Into the North Wind: A thousand-mile bicycle adventure across frozen Alaska

by Jill Homer

  After letting the pain course through my body, I was sufficiently satisfied that nothing was broken. Still, my arm was sore and throbbed painfully whenever I gripped the handlebar. I attempted to steer one-handed through the thickening maze of alder branches and stream ice, but fear of crashing again coaxed me to endure the pain.

  A few more miles of tender steering brought me to the top of the Dalzell Gorge, an infamous segment where Pass Creek empties into Dalzell Creek and cascades down a narrow gorge with sheer rock walls on both sides. The “trail” is a series of ice bridges over the creek, prone to collapsing into the rushing water. When I walked through this gorge in 2014, there was no snow cover at all, and I had to anchor sharp cleats and trekking poles into wet, sloping ice as my sled yanked toward open leads. I was terrified of taking a bike through the Dalzell Gorge, even more so now that my arm was compromised.

  Just as I braced for the icy descent, I saw another cyclist pushing his bike toward me. Bartosz was a Polish man, bald and barrel-chested with a beak-like nose. He was a rookie in the 350-mile race.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, since he was walking in the wrong direction. “What’s wrong?”

  “I am looking for hotel,” he said in a particularly garbled Polish accent.

  “Oh, ha ha,” I laughed, presuming he was making a joke. We were on the western side of the Alaska Range, deep in a frozen gorge, still a hundred miles from the nearest village. Even Alaska doesn’t get much more remote than this spot.

  Bartosz responded with a confused look that led me to believe he was genuinely looking for a hotel. “I just saw it,” he said. “It was right over here somewhere.” As I scrunched my face into a concerned frown, he moaned, “I am sooooo sleepy.”

  I realized that it was Bartosz I saw late the previous evening in Puntilla, as I briefly awoke while snoozing in the wet bed. He was sitting in a chair, holding his boot next to the extinguished wood stove. He told another rider that he’d soaked his foot in a river, and was only going to stay long enough to dry his boot. I doubted that he succeeded in drying his boot, and probably hadn’t slept at all, possibly since the start of the race two days earlier.

  “Hey, I think you’re hallucinating,” I said. “There’s no hotel.”

  Bartosz continued to look confused. “I just saw it.”

  “Well, we’re only eight miles from Rohn,” I said, referring to the next checkpoint — a tent camp next to an uninhabited shelter cabin that was used once a year during the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. “Why don’t you stick with me and we’ll ride there right now? Easier than finding a hotel?”

  Bartosz beamed and nodded vigorously. We continued down the trail, with him hugging my rear wheel but saying nothing as we swooped into the gorge. There were a few rollers with steep climbs. I felt compelled to crank up them to save face, and still Bartosz had no problem keeping up with me. Clearly this guy was a strong rider, even if a bit bonkers.

  We hit the creek bottom, where I expected to encounter deadly glare ice. Instead we found smooth snow and robust ice bridges supported by tree trunks. A week earlier, the Iditarod Dog Sled Race had sent a half dozen volunteers to Rohn to work on the trail, in response to complaints from mushers about dangerous conditions during previous years. The trail they built was professional grade, with banked turns that seemed custom-built for mountain biking. The volunteers even cut notches through ice walls — at some point earlier in the winter, an ice dam blocked the gorge, forming a temporary lake that later washed out and left behind shelves up to six feet thick. Frozen waterfalls draped from the cliffs, and the route continued to wind through narrow passages in a dense canyon forest. Even a sore arm couldn’t diminish the thrill of this descent.

  Bartosz and I popped out of the forest at the Tatina River, where the narrow Dalzell Gorge empties into a much wider canyon. We pedaled over a benign-looking ice bridge onto the main river channel. I even stopped to capture photos of Bartosz in front of the canyon’s towering peaks. Just two days later, warm temperatures created open leads in this same spot, forcing a few cyclists and foot racers to bash through the woods along the river bank. One foot racer, Peter Ripmaster, attempted a crossing and crashed through a precariously refrozen ice bridge, plunging over his head in frigid water. Before the current could push him under the ice, he managed to spread his arms onto a solid shelf and pull himself out of the river, flopping like a seal as ice shattered around him. Everything from his clothing to his sled was soaked and quickly freezing. All he could do was sprint the remaining four miles to Rohn, where he was able to dry his gear overnight. If it had been any colder than the thirty degrees it was at the time, he might have succumbed to hypothermia before he reached the tent camp. What happened to Peter was my worst nightmare — the scenario to which I gave the most headspace during nighttime fretting sessions — and I admired him for continuing toward McGrath after that incident. If I had nearly drowned in the Tatina, I no doubt would have quit the race immediately and called in a thousand-dollar air taxi flight out of Rohn.

  Two days before Peter’s plunge into the Tatina, skies were blue and the river was a tranquil plain of snow-covered ice. Sunset was still more than an hour away when I arrived at the tent camp, situated at the confluence of the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River. The checkpoint was designated “Rob’s Roadhouse” in honor of a longtime volunteer who died during an Alaska wilderness race in 2014. Rob drowned after his packraft capsized in the Tana River. His death was a reminder that we may view the world as a beautiful playground, but it remains indifferent to our presence. Life hangs by a delicate thread everywhere.

  At Rohn I stayed only long enough to enjoy a bratwurst cooked up by a volunteer who was a friend of Rob’s, change my socks, and restock my bike with food and batteries from my drop bag. The volunteer made me a second sausage after I admitted to feeling ravenous. Bartosz walked into the tent and minutes later had passed out with his boots on while lying on a pile of spruce branches. When I left, the sun was gone and the whole sky was a bright shade of pink. Bolstered by a stomach full of protein and a bike full of everything I needed for days in the wilderness, I pedaled across the well-frozen Kuskokwim River with a grin that no doubt could still be seen from Rohn.

  How did this become my life? I’m just extremely lucky, that’s all.

  Chapter 8

  The Boundless Night

  Even on the first day of March, night in Interior Alaska feels boundless. Darkness is crushed into every horizon without a hint of light pollution to look toward for comfort. As much as I enjoyed my solo push over Rainy Pass, solitude became a menacing phantom after sunset.

  In these rolling hills that border the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River, the forest had been scoured by wildfires. Charred and twisted tree skeletons leaned into the trail, which was a patchwork of dirt, matted yellow grass and amber sheets of ice. Snow was again absent in this valley, located on the dry side of the Alaska Range. What little precipitation falls here is quickly scattered by incessant winds. Without snow to reflect a headlamp beam, this particular night seemed enormously dark. I couldn’t see anything beyond a table-sized circle of dim light, and this blindness illuminated how alone I was out here. Bartosz remained at Rob’s Roadhouse to sleep off his soothing delusions. As brief and strange as our partnership had been, I already missed him.

  I hadn’t yet connected with Beat on the satellite phone. Based on memories from our walk together in 2014, I imagined him approaching Winter Lake Lodge at that moment. There, the trail zigzags between forests and swamps. Reflective trail markers can capture light a half mile away, deceiving travelers into believing they are closer to something resembling civilization. Out here, in the burned hills west of Rohn, permanent trail markers were dulled with dirt and soot. Thin clouds dimmed the stars, and black ice entombed the trail in fathomless reflections.

  Pedaling over frozen dirt felt like real mountain biking, with grass clumps — called tussocks —
adding fun technical features. The ice, however, became infuriating. Most of it had formed from water seeping out of the ground rather than snow melt, and it was the same color as dirt, only slippery. In the low light I couldn’t discern patches of ice from anything else, and made numerous steering errors that sent me skidding toward skeleton trees. When I went to grab the brakes, my numb right hand had no strength. I began to use only my left (front wheel) brake to arrest skids, which eventually caused the bike to flip forward, tossing me onto the hard ground. There were other crashes, too, when I tipped over on off-camber ice or instinctively bailed when I lost control of the bike.

  I don’t think I’ve ever — even as a small child — ridden a bicycle so badly. I had no idea what was wrong with me. Studded tires should have offered more solid traction, if I wasn’t steering so spastically. The crashes prompted me to ride slower and hit the front brake more often, which only made my handling worse. My arm was still throbbing and swollen from the crash earlier in the day. Combined with a numb hand and shoulder pain from the previous week, it seemed plausible that I’d lost the majority of my strength on my right side, causing this imbalance. Perhaps poor visibility also contributed. Perhaps I was just tired. I still felt wound up, but endorphins have that effect. When I looked at my phone, it was 10:30 p.m., which was the same time I stopped the previous evening.

  “I’ll bivy here and ride the rest in the morning,” I decided. I believed the worst of the bumpy ice would end where the trail dropped out of the foothills at the Farewell Lakes, still about fifteen miles away. All of the crashes had rattled my morale, and I was walking more than riding. Fifteen miles might take me as many as five hours at this timid pace. Daylight and more confident riding could reduce that distance to two hours.

  It was a wise decision, but the burned-out forest wasn’t the best place to bed down for the night. Snow only covered the tundra in small, petrified patches. The rest of the ground was tangled with berry bushes and basketball-size tussocks. A stiff breeze made the moderate temperature — fourteen degrees — feel much lower, and the toothpick trees provided no shelter from the wind. Still, this was a nice campsite compared to others I’d no doubt encounter if I ventured beyond McGrath. I knew I could use the practice.

  I ventured through the brambles until I found a patch of concrete snow large enough to lay out my bivy sack. Propping the bike against a toothpick tree, I stuffed my coats in a sack to use as a pillow, buckled my overboots around the bike frame so the wind wouldn’t blow them away, and wedged my boots against the rear wheel for the same reason. Hunkering into my billowing sleeping bag, I felt a wash of tranquility, as though I was being tucked into a warm bed by someone who loved me.

  “It doesn’t get better than this,” I whispered hoarsely as I watched the sky for Northern Lights, until my nose tingled with the cold. I slipped deeper into the bag and drifted to sleep.

  The phone, with no reception but an alarm set for five in the morning, rang loudly inside my bag. I sat up and blinked in confusion, understanding where I was but without a concept of time. Did I really just sleep uninterrupted for six hours? Here in this spooky burned forest? And why was it still pitch dark outside? Shouldn’t it be morning?

  Crawling out of a warm sleeping bag is harsh in any weather, but subzero wind chills and pre-dawn darkness have a way of making this feel suicidal. I shivered violently as I packed up my gear. My right hand and arm were still deeply sore, and my feet felt like they were encased in ice — which they were in now-frozen boots. Even though I could barely feel my extremities, I decided breakfast was in order. I was standing next to my empty campsite and gnawing on a frozen Snickers Bar when an Italian cyclist passed on the trail. He shined his headlamp toward me, and I shined mine back on a concerned face.

  “You are okay?” he yelled loudly.

  “I’m fine,” I said, with a more exasperated tone than I intended. “I’m just getting up for the morning. I’ll be right behind you.”

  It was certainly nice of this man to check on me — and I would have done the same — but the alarm in his voice revealed an attitude common among Iditarod cyclists: that stopping was something we did only in emergencies. Otherwise, we just raced until we reached outposts of civilization, then raced some more. These quiet moments — not racing or recovering, but simply existing in rare spaces — were often overlooked entirely. Sure, camping on an ice slab in a burned-out forest, in Alaska, in March, wasn’t a typical pastime. But it had been a wonderful respite.

  Morning riding was not better than night riding. Even well rested, I was still terrified of slipping on ice and overreacted to obstacles, which ironically caused more crashing. If I had to guess how many times my body hit the ground in the fifteen-mile segment between the Post River crossing and the Farewell Lakes, I would say at least six, with a dozen more near-misses. Luckily none of these crashes led to new injuries, but it had gotten to the point where I was resigned to walking my bike the next fifty miles to Nikolai. Finally, purple hues began to spread across the sky. The flat light of dawn proved to be better for depth perception than the harsh contrast of the headlight, and my handling improved.

  Near the first Farewell Lake, evidence of the trail largely disappeared beneath bison-stomped swamps. I followed faint scratches in the ice to a well-defined trail that snaked up a hill. I labored up the trail for a half hour before memory kicked in and reminded me that there were no big climbs before the Farewell Lakes. I was off route. Exasperated, I rocketed down the hill and encountered two other racers, Amy and Cody Breen, a couple from Anchorage who were racing to McGrath. As I explained why I believed this was the wrong way, they both looked at me like I’d been up smoking crack all night.

  “What other trails are there?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe someone has a vacation home,” I shrugged. “I only know that there are no climbs near the Farewell Lakes. The Iditarod Trail stays low.”

  It was clear they didn’t believe me. My vacation home theory was pretty ridiculous, given there were no roads, airstrips, or anything else nearby. I turned and continued backward on the trail, and Amy and Cody didn’t follow. After several minutes of picking my way around open leads in a stream and finally crossing a narrow ice bridge, I finally located a yellow triangle indicating the Iditarod Trail.

  “It’s here!” I called out to them. “I see a marker!”

  The three of us shadowed each other across the glare ice of the first Farewell Lake, where we encountered Bartosz, again riding backward on the route. He must have passed while I was sleeping. Given how long it took me to pack up camp, crash my bike a bunch of times, and wander for forty-five minutes off route, it was strange he wasn’t farther ahead.

  “I can’t find the trail,” he announced. “Where is it?”

  Amy pointed to a line of wooden lath that had been hammered into the ice by Iron Dog trail breakers. I also thought they looked fairly obvious, but Bartosz remained skeptical. Still, he maintained a jovial demeanor, and I found it humorous — with dashes of both pity and admiration — that a Polish man who lived in England was so happy to bumble around haplessly in remote Alaska. He latched onto our group and shadowed Amy and Cody as they quickly outpaced me on the lake. The surface was so clear that I could see blades of grass and what I convinced myself were fish on the shallow lake bottom. My own anxiety from bumbling around haplessly had significantly abated, but I was still terrified of falling through thin ice.

  As the day brightened and warmed, the four of us tackled the rolling hills beyond the Farewell Lakes, a deceptively tough section of trail rippled with seemingly endless hundred-foot climbs and descents. Although we drifted apart, I could occasionally see Amy and Cody on the crest of the next hill, and Bartosz one or even two hills behind. Whenever I looked back, the jagged crown of the Alaska Range stretched across the horizon — a stunning landmark demonstrating how far we’d traveled.

  Almost exactly halfway between R
ohn and Nikolai, the trail crests one last forested ridge and drops into a sweeping, swamp-inundated valley called the Farewell Burn. The Burn earned its name when a massive wildfire raged through the area in 1978. Nearly four decades of regrowth have restored the landscape, in a unique way. With spruce trees that are all roughly the same age and height, the boreal forest resembles a Christmas tree farm, only haunted. The trees have grown so closely together that twisting branches weave an impenetrable wall on both sides of the trail. Branches that lean away from the prevailing wind form a menacing canopy. When the wind moans overhead, the spooky vibe of this claustrophobic corridor is overwhelming.

  Riding through the revitalized Farewell Burn on a sunny Wednesday afternoon dimmed its ghostly effect. This was surprisingly disappointing. I’d first experienced the Burn at thirty-five below zero, wracked with violent shivering while ducking hurricane-force wind gusts. The second time I visited this place, Beat and I walked through the night as subzero temperatures coated the conifers in wraithy frost. This time around, the afternoon was warm and bright, and I could see this forest for its trees, stunted and benign as they were.

  When thrills abate, tedium fills in the empty space. Adding to the slow grind was the state of the trail, which was rippled with snowmobile moguls. Different from the pump track before Winter Lake Lodge, these moguls were more solid, taller, and spaced closely together. It was impossible to achieve any sort of flow. Instead, riding this undulating trail felt like climbing hundreds of tiny hills, mashing the pedals up and coasting down. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t boost my average speed above five miles per hour. Although I acknowledged this was the Iditarod Trail and I couldn’t complain about any trail conditions solid enough to support a bike, the back-wrenching fluctuations left me feeling grumpy. With no imaginary zombie trees or deadly cold to distract me, only hard work remained.