold — 5 degrees, according to my thermometer — which was warm enough to keep my face pressed out of the bag and breathe freely. But my heart continued to beat rapidly, prompting frantic leaps between exhaustion and alertness. Almost as soon as I dozed off, my lungs would fill with chilled air and my unadjusted panic response would jolt my brain awake — what is this cold fire? Where are we? But nuzzling into the sleeping bag was worse; I couldn’t shake off the panic response that now thought I was suffocating. Still, my body was reclined, my feet — encased in Nunatak down booties — were so toasty, and actually this whole not walking thing was pretty damn wonderful. 

I was still lying there, staring at the outlines of birch branches in search of green light, when the group began to rouse. A couple moved out and then a couple more, and I continued to lie there because I was still stoked on not walking. Finally Beat started rustling in his bag, so I sat up. “What time is it?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “Almost 5 a.m. We slept four hours.”

“I didn’t sleep at all,” I said. “Pretty sure not at all.” 

“It will come,” Beat said. “Don’t worry.” 

I peeled the used socks off my torso. They were still damp to the touch, so I stuffed them back in and zipped up my down coat to pack up. My head was foggy, there was no coffee, and I was forgetting all the steps. I rolled up my bivy bundle before I remembered to extract my water bottle from the interior, and packed up the mittens I intended to wear.

“I didn’t practice this enough,” I said to Beat. 

“It will come,” he assured me again. 

We trundled to the lip of the Wall of Death, which is not really all that scary if you’re not riding wheels or skis, and broke out into sprints as our sleds chased us down the steep pitch. Temperatures plunged as we dropped onto the river, and I gasped at the sudden stabbing sensation in my throat. I pulled up my face mask and looked at my thermometer. “It’s minus 10 now,” I announced, though Beat was marching too far ahead to hear. 

I shivered and started marching harder because I believed hard efforts would help me warm up. And then I remembered that, yes, breakfast would help me warm up too, so I reached into my feed bag to fish out some dried cherries and pistachios. My “feed bag” was a chalk bag that I fastened to the chest strap of my harness, for easy access. Subzero cold doesn’t really afford the luxury of stopping, so it’s wise to figure out simple ways to eat while walking. Strategies include choosing food that’s bite-sized, high-calorie-density, doesn’t need to be unwrapped, and won’t break your teeth when frozen solid. In my opinion (an opinion that some disagree with), high-carb food is best for endurance efforts in subzero cold, because it burns fast and warms you up quick. Others swear by high fat — and these people are lucky because they get away with half of the weight in food — but I’ve never made fat work for me as an energy source for strenuous activities (majority-fat foods usually just sit like an unignitable log in my gut and make me feel ill. Peanut butter and some nuts are about all I can stomach.) I had pre-prepared thousand-calorie Ziplock bags of Jill Feed. Half were marginally healthy — dried fruit and nuts. The other half were unapologetically all candy — peanut M&Ms, mini peanut butter cups, chocolate-covered pretzels, bite-sized Twix, and bite-sized Snickers. It was simple enough to pull my hand briefly out of the pogies on my trekking poles, cram fifty to a hundred calories into my face, and jam my hands back in my mitts before fingers went numb. 

Five in the morning seemed like something that should be vaguely close to dawn, but darkness persisted as we marched for miles along the fortress-like bluffs of the Susitna. A breeze kicked up and I began to regret not adding more layers when I had the chance. When I crawled out of my sleeping bag that morning, my capilene shirt and windproof tights were damp and clinging to my skin, and my polartec pullover felt clammy. But these layers had been good enough for all of the day before, so why not now? I didn’t account for the depletion in glycogen stores, the muscle fatigue, and a fifteen-degree drop in temperature on the river, which kept on dropping. I had added a windproof fleece jacket, but needles of cold found their way into openings around my neck and minimal fabric around my knees and butt until an electric chill reverberated down my spine. It happened so suddenly; one minute I was debating whether it was worth stopping for a few minutes on this wind-exposed river to put on another hat, mittens, primaloft shorts, perhaps my Gore-Tex shell — and the next minute, it felt like stopping for any amount of time was not an option. 

This clothing was all readily accessible inside my sled, but my panic response warned me that any pause in motion would be the tipping point between uneasy discomfort, and violent shivering. I had the means to recover from a bout of violent shivering — and if I were trekking across Antarctica, I would have no choice. But we were only twenty miles or so away from Yentna Station. And the sun would surely come up soon. Oh, beautiful sun. Even though logic told me just a few more layers would help me overcome this urgent discomfort, I was terrified of violent shivering, and couldn’t bare the thought of stepping over the narrow margin my body was straddling. So I marched harder.

We took a hard left at the confluence of the Yentna River. The breeze bit my nose, so I pushed my frozen face mask closer to my skin. My hands went numb, so I decided it was no longer an option to take them out of my pogies. My feed bag bounced against my chest, taunting me. I felt very hungry, but exposing my hands and face to move a few calories from the feed bag to my mouth was not an sacrifice I was willing to make. My core temperature was dangling, slipping, and every minute seemed more dire. I should have stopped back there on the Susitna, I thought. But now it really wasn’t an option. I kept marching. And darkness persisted. 

Blame pressed at this sense of urgency. “You need food. You need a coat and mittens. It’s not hard. They’re right there.” So I fired back, “It’s the first morning. I wasn’t ready. I live in California. It takes some time to remember what it means, this cold.” My jaw began to quiver and teeth chattered softly. My core temperature was still dropping. Beat was just a hundred feet in front of me this whole time, and sometimes right behind after waiting for me to catch up. He’d ask me how I was doing and I’d reply that I was fine, because I was embarrassed that I was so cold, that my fingers had become stiff, that I’d stopped eating and drinking. It was silly, of course, but stopping to ask Beat to help me grab a coat still meant stopping. So I kept marching. 

Lavender light filled the sky, followed by a pink strip across the southern horizon. Finally the sun slumped over distant mountains, but bluffs kept the Yentna River interminably in shadow. It was funny, really, that I’d decided waiting for the sun was the best solution for my miserable state of cold, as though I’d forgotten I was in Alaska and maintained a delusion that sun’s 9:30 a.m. arrival on the low horizon had any capacity to warm this sink of frigid air. But the anticipation had its own unique quality — a futile optimism that stretched toward the river bends where sunbeams touched the ice. Always stretching, always marching. 

When we reached Yentna Station, there actually was a spark of solar radiation, and my fingers began to tingle. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in five hours, and traveled more than twenty miles since I “woke up” from a sleep I hadn’t actually had, and yet the only thing I’d really felt since then was cold. Food, water, and rest are nice luxuries when they’ve only been missed for a few hours. But when it comes down to it, the body knows what it needs first.  

Heat. Fire was roaring in a wood stove when we stepped inside the snowmachiner stop-over at the far end of the Yentna's oxbow bend. I peeled off the ice helmet that my balaclava had become, and took off my shoes to make sure my toes still had hints of color. They were faintly blue, but they weren’t gray, which is what matters when you’re looking for frostbite. The black blisters come later, after thawing. I whispered a quiet “yay” and vowed to do better every morning from here on out. 

Anne and Shawn were slumped on the couches next to the stove, eyes half closed. Tim, Loreen, and Rick were waiting at the dining room table for the breakfast they ordered. 

“Why do I keep doing this to myself?” Tim asked rhetorically as Beat and I joined them at the table.

“I’m trying to make an executive decision,” Loreen said as she held two freeze-dried meals in her hands, deciding whether to pitch the eighteen ounces of extra weight. I was ravenous. Beyond any kind of ravenous I was familiar with, spilling over into the kind of hunger that can drive a civilized person to start spooning handfuls of goop out of Crisco container … which, incidentally, was something I caught myself eyeing greedily when I glimpsed the label on a shelf in the kitchen. Loreen said she could never eat much during these types of efforts because she felt too sick. I felt bad for her, but couldn't emphasize. My body was telling me to eat all the food, so it could store it away in glycogen and fat — the biological version of stacking firewood in anticipation of a long, cold winter. 

I ordered breakfast, and the roadhouse owner asked if I wanted hash browns or toast with my scrambled eggs. “Um, yes?” He brought me a heaping plate that I mowed through with several cups of coffee, then ate Loreen’s unwanted toast. All of the distress and discomfort I’d endured drained away. This was the ticket. Kilojoules. Kilojoules are everything. 

We left Yentna Station just a few minutes behind the Pennsylvanians. By early afternoon there was real warmth to the air, with solar heat radiating off the white expanse of the river. We had thirty more miles to travel to the tiny “town” of Skwentna, following the lazy curves of the Yentna to its confluence with the Skwentna River. From an outside perspective, dragging a forty-five-pound sled for thirty miles up a wide, flat river probably seems like a torturously boring task. Like the anchor that it is, the loaded sled and higher resistance of snow cancels out inefficient attempts at running strides — making running an unwise expenditure of energy. A good comparison would be attempting to run up all the hills in a hundred miler — you might move 25 percent faster at first, but the chance of burning out too soon is high. A small number of athletes, such as Dave Johnston, can and do run on snow with loaded sleds. But for me, and I imagine most people who engage in this foolish activity, sled-dragging is a walking motion that drains as much energy and stresses the cardiovascular system and many muscles as much or more than running on trails. So not only are you traversing a wide, flat, and almost colorless landscape, but you are “running,” sort of hard, at three miles per hour, and it’s going to take a long damn time to get anywhere. Once the danger cold retreats under the afternoon sun, there’s not even an immediate survival factor to keep the mind engaged. I think people have nightmares like this sometimes, in which they’ve died of boredom and gone to Sisyphean Hell. 

I’m not sure how to even qualify this statement, but I love the frozen river slog. It’s like a white curtain draped over my mind, a soothing place where my heart beats fast and rhythmically, my legs move robotically, and my mind is as open and blank as the surface of an ocean. I’ve never made an effort to meditate in the traditional sense, but I imagine this is what meditation is like. The cauldron of thoughts and emotions simmers down, and on this rare smooth surface I briefly glimpse what’s reflected from beyond rather than what’s churning from within. I breath. I walk. I’m at peace. 

It’s not always like this, out on the river — and wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had the discipline to harness this mindset in my own home? But I slip into this state naturally when my body is tired from exertion, and my mind is tired from battling fear and anxieties, and the wide, meandering trail brings no immediate obstacles to concentrate on, no sudden turns to navigate. The body and mind say, “let go,” and I do, and these interludes are too wonderful to attempt to qualify with outward justifications such as, “The views of the Alaska Range were amazing,” or “It was clear and the air had this sharp sweetness to it,” or “I had fun conversations with friends.” But these things were true, too.

For most of the afternoon we walked with Tim and Loreen, sometimes talking, sometimes just enjoying the scenery. Our friend Dan flew over in his Cessna, circling back several times and tipping his wings as he passed overhead. For the past two years I’ve been in that plane with him, watching racers traverse the Yentna River from above. “The view is actually not so different from down here,” I thought. But the journey had been much deeper than an hour-long flight from Merrill Field in Anchorage. And this was still, almost unfathomably, just the beginning of this race. 

Shortly after the sun set, we passed another bend in the river inviting Iditarod racers inside. Cindy has lived on the Yentna for nearly two decades, and recently became took on the role of a “trail angel” for human-powered travelers. I still don’t fully understand what compels a person to become a trail angel — to invite exhausted strangers into their home to disrupt their evenings, devour their food and spread stinky bodies across their furniture and floors — but I do know that trail angels are wonderful people. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Cindy offered a delicious soup and homemade bread, and cake for desert, and then offered her own bedroom for Tim, Loreen, Beat and me to lie down for an hour or two. Someone else would later curl up on a couch in the small front room/kitchen, and this and the upstairs room were about all there was to Cindy’s tiny cabin. Anne and Shawn had taken an unheated cabin outside. 

“Where will you sleep?” I asked. 

“I’ll be all right,” Cindy replied. 

The people who live in rural Alaska have no choice but to work very hard just to maintain the most basic amenities, for something that most Americans would view as a spartan and impoverished existence. When just surviving is a full time job, no one would fault you for looking out only for yourself and your own family. At yet, rural Alaskans are some of the most generous people you’ll ever meet.