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. 

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.