Iditarod Again, part eight

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

My post-bison-mud-bog outburst drained away whatever reserves of energy I had left to spend on angst. Despite continued concern about the Farewell Lakes, I no longer cared whether I fell through a crack in the ice and drowned, or not. The Zen of resignation. The silent self-coaching did continue, however. I decided that, minute for minute, this section of the Iditarod Trail in these conditions had been the most continuously strenuous thing I had ever tried. PTL was tough and frequently scary, but it didn’t have twelve solid hours of hauling a refrigerator up a steep mountain slope. This was sort of like that.

I couldn’t help but look at my watch. “It’s been twelve hours since we left Rohn,” I lamented. “We haven't even hit the Farewell Lakes yet, not even 25 miles.”

Beat just shrugged. I already knew our average pace had fallen below two miles an hour, but the math was discouraging. 

We reached the edge of the first Farewell lake, which is called Low Lake, rendered a bottomless shade of indigo in the late afternoon sunlight. I stopped to put on microspikes and gazed into the ice rimming the shoreline. It was so clear that I could see grass beneath the frozen water, sharply defined as though I were looking through a window. This ice surely didn’t look like a solid thing. I reminded myself that this ice had upwards of four months in predominantly sub-zero temperatures to set, and that one or two days of heat wasn’t going to break apart ice that was likely a meter thick. But when a surface looks like liquid water and even smells like liquid water after a day in the sun, it’s difficult to turn off the internal alarms. 

There were fresh scratches in the ice from Bill Merchant’s snowmobile, which proved to be an invaluable guide across the lake, leading to the point where the trail cut back into the woods. Otherwise we might have had to wander along the perimeter for long minutes looking for an opening. I gazed into the fathoms of the lake, fascinated by the fractured pattern along the surface, the opulent shades of blue, and the entirely visible subaqueous environment of grass and sunken logs. I even looked for fish swimming beneath the ice, but started to feel that woozy vertigo one feels when peering over a railing of a high bridge. The sled coasted behind me, and I marveled at the sudden weightlessness of my steps — as though the sled and I were floating across a tranquil pond. 

“I guess that wasn’t so bad,” I announced to Beat when we reached the other side. “I don’t know what I was so freaked out about.”

We returned to the grassy tundra, and the canoe sled morphed back into a refrigerator. Somewhere around the second lake, which is called Steele Lake, we reconnected with Anne. She apparently had spent some time trying to rig a repair for her sled, which was in the process of tearing in two. Anne's sled was custom-made from carbon fiber. It was light and strong but not designed to be dragged across dirt and rocks for 35 miles and counting. She showed us the gaping hole at the bottom and explained the repairs she tried. Beat, ever the engineer, had a few more suggestions that Anne waved off, lamenting that this was it for her. She was aiming for Nome this year, and there was no way her sled would make it that far. 

Beat tried to encourage her, and we came up with a plan that if she could limp her sled into McGrath, I could give her my sled to take to Nome. Anne seemed upset and fearful that her sled would fall apart before she even reached the safety of Nikolai. She was considering camping on the shoreline and using her satellite messenger to contact her husband, who is a pilot and could land his plane on one of these lakes. We convinced her to stick with us a little bit longer. 

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

We crossed the third Farewell lake, which is called Submarine Lake. I gazed into the depths with rapt fascination, no longer afraid. I knew that one we crossed Submarine, we were beyond the last of the major water hazards. From here we would traverse the final remnants of Alaska Range foothills before dropping into the low, dry basin known as the Farewell Burn. The three of us stopped to look back at the mountains, an impressive contrast of snowfields and naked slopes. An addled mind can achieve wild and rapid swings between emotions. Just five miles from meltdown, I’d already oscillated back to my other extreme, manic joy. 

The sun sank low on the horizon and the temperature took a nose-dive, which was a welcome development. Finally below freezing again, ice crystals formed on the dirt and the sled's drag wasn’t quite so bad. Although still a mild twenty or so degrees, my wet feet began to ache. They’d been uncomfortable at forty degrees; at zero or lower, I might not be able to sustain blood flow to the extremities at any pace. This was not a welcome development. 

We began to see patches of snow again, as petrified as solid ice. I remained worried about the drinking water situation, so I’d break pieces off branches and suck on them. The ice chunks had the strong, distinct flavor of spruce with hints of smoke, which I found gratifying. “This is what the Farewell Burn tastes like,” I thought. 

About an hour after sunset, we came upon an encampment amid the low brush off to the side of the trail. Rick was sitting over his stove, melting water. Tim and Loreen were asleep in their bags. Anne, Beat and I been discussing when to stop for a few hours, and this seemed as good of a time and place as any. “Mind if we join you?” Beat asked. 

Rick was in a fantastic mood. “Not at all,” he said. “If you can find a bare spot.” 

Beat had his sled to sleep in, and I located a dry patch of dirt amid the brush. I pulled my bivy bundle out of the now hard-frozen duffel. The bundle is comprised of a wrap-like piece of material with compression straps, which I covered in a trash compactor bag that was too short to pull all the way over the bundle. I expected the stream water submersion had soaked through this as well. The material was rimmed with ice, but happily when I popped open the compression straps, my sleeping bag was dry. Anne set up next to Tim and Loreen and disappeared into her bag almost immediately. 

“What did you think of today?” I asked Rick. And before I could even add “what a nightmare,” he blurted out, “It was great. I mean, yeah, it sucked. But it was interesting, right? Sometimes you just have to go two miles an hour, but it isn’t so bad.”

I was a little dumfounded by the implication that he found the mud "fun" ... but at the same time I realized that I needed to cultivate that attitude. The trail is what it is, so you do what you need to do and don’t fixate on things that don’t exist, like snow. 

“Hey, you want some water?” Rick asked. He had gathered all of the nearby snow clumps, like sticks for a campfire, and stacked them next to his stove and pot. He had enough to make water for everyone.

“Yeah, thanks. Thanks a ton,” I said, handing him my Hydroflask bottle. I looked around at the scene — a half dozen people cowboy-camping among the spruce and brush, Rick cooking up some water, and the last hints of dusk lingering in the sky. It felt far away from the desperate situations that I tend to associate with Alaska bivies. It was more like actual camping ... as Rick would remind me, this was fun. It was fun! I took a gulp of tepid, spruce-and-smoke-flavored water, and smiled. 

We crawled into our bivies and I stuffed the Hydroflask at the foot of my sleeping bag, like I always did to prevent the water from freezing. I snuggled in, still basking in the peaceful atmosphere, when I realized my feet had suddenly become cold. Not just the aching cold I was becoming more accustomed to, but icy cold — as though I’d submerged them in ice water. As the sensation intensified, I realized they actually were submerged in ice water. I exploded out of my sleeping bag and in a single motion opened the zipper and shook the bag wildly, slinging the bottle and a large puddle of spilled water. When Rick refilled my bottle once more after I took a drink, he pushed the lid down but didn’t screw it tight. I didn’t think to check it. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Most of a 40-ounce bottle had leaked into my down bag. 

I knelt down on the icy mud and and ran my hands along the inside of the bag. I had managed to fling some of the water away, but quite a bit had soaked in. For several seconds I knelt in a state of shock. I’d just severely compromised the insulating capacity of my bag. Some people's races end for lesser reasons than this. It was such a dumb mistake, and out here it was a serious one. I looked out over all of the seasoned veterans surrounding me. I certainly couldn’t say anything about this; it was hugely embarrassing. The night was still reasonably warm, in the sense that temperatures were still above zero degrees — although probably not much above zero degrees at this point. But it wasn't forty below, where a mistake like this really could be life-threatening. I decided I could crawl into my bag and see how it went. If I became too cold to sleep, I’d just have to get up and keep moving. I’d say something about it to Beat then, but not until then. 

I crawled back in and curled up into the tightest fetal position possible. The position ripped new streaks of pain through my tight lower back muscles and hamstrings, but at least it felt fairly warm. My feet were still cold — the down booties and my last pair of dry liner socks had also taken on water in the melee, but the booties were already wet from walking through the swamps of Rohn, so I left them on anyway. I smirked about the fact I’d taken so much care to keep my sleeping bag dry through the rains of Rohn and forty miles of swamps and streams, only to dump half of my drinking water into it when I was finally clear of the thaw. All I could do now was hope this ragged body of mine found a way to sleep in this wet bag, and that I’d never have to tell Beat about this rookie mistake. (And in fact, in writing this I realize I never did tell him. I remained extremely embarrassed about it, but now months have gone by and it’s too funny of a story to leave out of the blog report. Sorry, Love.) 

We woke up around 11 p.m. to Tim yelling loudly that it was time to go. He didn’t realize that Beat, Anne and I joined them in the night, even as we began stirring and moving to pack up our own stuff. Beat finally said something to him and Tim responded, “When did you get here?” My feet felt like blocks of ice, but the toes were still pink as I applied a fresh coat of lube. I was stoked on getting what amounted to two hours of solid sleep. 

As usual, Beat and I were slow to pack up and the last to leave. Anne waited for us to finish, dancing around to keep her own Raynaud’s-Syndrome-affected digits warm. I felt bad because Beat and I promised we’d stick with her and help if her sled had a catastrophic failure, but I couldn’t help that I was still a novice at bivy break-down. And our promise to stay with her didn’t change the fact that Anne was still a fair amount faster than me. She surged impatiently ahead, and I just shrugged. As long as she remained in front of us, we hadn't left her behind.

We marched up and down steep, undulating hills. The trail had some snow cover now, but exasperatingly it was all on the north-facing slopes, which were downhill in our direction. So we had to haul the refrigerators up bare dirt, and then battle to keep from slipping on the hard ice descents. I had to run fast to avoid being mowed down by the sled. Every pounding step felt like a ripple of electric shocks through my legs. These jolts of pain had an exhilarating effect, and were just what I needed to bust out of “morning” drowsiness. 

About forty miles from Rohn we passed through Bison Camp — the former site of a wall tent camp set up by bison hunting guides from Nikolai. After fuel prices went up and the economy tanked, their clientele dwindled and they mostly closed up shop. All that was left were some strewn logs and a drying rack of some sort. By this point there was a consistent layer of hard snow covering the trail, and we were moving more easily now. After Bison Camp, we dropped off the plateau into a wide-open basin. This final leg-shocking descent was the border of the “old burn." The Farewell Burn. 

Anne was becoming increasingly more agitated. She again talked about calling her husband. She told me that she couldn’t take my sled in McGrath, that it was against race rules to use gear from another racer. She seemed deeply upset. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong now that wasn’t wrong earlier. We were on snow again, and on the flat basin there was good reason to believe that the trail conditions would be consistent until Nikolai. By all outward observations, we were out of the worst of it. But then Anne said something that brought her attitude into perspective — “The Burn is trying to kill me.” 

Anne has had some harrowing experiences out on the Farewell Burn. In 2008 she was caught out in a windstorm at 30 below without goggles. The gusts froze her corneas and rendered her blind. She might have died had it not been for an Italian biker who just happened to be right behind her at the time. He put her in a sleeping bag and rode into Nikolai to get help. She spent months recovering from frostbite to her face and eyes, but did make a full recovery. After two more failed attempts, she returned again in 2012 to the worst conditions the Iditarod Trail Invitational had ever seen. By the time she reached the Burn, temperatures dropped to 50 below and she again battled for survival. She finished the race that year and set a new women’s record to McGrath the next. But it was clear she was still deeply impacted by her memories of this place. Just as I had post-traumatic stress issues with bad ice and fear of falling through ice, Anne had similar reactions to the Burn. 

She eventually resolved to contact her husband, and enlisted Beat to help her figure out how to do so on her device. After five minutes of standing still in temperatures that were now five below zero, my feet were ice blocks and I announced that I had to keep moving. I was the slow one so I knew they’d catch me soon. I marched into the darkness, surrounded by a forest of nearly identical spruce trees. This entire region burned to ash in the late 70s, and the new generation of trees are all roughly the same age and the same size. The spruce growth is so thick that you couldn’t bust through the forest if you tried, not without a chainsaw. Here the Iditarod Trail is only as wide as a single snowmobile, slicing through walls of twisted branches and frost-coated needles. It has a spooky atmosphere, like merging a haunted mansion with a Christmas tree farm. I find this weirdly comforting. 

Beat and Anne didn’t catch me for a while, and it was strange to be alone out there — and invigorating. I relished the solitude, the cold air and the silence. I’ve been terrorized by the Burn myself; I was caught in that same flash-freezing windstorm of 2008, eight hours earlier than Anne. I still remember hearing thunderous roars and looking up to see a wall of white rushing toward me like a freight train. All I could do was step off my bike, crouch down with my hands over my face, and hope the hurricane-force blast and accompanying ground blizzard went away before I flash froze. I know the Burn. And yet, I secretly love the Burn. 

Maybe it’s the endearingly ragged little Christmas trees, or my fascination with wide-open spaces, but I feel genuine affection for this strange place where I would never want to live. The Farewell Burn is the closest I have felt to visiting another planet. It’s the bald face of nature’s indifference — an expansive, frozen wasteland. From a small rise, one can look across the Farewell Burn and see the blinking light of the McGrath airport some eighty miles distant, knowing all the land between is untrammeled and unwanted. Nikolai is a little spur off to the east, but look west and there’s nothing but a land so distant and so hostile that a world of seven billion humans left it almost entirely alone. I find that captivating. 

Anne and Beat caught up shortly before the turnoff to the Bear Creek Cabin, a public-use cabin that the BLM put up as an emergency shelter. Anne planned to wait there for help. I was still a little confused by her decision, as it seemed to me that limping her sled to McGrath on this now-smooth trail was plausible. She might not be able to go to Nome, but she had a good shot at finishing the 350-mile sprint distance. Anne had her reasons and I didn’t question her decision. It was hers to make. 

Rick, Tim, and Loreen were bivied at the trail intersection of Bear Creek Cabin — which is a mile off the main trail. Beat and I were also in the throes of sleepwalking. Eleven p.m. was far too early of a wake-up and we wanted another nap, but decided to push on for a couple more hours. A little while later, Steve caught up to us. He had spent the night in the cabin after a long nonstop push of more than fifty miles. Steve has a climber’s build and a good amount of upper-body muscle mass. He didn’t seem all too perturbed by the trail conditions that had wrung out the upper-reaches of my strength and patience. Steve was in an upbeat mood and glad that there were “only” about 25 more miles to Nikolai.

“Only?” I responded. “Twenty-five miles is a long way.” I suppose eventually context starts to kick in, but I was not ready to pretend we were nearly done with this section. Twenty-five miles still meant half of a day of hard travel. 

Just as glimmers of dawn light appeared on the southern horizon, we found a clearing on the hard crust. Steve moved on, and Beat and I set up our bivies just a few feet from the trail, knowing no one was traveling this way anytime soon. 

The lower half of my sleeping bag was frosty and rigid, confirming that there was still quite a lot of ice clumped in the down insulation. The down booties were basically ice blocks; I don’t know why I even bothered to put them on, but I think I held onto hope that my heatless feet would somehow dry them out. By now temperatures were nearing 10 below, which is low enough that I couldn’t unpack all of my camp stuff before my fingers locked up, and had to pull on vapor barrier mittens. I was again nervous about attempting a stop with my compromised gear, but knew that the worst that could happen is waking up with painful feet and having to move on before our planned wake-up, which was only ninety minutes away anyway. 

Sleep was becoming this ethereal presence that always lingered at the periphery of consciousness, and unconsciousness was absolute and binding. This is why it’s so intimidating to submit to sleep when exhausted in a subzero wilderness, because on some level it's difficult to trust that your body can and will wake itself up if things start to go terribly wrong, like frostbite. I closed my eyes and opened them again in a seeming instant, only to learn the ninety minutes had indeed gone by. The sun had come up during that ninety-minute moment, casting its pink glow across the Burn. Tim, Loreen and Rick passed again as we packed up. I stood on the crust in my ice booties and stretched out my arms. 

“Have a nice sleep?” Tim asked.

“It’s a beautiful morning for sleeping,” I proclaimed. I wished I could do a lot more of it. 

But, on some level, one needs to find a balance that isn’t entirely comfortable. Too much rest could cause the body to sink into recovery mode, accelerating tissue repairs and releasing hormones that can open a floodgate of soreness and pain. By sustaining momentum, the body takes signals to maintain the status quo and patch things up as best as it can without putting up the scaffolding that can lead to weeks of recovery. It’s my strong belief that human bodies are built for higher levels of endurance, and instinctively do what needs to be done to sustain forward progress as long as required. It’s true that longer periods of rest and rebuilding will eventually become necessary to return to full strength, but a subzero wilderness is not the place to lapse into this process.

Still, I was really beginning to “feel it,” and had specific and constant complaints from my lower back, hamstrings, and now my shins had joined the chorus. My feet, which I knew would be an bother from the first day and accepted that, were indeed throbbing and sore from 275 miles of pounding. But what was more disconcerting about my feet is that they were now always cold. I wedged them into my solid-ice shoes and ran a short distance before slowing to a forceful walk. They didn’t even begin to warm up; it was a searing kind of cold, but I knew as long as toes hurt, they weren’t frozen. It was just another thing I would have to endure. 

The day warmed but not too much, which was a relief — not so much for my feet, but for the agony of The Wallow. We were moving relatively well again on the hard surface of a strip of snow that still clung to the trail, and the glare ice of wind-scoured swamps. Beat was setting a blistering pace. Even with a heavy sled he’s a strong walker, with a stride that’s difficult to match. As we gradually descended the wide-ranging river valley, the haunted Christmas tree forest thinned and the swamps expanded. I’d watch Beat surge ahead as I faded farther and farther back, until he was nearly gone from my sight. Then I’d pick up my frigid feet and sore shins and start running. Once I caught up and returned to walking, I’d fade farther and farther back until I repeated the process. Running was somewhere at the edge of my physical limits; every footfall hurt something fierce and striving yanked the drain from my already low energy reserves. At one point, I complained to Beat about feeling lousy and he responded, “Well, you’re moving really well today.”

“Haven’t you noticed I’ve been running to keep up with you?” I asked. “It’s not easy.”

Still, with this pace, we managed to catch back up with Tim, Loreen, and Rick. The five of us moved together through the birch forests, laughing and chatting much the same way we had on the second day. We stopped for a twenty-minute break to melt snow, and I enjoyed the last of my Mountain House meals. The Petruskas — a wonderful Athabaskan family from Nikolai who host Iditarod Trail Invitational racers — passed on snowmobiles while the four of us were plopped down on the side of the trail. Tim was cooking freeze-dried meals and I was wearing booties (I was still making futile attempts to dry my feet when I stopped.) The three Petruskas — Stephanie, her husband, and the family patriarch Nick — looked at us bemusedly while we chatted about weather and trails. They’d received a call from Anne's husband and were headed out to Bear Creek to pick her up. 

“It’s sixteen more miles,” Nick said, with a tone that made it seem as though he expected to meet us there in an hour or two. Tim was incredulous that it was still that far, but even he knew we hadn’t passed Salmon Camp — which was twelve miles out — so I wasn’t sure what he expected to hear. Still, Salmon Camp came after not too long. The tiny log cabin and fish racks were still there, but I was shocked at how much they had deteriorated in six years. When I was last here, I badly wanted to take refuge from the wind and melt some snow, but the cabin door was frozen shut and there was no way to go inside. Now the roof was collapsed and the walls were barely standing — just a pile of logs that wouldn’t provide shelter from anything. A lot can happen in six years. 

We remained with the Pennsylvanians for the rest of the march into Nikolai. I was lost in a daze, gazing up at the sky and the tops of trees that grew taller as we plodded our return to the Kuskokwim River. In forty hours we had traveled eighty miles, but on that ethereal edge of sleep I could feel and almost believe that millennia had passed. It was a long, long way.

Iditarod Again, part seven

Everything — duffle, shoes, sleeping bag, sled, harness and feedbag, everything — was either damp or soaked and smeared with mud. Tim, Loreen, Rick, Steve, and Anne had hauled out earlier, but it was still early. Maybe 4 a.m.? My mind was cloudy; the line between sleep and awake was increasingly more blurred. Beat and I procrastinated the inevitable while chatting with Rob, downing more Hot Tang, and rifling through my resupply bag that the race organizer had flown in a week earlier. I pictured the sponge-like surface outside and didn’t want to add any weight to my sled. Maybe I could just leave everything behind. That would be amazing — I could run free, like a rabbit across the snowless expanse, needing no warm gear or food because I’d be so light and fast that nothing could touch me. 

Everything in my food bag looked disgusting. Rob pointed out the pile left behind by the blazing-fast bikers. It was an enormous treasure trove — a fifty-gallon bin overflowing with any kind of energy food you could imagine: salami, Clif Bars, potato chips, Endurolytes, candy bars with Italian packaging, and some Scandinavian-looking cookies that I mulled for a minute before throwing them back in the bin. My brain was overloaded with choices but it all looked nauseating, and I didn’t want to carry any of it. My throat was raw from hard breathing dry, cold air, the roof of my mouth was scratched, and a metallic taste lingered on my tongue from gnawing on dense morsels of food until it bled. All of that, plus four days of hard effort, had eviscerated my appetite. Eating was the worst chore out there; it was worse than walking. I enjoyed my Mountain House Chicken and Noodle meals because they were warm, soft, and relatively tasteless, but everything else was crap. I didn’t even fantasize about food — real food — because I was so repulsed by the thought of eating. I rejected everything in those bins and only packed about half of my resupply; it was still more than I took from Finger Lake, and I didn’t even finish that. Ten portioned bags of food in total. It was about 10,000 calories. Seems like a lot, but we still had 130 hard miles in front of us, and only one meal remaining in the race-provided provisions. The math eluded me. 

We squished through the mud along a narrow trail that cut through the woods toward the confluence of the Tatina and the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River. It looked like an ATV trail; there were even ruts where snowmobile tracks dug into the soft dirt. Just before the river we encountered Anne, walking in the opposite direction. She explained that she couldn’t find the trail despite wandering along the shoreline for more than an hour, and was returning to Rohn and wait for daylight. I had a vague memory of riding across glare ice and gravel bars for about two miles before cutting to the left into the woods, but Anne had been here more times than me. There was always the navigational possibility of staying on the river all the way to the Post River confluence, but Anne said there was a torrent of overflow and she wanted to get off the river ice as soon as possible. I did, too. We convinced her to stick with us and we’d look for the trail together.

(Edit: Beat asked Steve about this, and apparently he was with us when we left Rohn, and also while we were on the Kuskokwim River. With apologies to Steve, for whatever reasons my memory has completely erased his presence during this time. It is an imperfect form of storytelling, trying to piece together events from memory.)

The Kuskokwim was a nightmare; there was an inch of flowing water over the ice, which snapped and moaned loudly enough to reverberate through the deadly quiet air. We could hear water gushing beneath the ice, and black holes revealed open leads near the center of braided river channels, which were already narrow to begin with.

It’s possible that some of the water evaporated from my shoes while they hung over the stove in Rob’s tent overnight, but it wasn’t going to matter and I didn’t care as I sloshed through the stream, reeling into the depths of ice phobia. Anne was stressed and her demeanor wasn’t helping, and Beat was struggling with his 75-pound sled and the more limited traction of his studded shoes. We’d scan the maze of gravel bars and alder islands, arguing like children in a playground. 

“This is the way. I see an IronDog marking,” I’d demand. 

“Those aren’t this year’s. They’re last year’s,” Anne would retort. “See, the color of the tape is wrong.” 

Occasionally we’d come across wooden stakes that had definitely been placed by the IronDog Snowmachine Race a few weeks earlier. The disintegration of the snow and fast-flowing overflow had taken most of them away, but there were still occasionally strings of reflective tape tied to branches, or the occasional hardy stake stabbed into the ice. Anne was right that some were years old, but I figured anything would keep us on the right track of this half-mile-wide river and eventually take us to the needle in the haystack that was the Iditarod Trail cutting back into the woods.

I scanned the beam of my headlamp across the river, back and forth multiple times, until I caught a glimmer of something that was far away. 

“There! Over there!” I announced, and started marching. Anne didn’t believe me and hung back. Beat was somewhere farther back, although I did not realize that at the time. I thought he was right behind us. I thought they were both following me. I marched single-mindedly toward the bright light, not looking at where I was putting my feet, whether it was on a gravel bar or a clump of grass or a shin-deep lead of overflow. I didn’t look back, either, terrified that if I moved my head at all, I would lose track of the distant sparkle and never find it again. About five minutes later I reached the wooden lath, where my headlamp had already caught the sparkle of another distant reflector. I marched harder. The growing terror of bad ice quieted and I moved in a peaceful transfixation toward these glimmers of reflected light, one after the other, until I reached an opening that was clearly a trail veering into the woods. Finally free to move my head, I looked back and saw no sign of Beat or Anne. Not even their headlamps.

Great. I took my own headlamp off and held it up, swinging the beam back and forth toward the darkness. After five or maybe even ten more minutes, there were still no lights approaching. I felt strongly I should go back, but my phobia wouldn’t let me take a single step back onto the river. When I looked down I could see ankle-deep water flowing over impossibly black ice, cracked like an ancient mirror. I hemmed and paced on the shoreline like a frightened dog, until finally I saw movement, and waved my light faster. Beat was very angry with me. About as angry as I’ve ever seen him. He’d been scouting a different braid in the river, and didn’t see me surge ahead. By the time he came back around, Anne was walking toward him, and I was gone. 

“All those times I waited for you, why couldn’t you wait for me?” he spat. He wasn’t angry that he had been left alone — he spends a lot of time alone in Alaskan wilderness, and this doesn’t bother him. He was angry at my act of abandoning him. This anger was justified, and I knew it. My actions hadn’t been intentional or malicious. Still, I believed the state of the river ice was volatile and dangerous, and it was inexcusable that I deserted the people I’d intentionally teamed up with. 

“I thought you were right there. Really, I did. I couldn’t look back because I didn’t want to lose sight of the reflectors.”

Behind the dark shadows of his headlamp I could see the anger flaring in Beat’s eyes and had to look away. My own emotions surged to the surface and I was filled with acrimony … not at Beat, but at everything surrounding us. God, this was hard. It was ever harder with other people. 

It’s a unique experience, taking on an effort like this with one’s partner. Humans stretched to the limits of their physical and emotional capacity can be exceptionally selfish, or exceptionally compassionate. Survival mode dictates the first — it’s why mountaineers can walk past a fellow climber dying on a slope. The depth of one’s sense of humanity often determines the second — and is why some climbers will attend to a dying person they barely know at the risk of both their lives. In harsh environments or dangerous situations, people often team up in groups to leverage both tendencies and maximize the chance of everyone’s survival. Of course intensive physical challenges do not have the same immediacy as survival situations, but they do generate similar emotions. There may not be pressing dangers, but stress, fear, and fatigue still gravitate toward extremes, and this can become especially volatile between two people who already share a deep emotional connection. Beat was hurt by my selfish dash off the river, and I also was shaken by the duty I didn’t act upon, both because of fear. I come to these places, to the Iditarod Trail, to face my fears, to capture anxieties that trickle into all parts of my life, and prove that fear does not control me. But it’s not a clean battle; the process is messy and it hurts when someone you love is caught in the crossfire. 

We turned away in silence, and Beat surged ahead into the woods. My sled scraped along the trail with terrible grinding noises, pulling miserably at my shoulders and lower back. It felt like there was a giant hook dragging through the dirt, and all of my strength was only just enough to battle forward. 

To his credit, for as irked as he was about me leaving him, Beat did wait while I struggled. Anne also stuck close by as we trudged up and down the steep rolling hills along the river. “This is not fun,” she said repeatedly.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

After two hours, we had traveled all of four miles from Rohn when we encountered Bill Merchant, the elusive co-race-director of the Iditarod Trail Invitational. Bill does the trail-breaking for this race, driving his snowmobile all the way from Knik to Nikolai, then back. Most racers meet Bill for the first time on his return trip, clad in a billowing down coat (at the time, it was zipped open to vent heat), a tattered ski cap, and a mischievous smile underneath a handlebar mustache. These encounters usually happen somewhere along this bewildering expanse beyond the Alaska Range, often in the dark, and Bill wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bill greeted us by regaling us with an in-depth description of his awful night, most of which I do not remember, but now it was 6 a.m. and he was limping his battered machine into Rohn.

“I wish I had a four-wheeler instead of a snowmachine,” he said. 

“How bad is it?” Anne asked.

Bill’s mischievous smile appeared again. “It’s bad. But it gets better. There’s about twenty-five miles of rough trail. Then there’s a little bit of snow, all the way into Nikolai. Course, if it stays warm …”

Bill shrugged, bid us good luck, and with that he was gone. A ghost in the night. 

It’s one thing to drag a sled over frozen bare ground. Ice crystals coat the dirt; even though it’s a rough ride, there’s at least a small amount of glide. But on thawed, wet dirt — mud — laced with roots, wet rocks, and clumps of slippery grass … I might as well have been chained to an anvil for how I helpless I felt. I leaned so far forward that my lower back began to ache, and still my hamstrings and glutes quivered as I trudged step by painfully slow step. Anne had done a lot of dirt-based sled training in the hills behind her Anchorage home during the dry winter (“I destroyed three sleds this winter,” she boasted. “They were completely shredded.) She was also faring better than me, and despite her desire to not be alone through this section, eventually marched out of sight. 

“Why didn’t I drag a sled around on dirt in California?” I wondered to myself. “Or better yet, brought my cart to Alaska? Damn, this would be so much easier with wheels.” 

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

As dawn broke, we began to see the depths of this winterless wonderland. Charred spruce trunks — remnants of “The New Burn” that flared along the shore of the South Fork a few years earlier — stuck out of the brown earth as far as we could see in all directions. The 5,000-foot peaks surrounding us were utterly stripped of snow. There were streaks of white, hidden in couloirs, but the extent of brownness was boggling. 

We dropped onto the gravel bars surrounding the Post River — a mile-wide crossing of baseball-sized cobbles strewn with a spiny carpet of driftwood. The sled scraped and groaned miserably, and I thought for sure it was coming apart, but Beat assured me that the material was strong enough to handle sticks and rocks. I clearly wasn’t strong enough, however, as I leaned and yanked and made my own miserable groans. Sometimes I came to a string of logs that I couldn’t see a way around, so I unhooked my harness and hoisted the sled over the obstacles by hand. I had been mulling over ways to carry the sled on my back, but this hoisting confirmed that the load was too unstructured, awkward, and heavy to achieve this with makeshift straps, at least for any significant distance. 

The Post River itself was glare ice, and not wet and cracked like the Kuskokwim. It was nice ice. We only had to cross it, but for a hundred yards the sled became weightless, gliding effortlessly over the smooth surface. The effect was so startling that I continued looking back to make sure the sled was still attached. 

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

The Post River “Glacier” is an infamous obstacle on the Iditarod Trail. Although just a tiny tributary of the Kuskokwim that parallels the Post River, it freezes into a steep, five-hundred-foot waterfall of ice that must be scaled. It’s possible, but not easy, to bypass the waterfall along the cliffy walls lining the shore. The ice is steeper than it looks in photos, and if you lose your grip even for a millisecond, there’s no way to arrest a fall. Since I had microspikes, I opted to march straight up the ice. Beat just had carbide studs, so he strapped on his snowshoes and hoped their dull teeth would dig in. At this point, even a near-vertical ice fall was better than dirt. 

Beyond the Post River, the Iditarod Trail climbs onto a higher plateau beside an outlying peak known as Egypt Mountain. The immensity of this place is difficult to express. It’s just “out there” in every sense of the phrase — a place beyond what lies beyond. We crossed long swamps with no hints of a trail, walking overland while skirting aquamarine puddles of ice that were rapidly thawing in the rich morning light. The swamps were carpeted in tundra grass and lined with barren birch trees, and the low-angle sun gave turned everything a reddish tint of gold. Even as my body slumped hatefully in front of its anchor, my mind was mesmerized by the strangeness of this place. 

“It’s so surreal,” I said to Beat. “I said this about the Dazell Gorge, but I take it back. This is the most surreal place I’ve ever been.” 

I slipped further into its spell, becoming more convinced of time warps. That it wasn’t just May or June of 2014, no, because spring brings hints of green. It was too quiet and odd to be the near future. No, this place was deep in the past, a desertification of tundra before the Ice Age. I looked around and expected to see mastodons; and there was a glimmer of seriousness in this expectation. Bison tracks were pressed deep into the mud. I saw canine tracks too … there certainly weren’t any dog sleds out anytime recently, so they were probably wolf. There were times that Beat disappeared from sight in the birch forests, and I would think, “Well, this is it. I’m the last person on Earth.” 

Photo by Beat Jegerlhener

As the day warmed up, we stopped to remove layers and string our wet socks across the top of our sleds, on the off-chance they could dry in the sun. I had four pairs of sopping socks and draped each one of them over the duffel, along with a hat, held down by bungees, which made my already hateful sled look like a hillbilly junk cart. Neither of us had sunscreen, but I had a wind-protection face stick, and slathered it all over my face, neck, and arms. “Welcome to the brave new world of climate change,” I said. 

The swamp ice broke apart, and we had no choice but to slosh through puddles. As we dropped off of Egypt Mountain, there were more streams to cross — increasingly, these streams were free-flowing, although at least not deep because it was still water flowing over ice. Still, it appeared that, even outside my time warp fantasies, spring break-up was actually happening, rapidly. I tried very hard not to fixate on my ice phobias. But beyond these anxieties, there were only the thoughts about sharp pain in my lower back and hamstrings, and the fatigue, and the lurching frustration of pulling a semi trailer across swamps at a blistering pace of 1.8 miles per hour (which I could track on my Garmin eTrex, and it was driving me mad.) 

And then there was the coming of night to think about — the fact that nearly everything inside my sled was wet if not soaked, my shoes were wet, and eventually we were going to decide to camp on this wet tundra somewhere down the trail. It wasn’t clear whether we’d ever find snow, which is what we needed to make drinking water. We could boil stream water if necessary, but past the Farewell Lakes was increasingly drier country, so we had to decide whether to stop and boil water now, while we could. And then there were the Farewell Lakes. We’d have to cross them. What were those like? What condition was that ice in? 

Quiet panics began to tremble in my chest, and I was losing the energy to battle them. My iPod had been playing dull, depressing music since I turned it on — because all music sounded that way at that point — but then Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” clicked onto the Shuffle. It was something, and I needed anything — anything to lure my head away from this downward spiral of melancholy. I latched onto the rhythm as a way to time my steps, prompting me to march harder as I sang loudly, “I gotta feeling … that tonight’s gonna be a good night … that tonight’s gonna be a good good night.” 

“And how many people can say that about sleeping in the mud with wet feet and no drinking water?” I thought. And it’s probably going to be 15 below by morning, I bet it is. Wouldn’t be right if it wasn’t.” I laughed out loud, put the Shuffle on repeat, and kept marching to the same energetic beat. It was surprisingly calming. The Zen of resignation. 

As we dropped off the final pitch of the plateau, we neared a large tributary of the Kuskokwim. From above, it looked like a churning whitewater river. When we reached the shoreline, I realized the whitewater was just chunks of ice floating in the current, but the current was swift. The closest bank on the other side of open water was at least 500 feet across the river, and it was impossible to determine how deep these leads were. My quiet panics became louder. “I don’t know about this. I’m not entirely sure I can do this,” I gasped at Beat. 

He assured me we’d be okay. We both put on our hip waders even though both of our shoes were soaked, and Beat waded in first. At one point I could see the ice water flowing well above his knees, but he didn’t crash through any surface ice, so that was a positive thing. I ventured into the water; it was flowing over a layer of smooth ice, creating treacherously slippery conditions. The swift current pulled at my ankles as I scooted along in the hip waders, which had zero traction of their own. As I waded into the thigh-deep section, I turned around to check on my sled. There was no way I could carry it and keep my balance, so I let it drag behind and hoped for the best, knowing Beat had done the same. It bobbed along like a pool toy, floating happily, but I could see water streaming beneath the duffel. I’d reinforced my gear with water-resistant coverings, but it wasn’t full-submersion waterproof. Whatever wasn’t wet before definitely was now, I thought. My next thoughts were just an unbroken stream of silent swearing as I scooted the rest of the way across the river. 

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

On the other side of the river, we crossed through a bison bedding area. The swath of soft mud looked like a cattle loading zone, like some sad trampled piece of land behind a barb-wire fence in Wyoming, and it was again surreal to remember where we actually were. The paddies of mud were so torn up that we couldn’t even begin to discern a trail, and since it was daytime, reflective markers weren’t easy to find. We picked our way along perimeters of the meadow, looking for diamond-shaped trail markings on trees. 

Somewhere just beyond this, we located the trail cutting back into the forest. It rolled through the birch forest beside the Kuskokwim, rippled with increasingly larger roots. My sled caught these roots every time, yanking me backward and jerking my already sore back to the point of involuntary screaming. It wasn’t long before I got snagged in one too many roots, and lost it. The long-simmering caldron of frustration and pain and fear and doubt boiled over, sending the entire landscape into a tailspin and filling my ears with deafening white noise. This was a thing that couldn’t be done. Not by me. I wasn’t strong enough. And the now-broken ice of the Farewell Lakes was waiting to swallow my broken body whole. 

Seconds, maybe minutes, were filled by only this silent screaming. Perhaps more time went by, because Beat came back to look for me. The sight of him walking backward on the trail broke the last layer of my flimsy shell apart. I melted down before he even had a chance to ask how I was doing. 

There was blubbering and sobbing, and I could’t even get a word through this mess, even as both Beat and my rational self assured me this was not so bad. Finally I was able to blurt out, “I’m … sorry. I … actually don’t … even know … why … I’m so upset.” 

Once I got my breathing back to a manageable level, we pulled forward once again. “It’s really okay if we do the whole Farewell Burn at two miles an hour,” Beat said. “It will take as long as it takes. It’s fine.”

“I know,” I said. “I just had a moment back there. I’m okay now.”

But there was still a lot of dirt … and the Farewell Lakes … left to cross.

Iditarod Again, part six

Sprinkles continued to fall as our oversized group emerged from the little cabin at Rainy Pass Lodge a few hours before dawn. The intensity of the rain had diminished, but we had no forecast to guess at whether the storm would pick back up, or turn to snow, or clear out and drag subzero temperatures back into the region. No forecast meant no plan. But we'd do what we came here to do, which is walk from one side of the Alaska Range to the other, and hope for the best. 

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Unlike some of the others in our crowded cabin, I neglected to bring my duffel inside. I'd rescued the sleeping bag, clothing, and food, but inside the duffel was an inch of standing water and several items I'd neglected to bring inside and regretted this — waders, stove, a baggie of used socks, my bag of spare mittens, buff, and hat (whoops! But luckily the silnylon sack seemed to keep those things merely damp) and a few other miscellaneous items that had now doubled in weight and diminished in usefulness. I also noticed Beat kept his sled with its built-in bivy out in the rain. He'd designed and built his own five-foot hmw-polyethylene sled with a small frame at the head, and a piece of plastic at the end to roll out to six-foot length. He then glued a silnylon shell over the top of the sled to serve as a shelter — not only would it protect his gear, but he could sleep inside. It was a fine idea in theory, but in practice the system proved to be a nuisance, as the material was loose and flapped around, it added another layer of difficulty to gear access, and he was not so stoked on sleeping inside. Beat likes to tinker with new ideas; sometimes they work for him, and sometimes they do not. But he seems to enjoy the process, even when it occasionally produces less-than-workable results. I wondered how everyone else's stuff had fared as I dumped a gush of water out of my duffel and sled. It felt particularly unfair that we had to do this. 

 At least we had enjoyed a long rest — nearly eight hours of down time in the cabin that for me included about three and a half hours of real sleep, broken up by three rain-soaked dashes to the outhouse (my kidneys seem to go into overdrive later in these long efforts, and I need to pee constantly.) But unlike the previous morning I was alert and reasonably energetic, marching up the ramp-like rise of the Ptarmigan Valley in the pre-dawn darkness. It was still too cloudy for stars, but as my eyes adjusted, silhouettes of surrounding mountains revealed the ceiling had lifted.

It was a warm, calm morning, and as daylight appeared we could see clearings to the south that appeared to be expanding. My hamstrings burned and my shoulders ached sharply, which was not unexpected for having dragged more than a third of my body weight 165 miles in three and a half days. But all in all it was a fine day for walking, and I felt pretty good. Vigilance for re-lubing and changing socks had kept my feet in good shape despite the oversized shoes, and the muscles that I'd specifically trained — such as quads and calves — felt reasonably strong despite the beating they'd taken the previous day. One of Tim's favorite pieces of advice is to not worry about early aches and pains — that your body eventually adjusts and you get stronger as you go. "The first week is always the worst," he reiterates. I only had one week of Iditarod to endure, and I certainly could not say I felt stronger than I had on the first day — but I didn't necessarily feel a whole lot weaker, either.

With everyone feeling well-rested and enjoying the warm-yet-not-rainy morning, the initial miles were relaxing and playful. This little vole popped out of the snow and dashed under Tim's sled, then tried to climb up his leg, wavering between the sled and leg while refusing to be chased away by any of us. We joked that Tim had a new pet to take with him to Nome. The vole was actually one of the few wild animals we spotted during the trip. Interior Alaska is not the Serengeti; it's hungry country and most animals are wildly dispersed. Since there are so few humans in this region, it's easy for wild animals to avoid the corridors that humans frequent, and they do — unless they have something to gain from humans, like the ravens and crows. If you want to see wild animals in Alaska, take a bus tour through Denali National Park. A thousand miles on the Iditarod Trail in the winter might get you a few moose, the hardier birds of Alaska, rodents, fox, and maybe even a possibly-real-but-most-likely-hallucinated lynx sighting.

I took many dozens of photographs. Ptarmigan Valley can be an extraordinarily mean place, with white-out blizzards, gale-force gusts, and windchills approaching 70 below. During the 2006 Iditarod Trail Invitational, a storm rushed in after the initial wave of lead cyclists, forcing everyone else in the race back. Most of the mid-pack didn't make it through, and my favorite story from this year came from my friend Brij, who stuffed socks in his hat to prevent his ears from freezing as he made three attempts into the white-out, turning around in fear of his life each time. Tim has his own collection of harrowing Rainy Pass stories, and he was the only one who actually burst through that storm in 2006. In 2008, I experienced what I was told was a "nice" day on Rainy Pass, with face-biting winds and nighttime temperatures that dipped beneath my thermometer's limit of 20 below.

 This day was just ... pleasant. Temperatures in the thirties. No wind. It was surreal.

 Then the clouds began to clear, removing any remaining immediate threats of storms.

 We stayed in a fairly tight group with Tim and Loreen, and occasionally Rick and Steve, depending on whether Loreen or Rick stopped to nap (both seemed capable of catching short snoozes on top of their sleds without freezing their feet, which I envied), or the rest of us stopped to snack or fuss over our feet. It was such a luxury, being able to stop and rest and take in the scenery. I could hardly believe our luck.

 The trail veered away from the valley and began to follow Pass Creek up the steep pitches toward Rainy Pass. My fear meter spiked here, as the trail flows through a narrow gully that creates the perfect terrain trap for avalanches. The surrounding slopes appeared to be classic high-risk angles, and the recent rain made it seem likely that there was a heavy layer of saturated snow sitting right on top of sugary fluff. "If I were hiking alone in Juneau, I would probably not go here," I thought. But there was no wind, and the odds of quiet walkers triggering an avalanche from below seemed slim. I marched hard to stick close to the group, clinging to the false security of strength in numbers.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

As sunlight spread across the canyon, the heat began cranking. Beat announced it was 40 degrees as he and Steve stopped to roll up their tights and remove vests, hats, and gloves. The trail surface was well-set, but snow was noticeably softening up in this spring-like thaw.

 We crossed Rainy Pass Lake, where Tim pointed out a private cabin that he'd happened upon years earlier in a white-out. This cabin was explicitly off-limits to travelers, and looked half dilapidated anyway. With sweat pouring down my forehead and neck, it was becoming increasingly more difficult to imagine any scenario where shelter would be desired in this place. The frantic chill on the Yentna River three days earlier was all but forgotten.

 The temperature kept climbing. As we closed in on the pass, Beat announced it was 48 degrees. This was reasonably alarming. Thaws have the power to disrupt everything that holds winter travel together — ice breaks apart, waterways open, snow becomes unmanageably soft, swamps flood. I was not exactly thrilled to be overheating and drenched in sweat on this day.

Still, Rainy Pass is an stunning setting, a corridor of open valleys and snow-swept mountains more than a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest road. It's a stark place that not only feels, but actually is far away from the hum of modern life. Hot air and glaring sunshine only added to the surreality of the place. The surface crust was smooth and icy, and we could walk anywhere we wanted along the slope — gazing up at the white-washed peaks towering over us. I walked in a happy trance until one leg broke through the crust to sugar snow, up to thigh level. I was at least wearing gaiters to protect my shins from ice shards. But it was clear the surface snow was breaking apart. It could only be the beginning. The beginning of The Wallow.

As nervous as I already was about the prospect of bad snow and ice, I couldn't get over how weird this all felt — this was the big, bad Iditarod Trail across Alaska, and I was taking it on with just my two feet and a sled. Right now, though, it felt as though I was out on a fun day hike with my friends, in a summery month like June. With temperatures near fifty degrees, it could just as well have been June. At 3,400 feet elevation, Rainy Pass is a rare low divide in the towering Alaska Range, but it's still a divide. We were crossing over a mountain range so large that it creates an almost impenetrable weather wall between Alaska's coastal climates and the frigid Interior. And it wasn't June; it was February. These conditions couldn't be real. We posed for pictures, laughed, told stories about things that were far away from here because we were all relaxed enough to let our minds wander. A breeze kicked up at the pass, cooling my overheated skin.

 It was a little too windy at the pass to linger before the chill kicked in, so we descended a few hundred feet to the cusp of treeline for a proper lunch break. We rolled out our sleeping pads and sat down with Tim and Loreen. Beat broke out one of his gallon-sized Ziploc bags of peanut butter, and complained that this caloric fuel source was not as tasty when temperatures were above freezing. When frozen, peanut butter develops a fudge-like consistency that's quite satisfying. Above freezing but still chilled, it's just stick-to-the-roof-of-your mouth gooey, and you can only choke a few bites down at a time. I took advantage of the stop to take off my gaiters, shoes, and socks, and dry my feet out properly.

 Beat offered to let me use his satellite phone to call my parents. It seemed like a fun milestone to mark with a phone call — "Hey, Ma, I'm at the crest of the Alaska Range!" My folks were surprised and thrilled to hear from me. We chatted for a few expensive minutes and I told them how great things were going, how much fun we were having, and how incredibly different this experience had been compared to my last trip on the Iditarod Trail. When I looked down the canyon, I could pinpoint what I believed to be almost the exact spot where I stopped to bivy in 2008. At the time it was well after midnight, I was all alone, a harsh wind whipped down the canyon, and temperatures had plummeted to twenty below. I was so shattered, and so unfamiliar with that depth of cold and fatigue, that when I closed my eyes for what I believed to be imperative sleep, I felt strongly uncertain about whether I'd ever wake up.

Now, six years later on the thawing bed of Pass Fork, noon temperatures soared into the high forties, and I was surging with optimism, surrounded by friends, and drying my bare feet in the sun. I've said this before, but it was surreal.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Then it started to fall apart. Literally. As in, "the trail started to fall apart." We ran the first mile of the steep descent off Rainy Pass, but only descended perhaps 500 feet before the thin layer of snow deteriorated into puffs of sugar. These gritty, unconsolidated pillows filled in the spaces between tussocks and alder branches, but it wasn't solid enough to hold our weight. So every step would sink all the way to the ground below — sometimes to our shins, sometimes to our knees. It was impossible to know until our feet hit the frozen ground, twisting ankles and wrenching knees along the way.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

We had to don snowshoes to battle the ankle-twisting holes. The snowshoes also sank into the sugar snow, and frequently got caught on grass clumps and alder branches. Often I had to reach down with my fingers to wrestle the snowshoe free from the latest plant trap. The sled dragged and caught branches just as badly, until I had to work considerably harder, and at a much slower pace, to descend Rainy Pass than I had climbing it. It was maddening. Humorously maddening.

 Tim, as usual, kept an unwaveringly sunny disposition. As I struggled to catch up with Beat, Tim would walk with me, because he was waiting for Loreen, who was somewhere farther back. Occasionally he would flip his sled all the way around (his flexible PVC poles allowed him to do this without diving into alder thickets) and walk back to find Loreen. Then I'd see him again twenty or thirty minutes later, chatting away, in some kind of inexplicably fantastic mood. "This is really hard work," I said, and Tim agreed. He loved it.

 I wrestled alders, scratched my hands, ripped a hole in my shirt, and did some silent gnashing of teeth. But in the end I had to take Tim's words to heart — "what can you do about it?" — and embrace the Zen of resignation. The sugar layer only grew thinner as we descended, until it was scarcely a dusting on top of the fortunately-still-frozen surface of Pass Fork.

 After descending a thousand grueling feet from Rainy Pass, we dropped into the Dalzell Gorge, where the torrent of Dalzell Creek rages down the canyon as waterfalls tumble over sheer walls — whitewater that's frozen in time during the winter. Having been here before, what we saw this year was almost unfathomable. The snow was gone. Even the ice had been stripped to a minimum. My fatigued mind juggled impossible possibilities — like maybe we had warped through time to a distant summer month. A surging Dalzell Creek gushed beneath open leads and layers of thin ice, and the sheer canyon walls ensured there was no way around these brittle bridges.


Picking our way across wet, glare ice with sleds that did whatever the hell they wanted was a formidable task. I was glad to have microspikes. Beat had custom machined carbide studs in his shoes, but they didn't quite cut it, and he had to grab branches to keep from slipping onto the thin ice over the creek's center. Even the mircospikes slipped out on occasional exposed rocks, and all the while Dalzell Creek continued to rage beneath our feet. I could hear water gushing; it was driving me mad. Later we learned Rick broke through the ice in this section, up to his knees in creek water. I skirted around leads that were definitely deep enough and flowing fast enough to suck a person under the ice, never to be seen again. Already pronounced phobias of bad ice did not help me keep my cool in the Dazell Gorge. Sometimes, when Beat was farther ahead, I let a cathartic bout of hyperventilation release pent-up panics that threatened to shut down movement altogether.

 I breathed a sigh of relief when the Dalzell Gorge finally spit us out on the Tatina River, after what felt like endless bends in the increasingly narrower canyon. The Tatina valley is much wider, but after a half mile of skirting puddles and flowing streams of river water over the ice, open water became impossible to avoid. I tried my hardest but eventually plunged both shoes up to my ankles in puddles. I thought I should be really upset about this — wet shoes. The checkpoint at Rohn was only a wall tent with a tiny camp stove that does not generate enough dry heat to even begin to dry sopping wet shoes in the span of four or six hours. Beyond Rohn was the Farewell Burn, where an Interior cold snap could break this heat wave into splinters before we even had time to react. In all likelihood, I would have to deal with wet shoes for the next 150 miles, and I wanted to be really upset about it. But mostly, I was still happy that my body was not underneath the ice in the Dalzell Gorge.

A half hour after dark, we walked across the landing strip for the Iditarod checkpoint of Rohn — which is just a BLM public use cabin, a landing strip, and nothing else. The ground was utterly bare — not even wisps of snow to be seen — and the dirt was soft and wet. It felt like I was dragging my sled over a saturated sponge. My survival joy was wearing off, and I was back to being angry about bare ground and wet shoes, when Rob appeared out of the woods. He wrapped his big bear arms around my shoulders in a genuine hug, and offered a bratwurst that he was warming on a tiny grill out in front of his wall tent — Rob's Hilton.

Rob was a perennial volunteer for the Iditarod Trail Invitational since he raced the route on foot in 2003. He also was an avid outdoorsman and participant in the Alaska Wilderness Classic, a point-to-point overland race across a different mountain range every three years. Rob tragically died during the Wilderness Classic in August after his packraft flipped in the Tana River. He was a great guy and will be missed by all in this community, in particular those who benefited from his warmth and kindness in this far-away outpost.

It was Rob who transformed Rohn from a spartan wilderness encampment to a warm and inviting stop-over. He collected spruce bows from the woods to build up a thick mattress, stoked the tiny wood stove all night long, heated cans of soup and cups of Hot Tang, and apparently this year, cooked bratwursts! I devoured mine greedily as he teased me about forgetting my bike and asking me what I thought of the hiking adventure. I inquired about the state of the trail beyond Rohn, and Rob just shook his head.

"It's dirt," he said. "For at least twenty miles. There was a dusting of snow before but it's all gone now. It was fifty degrees here today."

I sighed with sincere defeat. "I guess now would be a good time for a backpack."

The crowd of our roving Iditarod party built up inside of Rob's wall tent, so I finished another delicious freeze-dried meal and ventured outside to set up my bivy in an empty snowmobile cargo sled. It was still hot outside, so I kept my fifty-below down sleeping bag open and slept on top of it, inside the bivy. It seemed like the moon was emerging, but I couldn't be too optimistic. And sure enough, about a half hour later, it started to rain.

As droplets pattered outside my bivy sack, I curled into a fetal position and mulled how I would address this. Should I just ignore it and hope it stops? Or ignore it had just not care how wet my sleeping bag gets? I came up with several more options that all began with "ignore it" before Rob shook my shoulder.

"Are you asleep?" he asked. "It's raining now. You should come inside the tent."

I crawled out and punched my down booties on the wet mulchy ground, feeling the cold water soak through to my socks as I pulled them out with a loud "slorp" sound. "I can't believe it's raining in Rohn. Raining in Rohn!"

"It's weird," Rob shook his head. "In all my years, I've never seen rain."

I threw my sleeping bag, still inside the bivy, into a narrow notch between Beat and Steve on Rob's spruce mattress, then plopped my damp body on top.

"This is maddening," I thought. "Can't someone make it stop?"

But it had only, still, just begun.