by Homer, Jill
My frozen breath swirled in the still air inside the cabin, where a thermometer confirmed it was three degrees. It felt practically tropical without windchill. The plywood interior included a wooden bunk and standing-height table, as well as a tiny wood stove with a broken pipe and door, stuffed to the brim with partially burnt trash. Clumps of paper and charred coffee cans littered the floor. Ash and cigarettes coated the bunks. But this cabin had four walls and a roof, and I couldn’t have been more grateful if it were the Emirates Palace.
I sat down on the bunk and nibbled on trail mix, but my stomach churned and I continued to feel out of sorts. I needed to cook dinner and melt snow for drinking water soon, while I still had any fumes of energy left. But these tasks were too daunting. They both required stepping outside. Instead, I fished my satellite phone out of a bicycle pannier and turned it on, pointing the antenna toward the tiny window. More than anything, I just wanted to hear Beat’s voice.
The phone beeped to life and alerted me to a new text message. The message said only, “Zane died. Phone’s on. Call at 6.”
“Wait, what?” It was a shocking piece of information to receive out here. Zane was Steve’s wife. I visualized Steve emerging from the hell he and Beat had been through, and hearing this news. Out here in the jaws of the merciless wind, I couldn’t imagine experiencing the same: Fighting the battles Steve had fought, enduring the grueling efforts and brutal cold, surviving it all only to discover his entire life had fallen apart. And now he was so far away from home, so far away from anything.
The phone’s service cut out, so I charged outside to boost the satellite connection, momentarily forgetting my intense fear of the wind. It was after six, but Beat’s satellite phone was still on, and he picked up my call. I could scarcely hear his voice over the screaming gales. Zane was found in bed at her and Steve’s apartment in San Francisco, Beat told me. No foul play suspected, but nobody knew what had happened. Beat said he and Steve were currently waiting in a tiny village on the Yukon River, Koyukuk. They would leave that evening on a flight to Galena and then Anchorage. Beat would accompany Steve because he wanted to be there for his friend, and because after all they’d been through together, he didn’t have the heart to continue toward Nome without him. This was the end of the race for both of them.
All of the blood retreated from my fingers and toes, and my face felt flush. I told Beat that I would turn around as well, return to Unalakleet by bike, and buy a plane ticket to Anchorage. It might take me a few days to make it back, but I’d get there as soon as possible.
Although I entertained plenty of thoughts about quitting, as soon as I said the words, relief washed over me. Relief was followed by shame. Shame melted into disappointment, and then bewilderment. Death elicits a pendulum of emotions, and as I sprinted back to the cabin with my bare fingers still wrapped around the satellite phone, I became overwhelmed by the weight of them. I didn’t know Zane well, but I did know her. My memory conjured the image of a petite woman with blonde hair and kind eyes, wrapping her arms around adult sons who were twice her size. She wasn’t much older than me. She didn’t share these risky hobbies — her own husband’s penchant to wander deep into the Alaska wilderness with only the supplies he could drag in a sled. Steve had survived a situation that not many people in the first world could, but he was alive and his wife was gone.
I collapsed on the ash-covered bunk and curled up in a fetal position, burying my face in half-frozen hands. Wind gusts knocked against the cabin’s thin walls like a Big Bad Wolf, so I moved my hands over my ears to quiet the roar. Grief rippled through my chest, and I shivered as I continued to imagine what Steve and Beat must have been experiencing in that moment. It was so bleak. I needed to break away somehow. After pulling myself off the bunk, I fumbled with stiff fingers to put on my down parka and pants, then returned to the wind.
Little Mountain rises only about three hundred feet above the sea, with a broad slope encircling the east face and sheer cliffs on the west. Although my limbs were numb and I didn’t have an ounce of glycogen left in my muscles, I was determined to stand on the peak. These would be my last steps north, and I needed them to count. My boots punched through flaky layers of crusted snow as I ascended. Sweat trickled down my back in spite of the cold. The final fifteen feet were nearly vertical, and I drove both arms into a dense cornice to pull myself up the wall.
“So futile,” my intellect said to the primitive self that strove to complete this climb.
All of it was futile.
This tour along Alaska’s western coast had been a test run for my own long-standing dream of traveling the full thousand miles to Nome. It was a dream nearly ten years in the making, since I first moved to Alaska and discovered endurance sports. As I pushed myself through ever-longer and tougher challenges, Nome always seemed like a step too far. It took meeting Beat to begin to believe anything was possible, but even then, I never felt ready to tackle the full Iditarod Trail. Finally, in late 2014, I set a plan in motion to make my first attempt during the 2016 Iditarod Trail Invitational. To gain the experience I thought necessary, I reserved 2015 for preparations — everything I did that year was fixed with an eye on reaching Nome from Anchorage under my own power.
Simmering beneath a gut-wrenching mixture of sadness and relief was disappointment that my test run had failed, and failed badly. In four days I’d managed only sixty miles, which is six percent of the distance to Nome, and those sixty miles had unraveled every ounce of experience and strength I’d mustered in ten years of endurance racing. I’d ridden a mountain bike 2,700 miles along the Continental Divide and walked 350 miles on the Iditarod Trail, and I’d never felt so beaten or tired. I knew even if this tragedy hadn’t happened, I didn’t have the energy or strength to attempt the rest of the sea ice crossing. I was done either way.
The top of Little Mountain was a broad plateau, windswept and brown with clusters of blueberry branches sticking out of intermittent patches of concrete-hard snow. It was so flat I couldn’t discern the high point, so I marched to a pile of rocks near the northern edge. On the largest rock, I stood up straight and pulled my face mask down, facing the full brunt of the gale, forever raging southward — the North Wind. Tears had soaked the piece of tape I’d stuck to my face as wind protection, and I could feel ice forming around the edges. All around me, the rippled surface of the sea ice stretched toward distant mountains. The sun hovered low over the southwestern horizon, casting a pink glow. Only the orange shelter cabin punctured the illusion of standing on another planet. Even though Shaktoolik was only fourteen miles away, it had taken me nearly eleven hours of exhaustive effort to reach this point, and in this moment it was another planet. Little Mountain surely was a lonely place — the loneliest I’d ever been.
“Why?” I called out to the wind. “Why?” It was the only word I could think to say. There were no others.
The North Wind answered only in the same deafening roar, racing effortlessly past my shambling body. How does the North Wind generate all this energy? Where did it begin? Where does it finally stop? Many questions filled my mind, but the same unanswerable one was all I asked aloud. “Why?”
With a numb face to match my fingers, I turned my back to the wind and hiked back to the headwall, bounding down the slope I’d crawled up. The North Wind ushered me forward as though that were its answer: “Leave this place. Go home.”
I strongly doubted I’d ever return to Little Mountain.
Chapter 2
Growing Old Along the Great Divide
Why?
Anyone who participates in endurance sports will frequently encounter this question — both from others, and from within. Why would any person choose to engage in long and intense blocks of physical labor, suffer discomfort and illness, risk injury, spend large amounts of money on gear and invest hours in training, all for no reward?
Those who don’t participate in endurance sports assume
those who do are either deranged, self-flagellating, or need to stroke their misguided egos by asserting that they are strong or tough. When confronted, endurance racers generally furrow their brows and mumble equivocal platitudes: “I do this as a challenge to myself,” “To see if I can,” or “Because it’s there.”
But really, why?
I’ve been attempting to answer this question for more than ten years, ever since I happened across a brochure for a hundred-mile winter bike race in Alaska and decided on a whim to sign up. I come from a decidedly nonathletic background — I was terrible at sports as a child, bookish and nonconformist as a young adult, and possess a physical disposition better suited to working in windowless offices than climbing mountains. For these reasons, I felt better equipped to offer some sort of understanding to nonparticipants. Despite a decade of trying — publishing thousands of photos and writing millions of words in blogs, newspaper articles, magazines, and books — the answers only became more ethereal, and the question more opaque.
Most of the answers we find in endurance sports are contradictions. We suffer to feel alive. We exhaust our bodies to fill our souls. We compete against others to bond with them. Beat will rant about the insignificance of sport amid all the issues facing the world, but much of his free time is dedicated to participation, as is mine. I have raced many thousands of miles, both as a mountain biker and a trail runner, and feel no more satisfied or accomplished than I did at the starting line of my very first race. I fear I’ll never be satisfied. But no, fear isn’t the correct word at all. I’m glad I’ll never be satisfied. Sport is an enduringly beautiful way to stay in motion, experiencing life.
The failed bike trip on the Iditarod Trail rightly crushed my own self-assurances about the “why.” After Beat and I reconnected in Anchorage, we went for slow hikes in the foothills of the Chugach Mountains and talked about our experiences on the Iditarod Trail. We discussed how Steve was coping, and reconfirmed how much we valued our relationship. It was during these talks that we openly committed to the second part of the Nome dream I’d fostered, which was to coax Beat to sign up for the Iditarod Trail Invitational in the bike division, and ride together. The roar of the North Wind swiftly faded into the whispers of memory, and I became excited about the prospect of traveling across Alaska with Beat.
One week later, I lined up to run White Mountains 100, a hundred-mile race on remote snowmobile trails in the mountains north of Fairbanks, Alaska. I’d finished this race four times on a bicycle, and this was my first year in the foot division. Exhausted but upbeat, Beat “paced” me for the first sixty miles as an unofficial participant. Eventually he needed a break to take care of his own issues, and I surged forward, hoping to finish before the thirty-hour mark. My own legs were wind-battered and sore, but they carried me to my best hundred-mile finish yet. Sometimes these snowy miles are not so hard. Nome, I decided, was a great idea.
There was still an entire summer ahead of us, and the prospect of preparing for an effort as daunting as the Iditarod brought me to an equally outlandish training idea: the 2,740-mile Tour Divide. The mountain bike race traverses the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico, and I’d completed it once, six years earlier. My twenty-four-day finish stood as a women’s record for three more years, and if I had to rank my athletic accomplishments, the 2009 Tour Divide remains at the top of the list. It was ridiculous to consider this nearly three-thousand-mile race through the rugged Rocky Mountains — often touted as “The Hardest Mountain Bike Race in the World” — as training for a thousand-mile race across frozen Alaska. But in my mind, it made sense. Alaska requires complete self-sufficiency, and the self-supported nature of the Tour Divide would help me refresh these skills, as well as work on strategies to maximize efficiency. Skills and strategy are more valuable than simple fitness. Multi-day endurance races are largely about the long game: Slow and steady actually can win the race.
I trained through the spring in California, and felt strong and fit when I arrived in Banff, Alberta, for the June 12 start. It was odd to return to this place with six years of experiences separating me from an event that had such a monumental impact on my life. I felt like a wholly different person, but this was still the same quirky mountain town, with the same types of wide-eyed rookies, the same pre-race chatter about mud and snow, and the same 2,740-mile journey. Only now it was in front of me, not behind.
As I lined up at the Spray River trailhead with 150 other cyclists, I was filled with a strange dread. A voice in my head whispered, “You shouldn’t have come back here.” I dismissed this thought as silly, but the fear wouldn’t leave. As the field took off, I rushed up to my Banff friends, Leslie and Keith, for one last goodbye.
“I just need one more hug,” I said as tears poured down my cheeks. I had no idea why I was crying; there was no reason to be so upset. I was heading out for a grand adventure — one that had more knowns than unknowns. There were dangers along the Tour Divide route, but they were nominal compared to the relentless menace of winter in Alaska. Leslie and Keith wrapped their arms around me and said I’d be fine.
“I’m so scared; I don’t know why,” I said through happy-sad sobs. “Thank you.”
As I pedaled south through narrow valleys crowned with snowy peaks, dark clouds gathered overhead. It started raining, and then the rain turned to hail, then to chunky flakes of snow. This was normal for June in the Rockies, and I’d gotten caught up in the thrill of chasing folks who left me in the dust after my starting line meltdown. I didn’t stop to put on my raincoat, reasoning that my numb fingers and toes would warm up soon enough. To generate heat, I pressed harder into the pedals. Hard breathing in the cold air tore at my throat.
The rest of the first day was filled with miles of thick mud, crashes, more rain, rainbows, then a clearing just as night descended. I pedaled hard until I’d covered 155 miles, and found a nice spot next to a river to lay out my bivy sack. In Alaska, common wisdom dictates that you avoid camping near waterways, because the coldest air sinks into the lowest spots. But I was in a different place — the Canadian Rockies in mid-June — and the riverbank offered a forested canopy and drinking water for morning. I congratulated myself on this efficiency.
The alarm went off at 5 a.m., and I awoke from a stupor so deep that it took me several seconds to realize where I was. My arms and legs were numb, and my core temperature was low. Shivering commenced before I even peeked out of my sleeping bag, seven years old and likely no longer insulated to its thirty-two-degree rating. The mossy ground was coated in thick frost. I’d fallen asleep in my wet clothing and soaked the interior of my bag. The zipper was frozen shut. It took several minutes of thrashing to free it, and by then I was very cold. I darted around camp and did jumping jacks to ignite blood circulation. As soon as I could move my fingers, I checked the temperature on my bike computer. It was minus four Celsius — twenty-five degrees.
I fumbled to pack up as quickly as possible. After I generated enough heat, I made a poor decision to drag my bike into a frigid creek and wash away some of the mud. As I pedaled away from camp, my limbs were utterly numb again. Still, it was summer and skies were clear. I knew warmth was not far away.
By midday, mucous was streaming out of my nose and a pounding headache rattled my skull. A sore throat was the final signal that I’d caught a potent cold virus. By the time I crossed the United States border in the early evening, I could hardly breathe through the snot, which only aggravated my muscle soreness, coughing, and fatigue. By then, I’d ridden 270 rugged miles and climbed four mountain passes in the span of thirty-six hours. I went to sleep hopeful I’d feel better in the morning.
Montana heated up, with daytime temperatures climbing into the high eighties. Windstorms swept brown clouds of dust through the canyons. The cold virus moved into my lungs, pushing mucous deeper into overtaxed airways as I ground the pedals up mountain after mountain. I stopped to cough up green gobs of phlegm. The hacking tore at my
lungs and left my throat raw, but briefly cleared my airways and opened short bouts of vitality. These energy bursts only proved how lousy I felt most of the time, even for an endurance race. I’d grown accustomed to maintaining forward motion by staying warm and fed, but out here, all energy came from oxygen. My airways were too clogged to filter the dusty, high-altitude air, and I was becoming startlingly weak from limited oxygen.
My routine was simple but strenuous. Each day, I set an alarm for 5 a.m., rising with first light into frosty mornings. I’d put on the damp clothing that hung from the frame of my bike, pack up my bivy sack, sleeping bag, and pad, and stuff a few handfuls of trail mix in my mouth before continuing down whatever dirt path I’d collapsed beside the previous night. I’d cough and sputter as my legs warmed up with the sun. Usually I enjoyed a couple of good hours of pedaling between morning coughing fits and afternoon dust storms. Each day there was usually a small town in which I could stop and refuel. I’d purchase a meal, more trail mix, cheese and dried meat; I was trying to stay away from simple sugars as part of my nutrition strategy, but this was proving more and more difficult. Sugar seemed to be the only fuel source that produced any energy anymore. Candy gave me wings, and although this energy was short-lived, I began to depend on guilty fistfuls of gummy bears and M&Ms to propel me through afternoon slumps. The slumps deepened. By nightfall my mind was foggy and my body was a shell. I’d forced myself into survival mode, until I could scarcely remember crawling under a cluster of pines or a clearing near a cattle fence to fall asleep.
When I was awake, the hours ticked by with muted urgency, like the pulse of a ventilator in an otherwise quiet hospital room. This is what my breathing sounded like — a rhythmic whoosh and hiss, harmonized by high-pitched chirps. The night coughs were becoming worse, and occasionally I’d wake up in a panic because I’d stopped breathing. I’d claw at the zipper of my bivy sack and push my face into the cold mountain air, hacking until the obstruction landed on the dirt. One night I stared at the gob in fascination while it glistened in the silver moonlight. I imagined that ball of mucous was the last stronghold of the virus. Tomorrow, surely, I’d feel better.