by Jill Homer
The sleeping gear filled a big red bundle that blocked the view of the front end of the bike, and I didn’t notice as the front rack slipped a few millimeters downward with each bump on the trail. As I launched into the final descent at eighteen miles per hour, the rack’s metal platform came down onto the front tire, stopping the wheel and flipping me over the handlebars. My body hit the ground with such force that all I could see for several seconds were white sparkles on black. When my eyes finally refocused, I sat up and hoisted the overturned bike off my legs. The sudden movement sent a shock of pain through my right shoulder. Sensations were returning; my shoulder throbbed fiercely, my right hand and knee burned with trail rash, and my ears were ringing. I spent another minute clutching my shoulder and moaning before I finally decided it would be prudent to stand up and figure out what was broken.
All of my limbs appeared to be intact. The bike was also fine — after the front wheel stopped moving, the bike cartwheeled and landed more or less on top of me. Moving stiffly through a fog of pain, I shifted the bivy bundle to the rear rack, then raised the front rack and re-tightened the straps. After a little more moaning, I was able to continue riding home.
The following day, my entire body felt as though I’d been hit by a truck. It was painful to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom.
“At least you have six more days,” Beat assured me as I lamented my battered limbs. “Plenty of time to recover.”
Beat boxed up the bike and we packed our bags for the flight to Anchorage. I didn’t know if fortune could be any more discouraging of my Nome ambitions, or whether I wanted to find out. I limped into the pre-race meeting with bruised hips and a battered ego, but unbroken intent. Still, most people at the meeting were friends and acquaintances who knew about my recent health setbacks and athletic failures, so I wasn’t about to broadcast more unearned hubris. When I said that I was “signed up” to ride to Nome, my emphasis was on the gamble, like “signing up” to win the lottery.
My skepticism was not well received. In any intensive endeavor, fate is not kind to those who don’t maintain unflagging commitment. Trekking across Alaska isn’t easy in the best of circumstances. There are endless reasons to quit and only one to continue: Because you want it, badly, despite anything that stands in your way. Others who had made this commitment gave me looks ranging from half smiles to full side-eyes when I shrugged and said, “Maybe.” Another Nome sign-up, a man named Joe Stiller, shared my slightly battered status with a pre-race injury to his knee. He’d driven a large van all the way from South Dakota to spectate the race. After the pre-race meeting, he took up a vigil in the hotel lobby to show off his fat bike, fully decked out with ultralight gear and a half dozen electronic gadgets. Unlike me, Joe had no intent of starting this year’s race with an injury; he was here because he already had the time off work, and wanted to observe and learn in preparation for the following year’s event.
“I don’t DNF,” he said forcefully, referring to the “did not finish” status designated to race failures such as myself. “When I start the ITI next year, I’m going to be a hundred and ten percent all in.”
“I admire that attitude,” I replied, but silently responded to his veiled criticism with my own. So many things can go wrong in the Alaska wilderness — frostbite, broken bones, debilitating illness, a thousand things you never prepared for. You can’t know what will happen, so you can never claim that failure isn’t an option. I’d clung to a dogged determination not to fail for far too long, and now I was grappling with the long-term effects of possible lung damage. Sometimes you need to quit when you’re ahead, sometimes you need to quit when you’re still alive, and sometimes — but only sometimes — you should shoot for the moon.
“I agree it’s something that takes a hundred percent, which I can’t claim to have,” I continued. “But Nome is a difficult dream to let go.”
*****
The following morning, sixty-five participants gathered with bikes, sleds, and one set of skis in front of the hotel. We prepared to board a bus that would take us from Anchorage to the official start of the Iditarod Trail on Knik Lake. I barely succeeded in hoisting my loaded bike over my shoulders and onto a moving van, but considered this a success all the same. The interior of the bus was sizzling with solar heat, tense silence and nervous chatter. Beat and I squeezed into a narrow bench seat and quietly discussed what we would do if one of us ended up back in Anchorage much earlier than the other. He felt severely under-trained after his month-long bout with pneumonia, so neither of us assumed it would automatically be me, although that was implied.
“If asthma is going to be a problem, I’m going to know early, maybe by tonight,” I said. The first and second checkpoints at miles fifty-seven and ninety were the easiest places to quit the race — involving an air taxi flight that costs two to three hundred dollars. After that, the Iditarod Trail becomes remote and the airstrips more difficult to access. Evacuations can take up to a week if the weather is bad. I glanced out the window toward the snow-capped peaks of the Chugach Mountains and pondered what it would be like to quit in time to sleep in a bed that same night. Ending up back in Anchorage on the first day was the most logical scenario, but the thought filled my gut with such dread that I had to shut it out. Instead, I fretted about pushing my bike through slushy water.
Anchorage and the surrounding regions were experiencing unprecedented warmth that winter. The global weather pattern El Nino pumped a steady stream of warm air into the Far North, resulting in temperatures above freezing and frequent rain. Snowfall had been minimal, and after two weeks with daytime temperatures regularly reaching forty degrees, the landscape was a patchwork of bare ground and wet ice. Much of the chatter in the bus centered on crossing open water and whether there would be a trail at all, as the Iditarod only exists in winter as a ribbon of snow packed down by snowmobile traffic. In the summer, it’s all swamps, alder-choked hillsides, spongy tundra, and rivers — utterly impassable unless frozen. The forecast called for rain showers, and we expected to spend the first day wading through swamps and slush while wearing soaked clothing. When temperatures are in the thirties, wet clothing and feet create a high risk for hypothermia. This was my most immediate concern.
The bus pulled over at the Knik Bar. I stepped out into the moist, too-warm air, feeling faint. The Knik Bar had been the starting point of human-powered Iditarod racing since the 1990s, but this year it was closed for the season. Still, the proprietor opened the doors to a darkened interior and fired up the grill to cook cheeseburgers for racers’ nervous stomachs. I sat in a corner and picked at the grease-soaked bun, worried that I might vomit at any moment.
All of my big endeavors scare me, but this was by far the worst I had ever felt before a race. My fear didn’t necessarily center on failure, which I had spent a year embracing. It wasn’t about dying — a risk that is always lurking whether we acknowledge it or not. It wasn’t about missing Beat. I regretted that we wouldn’t be traveling together, but took comfort in the fact that we were both carrying satellite phones, which would allow us to remain connected. No, this unsettled fear had more to do with facing the loss of something I loved. Choking out on the Iditarod Trail, both literally and figuratively, felt like a final straw. This was my last chance. If I didn’t succeed, there was nothing else to face but the reality of my declining health and the necessity of walking away from endurance racing. But I would not go gentle into that good night.
I spent so long stewing over the burger that I nearly missed the line-up under a banner at the shoreline of Knik Lake. I rushed out and grabbed my bike, which I hadn’t even test-ridden since I put it together in the Anchorage hotel room. The lake looked partly thawed; puddles on top of the gray ice were so deep that water rippled in the breeze. A male runner turned to me and asked, “Think the ice will hold?” I laughed nervously.
Beat pulled up beside me with his massive sled, built with a sturdy fabric cover
that doubled as a bivouac-style shelter. Other runners occasionally teased Beat about the size of his haul, but he maintained that security matters more than speed in the scheme of a long expedition. No one could argue with his track record. I shared his views on preparedness. I harbored deep insecurity about my own abilities, and needed to feel prepared for all of the worst-case scenarios I could imagine, of which there were many. Heading out into the frozen wilderness with a head full of fears and no safety nets would only ensure a decision to quit. Still, whether I could actually manage eighty pounds of bike, food, and supplies remained unproved.
“So are we all going to go plunging into Knik Lake now?” I asked Beat. “The ice looks a little anemic.”
“Nah, it’s solid,” he replied. “I checked.”
Somebody fired a gun into the air and the field took off across the lake, splashing through puddles and sliding on the wet ice. All of the runners and one skier veered right, where the Iditarod Trail begins. The cyclists went left toward a series of gas-line easement trails and roads on a route that’s longer but tends to be faster for bikes. Both converge at Flathorn Lake, around mile twenty-five. From there all racers follow the Iditarod Trail, although most veterans have their own secret shortcuts. Even the most creative side routes are sanctioned in race rules, which stipulate only that racers must reach every checkpoint under their own power. How they get there is their own problem.
I rolled beside Beat for a few seconds as we said our final goodbyes. When I pushed the power button on my GPS, it wouldn’t start. The blank screen incited a quiet panic. Why didn’t I test it earlier? What if it didn’t work the entire trip? I depended on it for navigation and had only rudimentary paper maps as a backup. Beat helped me re-start the unit as I shivered in the cold wind, inadvertently planting one of my water-resistant (I hoped) boots in a puddle. Finally the device fired up. Beat and I shared one last hurried kiss, and with that veered our separate ways toward the unknown.
Chapter 6
Whisked Into the Wilderness
The field of forty-eight cyclists streamed across the waterlogged surface of Knik Lake, churning up wake that splashed against the shoreline. I caught the pack where a trail climbed up a steep embankment. A traffic jam formed as wheels spun and bikes tipped over on the icy surface. Nearly all of us, myself included, had fat bikes equipped with tires that were embedded with carbide studs to grip into ice. I’d lived in coastal California for the past five years, and my ice-riding skills were rusty at best. I shimmied the handlebars and pedaled furiously in an attempt to generate the friction needed to propel my bike up a surface that had as much traction as an oil slick.
Wet ice coated the trail through the low hills of the Susitna River Valley. Birch trees crowded the narrow corridor. Beneath the trees, the forest floor was bare. The only reason there was still frozen matter on the trail was because snowmobile traffic had compressed snow into hard ice. Patches of mud intervened, and deep puddles ensured that everyone had wet legs and mud-splattered backsides within the first few miles. Clouds darkened into sleet squalls. I put on the rain jacket that I didn’t intend to bring, but decided at the last minute that I couldn’t afford to rely on non-waterproof coats. After all, it was winter in Alaska.
Rain pelted my jacket, my insulated handlebar mitts, my bivy bundle containing the down sleeping bag I hoped would keep me dry and warm in temperatures down to fifty below, and my panniers full of things that would be useless to me if they were wet. Anxiety roiled in my gut. The feeling was even worse than the nervousness I felt before the race, which was a new experience. Generally, the doom I feel before a big endeavor melts away when I finally start. At that point, I’ve done everything I can do to get ready, and usually relax when I realize that the only task ahead amounts to putting one foot in front of the other. Situational problems such as poor weather always bother me, of course, but this was different. Even after I reminded myself of the water-resistant reinforcements I’d made — including putting the sleeping bag inside the bivy sack, and stuffing all of my spare layers into Zip-lock bags — I continued to battle an urge to panic. Why was I so frightened? What certain doom was my intuition detecting this time?
A few dozen race fans spread out along the first twenty-five miles of the course. I was a knot of stress, but tried to smile and wave as I passed groups of cheering strangers parked next to road crossings, and friends riding their own bikes along the trail. The trail petered out and the route became little more than snowmobile scratches across barely frozen swamps. Spindly spruce trees stuck out of the brown ice. Wispy fog lifted to reveal Mount Susitna, a lone mountain towering over the river valley. Contrasted beneath dark rain clouds, Mount Susitna was an almost blinding shade of white, cutting a sharp profile of a reclining woman that inspired the mountain’s nickname — “The Sleeping Lady.”
Nearly every year since 2006, I’ve returned to the Susitna Valley for an Iditarod-based race or adventure, and every year I’ve looked to The Sleeping Lady for comfort. This year, I could scarcely look up for fear of hitting any small bump at the wrong angle and crashing down on the ice. I fell in line with five other riders. We passed the last group of fans on the shoreline of Flathorn Lake and rolled onto a smooth surface that perfectly mirrored the stormy sky.
There was no snow on the lake, revealing ice fractured with pressure cracks. Just a few weeks earlier, southcentral Alaska experienced a magnitude-7 earthquake that left deep, rippling imprints in the region’s frozen waterways. The cracked ice had refrozen, but it appeared fragile from the vantage of a bicycle seat. A dizzying vortex encompassed my thoughts, and I gripped the handlebars tighter in an effort to stay upright.
Back in 2009, I put my foot through a patch of weak ice while walking my bike across Flathorn Lake, dunking my right leg to the thigh. A series of poor decisions immediately afterward resulted in dropping out of the Iditarod Trail Invitational with frostbite on my right foot, followed by two months of recovery and nerve damage that persists to this day. Also persisting is a phobia of ice, and lake ice specifically. Even though logic reminds me that lake ice is generally more stable than river ice, my anxiety hits a fever pitch whenever I need to cross a frozen lake. For seven years, Flathorn Lake has been waiting to pull me into its icy depths. Of this I was convinced.
“This is how I die,” I thought as the ice groaned ominously. The group had pulled away, and I could scarcely muster the wherewithal to continue turning pedals.
A panic attack seemed imminent when I passed Joe Stiller, who was standing in the middle of the frozen lake with his space-age bicycle lying sideways on the ice, and one hand clasped around a video camera. I wanted nothing more than to get off this lake, and couldn’t believe he was willing to just stand there as though the world wasn’t going to collapse underneath him.
“Say something,” he called out to me.
“Ice, eek,” I squeaked. Saying this out loud made me aware of my own ridiculousness. Of course there was ice. After all, it was winter in Alaska.
Relief washed over me as I reached the other side of the lake, where there was finally some real snow cover. Its consistency was similar to a wafer-thin crust over granulated sugar, and there were blades of yellow grass sticking out of the surface, but it was snow. Since my group had surged ahead, I assumed I was near the back of the race. But another cyclist caught up as I was trying to locate the unmarked point where the trail veered into the woods. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and chest, wearing a bicycle cap, a wool shirt, and bib shorts — clothing better suited for a midsummer spin on trails rather than a winter wilderness race. His bare knees were sticking out of a pair of gaiters, and he was grinning through a short, salt-and-pepper beard. He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place his name. He must have known me or at least who I was, because the first thing he asked was, “Where is Beat?”
“Oh, he’s back a ways … walking. He decided to drag a sled again this year.”
&nbs
p; “Why?”
“Long story, but I’ve been sick and assumed I wouldn’t be able to start the race, so he decided to stick with what he knows. Because walking is more fun.”
“Ha!” the man laughed. He thought I was being sarcastic. Fat-bike racers frequently refer to runners as “fun haters” because they could be riding bikes, but inexplicably chose the more difficult and tedious method of travel. Even when trail conditions deteriorate and cyclists are reduced to pushing their heavy bikes through deep snow, they still feel their method is superior because at some point, they’ll be rolling again. And it’s true — even during years that saw the worst trail conditions, when runners led the race for more than two hundred miles, bikes always prevailed to reach the finish line first.
Still, foot travel has its advantages. For starters, runners and walkers don’t have to constantly scout for the path of least resistance through highly variable snow conditions, so they have more opportunities to gaze up at the scenery. They move at a more consistent speed, so progress is more predictable. They have fewer mechanical concerns to address. And there’s something inherently satisfying about traveling such a long distance, through such difficult terrain, under what is truly your own power — without mechanical or gravitational assistance.
My walk to McGrath with Beat in 2014 remains one of my most cherished life experiences. It was meditative and rewarding, and bolstered our relationship in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. It also was intensely physical, and after seven days I was wracked with deep exhaustion, muscle soreness, and shin splints. I will continue to defend the reasons why I think hiking the Iditarod Trail has potential to be more “fun” than cycling, but concede that it’s significantly more painful.