Becoming Frozen Kindle_4

by Homer, Jill

  Eventually I rounded a corner, and there was the Innoko shelter cabin. The log building was hidden in a tall birch forest that itself was a surprise after so many miles of burned spruce. Sam and Katie were already there, having passed me while I sat next to the drop bags and stuffed my face and bike with candy. They had arrived at the cabin fifteen minutes earlier and were busy collecting branches from the surrounding forest.

  “The stove here doesn’t really work,” I said to Sam. This was information I received from Beat, who spent a night in this cabin the previous year. Saying this made me imagine Beat hovering over this glass-doored wood stove, back when Innoko was a considerably more sinister place. “Yeah, Beat told me the heat goes up the chimney or elsewhere, and doesn’t warm the cabin.”

  Sam’s expression told me he didn’t care to hear this truth. “We’ll see,” he said. Sam had ridden the entire Iditarod Trail before, back in 2000. At the time, Sam was only nineteen years old, fat bikes had not yet hit the market, and only four men had ever completed the trip to Nome on bicycles, eleven years earlier. It was an impressively bold undertaking for a teenager in an era of limited information and technology. I viewed Sam as a pioneer, but he self-depreciatingly wrote off his adventure as the folly of youth. Still, he returned sixteen years later with his girlfriend to rediscover a trail that was both unchanged by progress and deeply affected by climate change.

  Sam and Katie had a unique travel style — lightweight for non-racers, although their background was endurance racing and they had finished the Tour Divide on a tandem in 2014. They shared a double sleeping bag that was rated to a paltry ten degrees, with a thin liner sack that they insisted kept them comfortable to forty below, thanks to shared body heat. I was unconvinced, and their insistence on building a twig fire in the nonworking stove didn’t lessen my skepticism. They carried low-sugar, organic food that included homemade dried vegetable soup. I wasn’t proud of my diet, which consisted mainly of nuts, chocolate, and gummy candy, but I was confused how they derived enough energy from theirs. I was eating as many as six thousand calories a day — not because I found this kind of gluttony fun, but because I felt chilled and faint whenever my blood sugar dipped too low. Foods with low moisture content and high calorie density that were quick to ingest were the only fuel sources that had ever worked for me in winter conditions. But I had to give Sam and Katie credit — they were moving as well as I was.

  Mike showed up as the three of us were digging into our dinners. Talking, laughing, and sharing stories carried us late into another already late evening. I was both grateful for and amused by this atmosphere — here we were, in the middle of a combination adventure race and survival situation, in what was absolutely the middle of nowhere, carrying on as though we were on a pleasant camping trip with friends. It certainly wasn’t what I expected, and I was sure there were more surprises to come.

  Chapter 10

  Somewhere In Innoko

  I managed an earlier escape from the Innoko shelter cabin, which is to say it was half past nine. Sugary snow sparkled in the morning sunlight. It was eight degrees, which felt so warm that I removed my jacket. I’d indulged in three long nights of rest, and despite the hard miles behind me, my body felt strong. Actual protein for breakfast — in the form of freeze-dried eggs — put me on an incredible high. I was unstoppable, mashing pedals and singing along to my iPod with slightly modified lyrics from a song by Ace Reporter, “Into Chicago.”

  “Carry me into Innoko. Chasing my whiskey with Skittles. Losing it all just a minute from the hotel. I think this biker’s been drinking. The heat is on and I’m roasting. Maybe the ice is affecting my head. And I’m alive, but I’m quite surprised! I thought we would die, somewhere in Innoko.”

  North of Innoko, the landscape became much hillier. Sam warned of this, and I confirmed the topography with my truth-telling GPS. The previous section featured steep but short climbs in and out of drainages. Now we needed to make our way out of the river valley over a series of progressively larger hills, with crests over a thousand feet high. On an eighty-pound fat bike, crawling over a virtual rock garden, just one or two hundred feet of elevation gain becomes Everest.

  The forest in these hills had been ravaged by beetle kill, and many of the trees were an electric shade of reddish orange. I found this unsettling but beautiful — a kind of inauspicious cheeriness that reflected my mood. By midday, signs of civilization began to reappear: more rusting barrels, dilapidated cabins, and the three-story remnants of a massive gold dredge on Poorman Creek. This was the ghost town where Tim Hewitt holed up the previous year during the deep snow fiasco. He pushed his bike to the site of an old airstrip and stayed put for nearly two days before he turned around and encountered Beat. As a spectator, I watched his GPS tracker’s lack of movement and fretted that Tim had crawled up the hill to die.

  Now that I knew the outcome of that story, it was entertaining to stand at the base of that hill and imagine what Tim saw and felt at the time — hoisting his bike over chest-deep drifts, shivering in his thin sleeping bag, waking up to somebody screaming about the cold, only to realize it was his own voice. Poorman is sixty miles from Ruby, a distance that took Tim, Beat, Steve, and Loreen six days to travel last year. I was in disbelief how painless our passage was this year. The only descriptions I’d heard of this region emphasized frigid weather and remoteness, along with a sinister solitude that could drive a weak-willed person mad. This year brought sunshine and warmth, difficult but rideable trail, and enjoyable company. I was even the unlikely early riser in the group. I held warm bare hands to my cold cheeks and wondered if this was even real. There’s always some amount of cognitive dissonance when life doesn’t mimic our expectations.

  According to Sam, the trail joined an old road bed just beyond the ghost town, and I anticipated a return to the smooth surfaces we enjoyed before Ophir. Instead, snowmobile moguls became even more pronounced, the trail launched up a climb to eight-hundred feet (which felt more like eight-thousand), and all of my good will unraveled. This is the adventure life — it wouldn’t have the same lasting effect if everything was easy and fun all of the time. I even reminded myself of this as I plodded up the hill, but my sore legs did not want to hear the truth. GPS offered no better promises, as according to it, the intersection with Poorman Road was already behind me.

  Still, I was not so jaded that I couldn’t concede to beauty as sunset drew long, gold-tinted shadows through the spaces between scrawny spruce trees. Anger melted into awe, and purple twilight softened what had previously been frustrating views of hills rippling beyond the horizon. A steep descent brought me to a concrete bridge, where the Iron Dog moguls faded into a smooth, wide strip of packed snow. It also brought another long climb, but I breathed a sigh of gratitude that for now at least, I could both pedal and look up at the sky.

  Nighttime, in turn, brought a strong wind. Gusts tore along the high ridge and sent me scrambling for my sturdier layers before I’d crested the climb. A headwind had been present all day, but wasn’t as noticeable while pedaling four miles an hour with my head down beneath warm sunshine. As the trail neared the Yukon River, the wind gained ferocity, and gales occasionally brought me to a standstill. This development was discouraging, as I’d hoped to find a place to bed down for the night. Although I’d harbored ambitious hopes to reach Ruby before daylight, exhaustion was compounding by the mile. Setting up my bivy in this wind was going to be uncomfortable at best. If I stopped for a moment, wind needled through my clothing and rapidly chilled my core. Digging a hollow in the snow and anchoring every errant piece of gear would be an arduous task.

  The trail continued to undulate along these true mountains. For hours I labored upward to wind-blasted ridges and coasted down into frigid drainages, where wind-protected canyons held air inversions that lowered the temperature by fifteen degrees. Skeletal birch trees swayed and popped. When the breeze calmed, I could hear wolves howling. My entire lower b
ody became unnervingly weak, as though fatigue would soon consume my legs and leave me crumpled on the trail. I opted to hike the steepening climbs, listening for animal sounds as my core temperature cooled to an uncomfortable degree. Everything was so difficult to balance out here. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, when logically my menace was just a typical wind, but I was intensely frightened.

  “And why shouldn’t I be afraid?” I thought angrily. “I’m just a Mormon girl, alone in the Alaska wilderness with a bicycle.”

  Often when I am struggling, I revert to my cultural background as a kind of excuse, because I was raised in a culture that praised submissiveness and taught girls to rely on the men in their lives to do the heavy lifting. That’s an oversimplified description, of course, and Mormons also promote work ethic and pioneering spirit in both men and women. Still, when I was a devout child, adventure was not on my radar. I assumed I would toe an entrenched line of marriage, homemaking, and children, finding meaning in quiet communions with God. As I grew into a teenager, God only became more distant. Time on my knees brought more silence, and the violence of the world was substantially louder. By age fifteen I’d neared a fever pitch of confusion, ready to lash out in the ways teenagers often do.

  It took my devout Mormon father — unintentionally, and perhaps ironically — to show me the path out of spiritual confusion and worldly despair. This happened a few weeks before I turned sixteen. I remember the date. It was August 2, 1995, a sweltering summer day. My dad invited me to join him on a climb up Mount Timpanogos, a prominent peak above the Utah Valley. The trip required eighteen miles of difficult hiking with more than four-thousand feet of elevation gain, topping out above eleven-thousand feet elevation. I wasn’t an athletic child and my hiking resume was thin, but I loved my father and was eager to do something that might make him proud.

  My heels bled in my brand-new hiking boots and my legs hurt in a way that I can still recall, to this day, as an exquisite pain. But when I stood on a chunk of granite at the top of Timpanogos, looking out over the grid of the city far below, eyes wide and jaw unclasped at the expanse of mountains beyond, everything changed. It was then that I first understood there was so much beauty in the world — more than I could ever see. There was so much truth — more than I could ever know. But I could continue to seek both — not in the dark corners of my bedroom or musty pews of my church, but out in the limitless world.

  Twenty-one years later, this journey brought me to a landscape that resembled the alpine valleys beneath Mount Timpanogos. Birch and black spruce bear strong resemblance to aspen and subalpine fir. Snow-covered meadows glowed in the moonlight, not unlike the granite cirques of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Steep slopes obstructed the sky, and I had only my truth-telling GPS to remind me that these peaks were eleven-hundred feet, not eleven-thousand. When fear started to take over, I looked to these memories — places of similar beauty where I found peace.

  “The world isn’t against you,” I whispered.

  Wind pummeled my masked face as I plodded up another nameless Alaska mountain, reaching gale force on the bald ridge. Fatigue had wrapped itself around me like a blanket, so tight that I felt smothered and helpless to fight it. I scanned the lower slope for any kind of protective nook. The forest was anemic at this modest altitude, and tangles of alder were the best I could find. The trail crested a saddle and plummeted down the other side. Too tired to even process that the climb had ended and it was time to descend, the sudden blast of speed caught me by surprise. Tears streamed down my frozen cheeks as I rocketed downhill.

  The descent bottomed out at a large creek, where flowing water roared beneath a thin layer of ice. I’d heard the rapids from a hundred yards away, and worked myself into such a panic over the crossing that I stopped the bike in disbelief when I reached a snow-covered concrete bridge. Did that bridge really exist? Was it really that easy?

  Now paused, I realized the wind was absent here. I could still hear gusts whistling above, but this was a narrow canyon with thick tree cover. Elated, I pedaled across the bridge and ascended a small rise. The road bed went around a sharp curve, and there was an old pullout — a perfect clearing, surrounded by a robust forest and protected from the wind.

  Adrenaline from the stream crossing had remedied my sleepiness, but I wasn’t about to reject what might be the last sheltered spot until Ruby. I rolled out my bivy and sat at the foot, heating water for dinner and hot chocolate. My thermometer registered minus five. Without a wind chill, this was pleasantly comfortable.

  Just as I was finishing freeze-dried spaghetti with meat sauce, the sky lit up with waves of green light. I positioned my sleeping bag so I could wrap myself in this cocoon of my own body heat and stare up at the sky. It was cold and indifferent and burning with the beauty that I spent most of my life seeking — twenty-one years of motion to arrive in this place, in this moment.

  I’m no longer a religious believer. I consider myself an agnostic, whose only conviction is that humans have only seen and can only understand fragments of the truth. But every so often I revisit the God of my youth, in a quiet prayer, always to say, “Thank you.”

  *****

  Morning was rose-tinted and cold, so cold — which is always the case when transitioning from a billowing down cocoon to the white, frozen world. I did jumping jacks between frantic motions to pack up my belongings, and took off in a sprint when I finally had everything more or less strapped to the bike. I was grateful for the early climb, but as soon as I generated enough heat to feel lucid, the weight of my fatigue clamped down. Why was I still so tired?

  Breakfast on the bike was a difficult affair — steering with a balled-up mitten beneath my numb right hand while scooping trail mix out of a “gas tank” top tube bag with my left hand. My body still wasn’t warm enough to stop for long, but I suspected my low energy level was the result of a calorie deficit. Although I needed to consume more than five thousand calories a day, the technical terrain didn’t allow me to eat on the bike, I didn’t take many breaks, and my six-hundred calorie breakfasts and one-thousand-calorie dinners weren’t quite filling in the gaps. The sheer bulk of food still weighing down my frame bag proved I’d been on an unintentional diet. No wonder I was tired and cold.

  Three miles past my camp, I approached a cluster of dilapidated cabins. Mike’s orange bike was propped against one of the buildings — he must have passed me while I was sleeping. I peeked inside the shack, which had no door. One corner held a few dirty plastic barrels, and the rest of the interior was piled with paper and garbage. A down sleeping bag was spread across the only bare spot on the floor. Mike’s nose poked out from a small opening. I didn’t intend to wake him, but he spoke without even stirring.

  “What time is it?”

  “About eight o’clock,” I said. “What time did you get here? I never heard you pass, and I was up past midnight.”

  “Maybe two a.m.,” Mike said. “I saw your camp spot. Almost stopped, but I thought I might find a cabin if I kept going.”

  His shelter wasn’t much — particle-board walls and a sagging roof, missing both windows and the door. But it did block the wind.

  “It was a nice night,” I said. “Did you see the Northern Lights? I must have spent a half hour watching them.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Mike hummed. He seemed to be drifting back to sleep, but then said, “Galena today?”

  “I don’t know. It’s thirty more miles to Ruby, and I think it’s going to be hilly the whole way. Then it’s fifty more to Galena. That would be a really long day. Too long. I feel awful this morning.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Mike hummed again.

  I left Mike to let him snooze until what would almost certainly be an afternoon hour. He’d still probably catch me before Ruby. Mike was strong, but he was clearly on vacation. I envied his happy-go-lucky attitude, but if I slept as much as he did, spring would probably beat me to Nome.

  T
he sun rose in sync with the long climb, pulling back a curtain of forest shadows to reveal a bright, warm day. Only it was still ten degrees, and my body fluctuated between shivering and sweating. I felt dizzy and flush. Something was clearly wrong with my system. Electrolyte imbalance? Potassium? I realize it’s not healthy to subsist on nuts and candy, but a body doesn’t become malnourished in three days. I tried to shake off this gnawing fatigue by focusing on my immediate surroundings.

  Human debris became increasingly more frequent past Mike’s cabin. A surprising number of abandoned vehicles sat rusted and half-buried in snow drifts. Although the lightly traveled trail revealed little evidence of a road bed, there were actual mile markers — numbered green signs sticking a few inches out of the snow — that clicked slowly backward. These sprinkles of civilization were oddly fascinating, and I rubber-necked every rusted rim and detached snowmobile windshield that I passed. Each one caused a pang of sadness, and I wondered why I felt so lonely. Only three days had passed since I left McGrath, which is not even close to the longest I’ve gone without outside human contact. When I was twenty-two years old, I spent nine days backpacking in the Utah desert with only two friends for company. We didn’t even follow trails — we wound our way along a shallow river at the bottom of a sheer canyon, where there was no human debris. I recall jumping in surprise when a jet flew overhead on day seven.

  Still, there was something about this no-man’s-land that felt even more isolating than the desert. During that ninety-mile backpacking trip, I understood that we had sequestered ourselves in a narrow crack in the Earth. Above us on the plateau, cattle were grazing, ranchers were herding their stock, and cars were streaming along a smooth highway. The corridor along the Innoko and Poorman rivers was a hundred and fifty miles long, surrounded by thousands of square miles of nothing. The wind blew incessantly and ten degrees was a hot day. The fact that anyone ventured here at all remained fascinating.