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

by Jill Homer

  *****

  Sullivan Creek is a spring-fed stream that never freezes, so the Bureau of Land Management constructed a bridge. It’s a rare piece of infrastructure in the uninhabited Burn, and lends some assurance to weary travelers that we haven’t teleported to an alien planet. A rusty coffee can on a string allows bridge-crossers to collect water without treading the thin ice along the river bank, so I decided to hunker down here and cook a hot lunch. Three days of racing with no major health problems made continuing beyond McGrath seem more plausible, and I knew I needed to complete at least one more test of wilderness skills. The previous night had been good practice for setting up and breaking down a winter camp, and this would be a good test of firing up my stove to melt snow. Of course I’d done all of these tasks before, but not with the frequency to inspire self-confidence.

  Beat would argue that my lunch stop was not a real test of winter wilderness skills. The wind had calmed to a whisper, and it remained so warm that I kept my hat, coat, and mittens stowed as I scooped water from the stream and pumped fuel into the stove. I fashioned a comfortable recliner from a pile of snow and leaned back on top of my puffy coat, sipping hot coffee as a bag of freeze-dried chicken and noodles rehydrated in the sun. Amy and Cody, who had taken an earlier break, passed one more time. I wished them well in the race, since I clearly wasn’t making my best effort to compete. Although I normally strive to perform as well as I can in a race setting, at this point I’d started focusing on the bigger picture. McGrath wasn’t a finish line; it was just a checkpoint, and an early one at that.

  The relentless snowmobile moguls continued beyond Sullivan Creek. The only respites were wind-swept swamps, where snow gave way to glare ice and tussocks. Miles of this were so exhausting that I slipped into sleepy daydreams without realizing my lack of presence, until a gust of wind hit my face and suddenly the distant profile of Denali was in view. It was stunning, and it had been there all along.

  I reached the village of Nikolai later than I hoped, but it wasn’t yet dark. Nikolai is a rare full-service checkpoint, provided by a local family in their modest home. I arrived during a strange lull in the race, when the competitive end of the mid-pack had already left to make the final push for McGrath, but the back-of-pack had not yet arrived. The home’s residents were exhausted from staying awake for two days and already in bed, so I was all alone in the front room. If I was a rookie in the race, I would have been terribly self-conscious about helping myself in a strange house. But I appreciated the lack of distractions. There was a cold pan of spaghetti on the stove, so I heated it up in the microwave and showed myself to an empty bedroom. I didn’t feel particularly tired at eight in the evening, but wanted to prioritize rest when opportunities arose.

  Instead, I tossed and turned in the overheated room until I heard voices outside. Since I wasn’t sleeping anyway, I decided it was time to pack up and leave. Bartosz had finally found his way to Nikolai, along with Lars and another man, Bob May. With a crazy-eyed twitch that made it seem like he’d ingested too much caffeine, Bob shared a hilarious tale of following the wrong trail sixty miles out of the way on the first day. I organized my things and guffawed as Bob shoveled spaghetti into his mouth and described wandering aimlessly through the woods along an apparent trapper trail until he found his way to Skwentna, having missed the first checkpoint entirely.

  “They’re probably going to disqualify you for that,” I said sympathetically. “You can take any route you want, but you have to hit all the checkpoints.”

  Bob seemed to bristle at this statement but then shrugged. “Well, no reason to travel at night now. I’m going to get some sleep and see the rest of the trail in daylight. You heading out?”

  “Ah, I’ve been here too long already,” I answered. “Yeah, I should go.”

  It was one in the morning. Outside, my thermometer said it was thirteen degrees, but the air felt much colder as I pedaled away from dim electric lights and dropped onto the Kuskokwim River. I left Nikolai wearing layers that earlier had been sufficient for temperatures in the teens, but kinks in the armor revealed themselves when my toes, neck, and lower back began to tingle and go numb. Rather than stop and add more clothing, I made the strange decision to tough it out until sunrise — which wasn’t coming for eight more hours.

  Green aurora rippled overhead, and the smooth expanse of the river allowed me to crane my neck upward for long seconds, absorbing the light dance as I pedaled. It was too cold to stop. When did Alaska become so cold? The trail veered away from the river and cut a straight line across woods and open swamps. With the sky obstructed by trees, I spent more time looking at the trail, observing the tire tracks of others. There was a fresh set of footprints at regular intervals, and whenever I saw boot marks in the snow, I got off the bike and jogged to warm my toes.

  As darkness wore on, I began to see occasional and then frequent canine tracks pressed into the snow, both over and underneath tire tracks. At first I believed the tracks belonged to dog teams, but they were too large for Alaska huskies, and too dispersed for a tethered animal. No, these were wolves, clearly prowling these same corridors. I pointed my headlamp beam where the tracks veered off the trail, and became convinced that I could see the yellow reflections of eyes staring back at me.

  I already had goosebumps from the subzero darkness, but now all of my body hair stood at attention. Wolf attacks on humans are exceedingly rare. Bikers had passed by this spot before me and the wolves left them alone — at least I hadn’t noticed any blood on the snow. And yet, why wouldn’t a pack of wolves take advantage of this situation? We cyclists were meals on wheels out here, doughy and warm and far too slow to run away.

  I continued to shine my headlamp into the yawning darkness, scanning for yellow eyes. Overhead the sky was radiant with green and purple light, but an odd sort of apathy had taken over, muting both fear and wonder. When I stopped to fish a peanut butter cup out of my feed bag, the fingers on my perpetually numb right hand wouldn’t work at all. Suddenly panicked, I shoved my hand down my tights into the warm space between my thighs. I must have looked like a child desperate not to pee her pants as I sprinted back and forth to generate heat. The adrenaline rush sparked renewed lucidity. Finally, I looked at my digital thermometer.

  “Geez, it’s minus ten,” I said out loud. I was wearing the same layers that I’d worn at the start of the race, when it was nearly fifty degrees warmer. The cold creep had been insidiously gradual, pulling me almost imperceptibly from a mild state of discomfort into hypothermia. No wonder my head had gone foggy, my hand entirely numb. I pulled on a balaclava, puffy shorts, and a thick fleece jacket. Although tempted to put on my down parka, I maintained that it was only to be used during stops or extreme situations. Minus ten couldn’t be extreme, or I’d never make it to Nome.

  I pedaled away feeling renewed vitality, but the cold continued to bite at my shoulders and backside. Starting out cold meant I had to pedal hard to maintain body heat, and stopping for any reason invited a shivering chill that took as long as a half hour to recover. Minus ten was a tiptoeing phantom, shadowing me even closer than the wolves whose tracks continued to proliferate along the trail.

  This is the edge we skirt out here, in these inhospitable places beyond the safety nets of modern life. It takes only one overlooked detail to slip into a potentially dangerous hole from which it can be impossible to emerge. Not anticipating a rapid dip in temperatures during a deceptively long night had been a mistake. It was a mistake I’d made before, and probably would again.

  For now, I anticipated daylight even more than my arrival in McGrath, and continued to scan the sky through frost-caked eyelashes, hoping for hints of pink light. By the time the sun cleared the southern horizon, I’d passed a hand-drawn sign announcing I was ten miles from the checkpoint. This news was surprisingly anticlimactic. Even as I anticipated the journey beyond, I expected to feel something more when I neared the end of the short race
after three days and twenty hours — nearly two and a half days faster than my previous finish by bike. I thought I’d feel satisfaction. Elation. But no, as I approached McGrath in the warming sunlight, I felt only the same creeping dread I’d experienced in the days before the race started.

  Arriving shortly after ten in the morning, I wedged my frost-coated body into a home filled to the brim with other cyclists. The scene was chaotic, with a dull roar of voices, sleeping bodies draped over the couch, and people crowded around a kitchen table overflowing with breakfast foods. There was a round of sleepy congratulations, and the homeowner, Peter, asked me if I wanted anything.

  “Coffee?” I said weakly.

  For the past two decades, the center of human-powered Iditarod racing has been the home of Peter and Tracy Schneiderheinze, longtime residents of McGrath. Peter is German with a gruff accent that’s difficult to decipher, and Tracy is a sweet red-haired woman with a grandmotherly presence that can be both sympathetic and firm. Every March, the couple selflessly opens their home to offer racers a luxurious finish line complete with beds, fire crackling in the wood stove, and an unlimited, twenty-four-hour smörgåsbord of home-cooked meals. Peter was frying omelets when I arrived, and offered one of his famous “mancakes” — a kind of pancake on steroids, three inches high, twelve inches diameter, injected with berries, butter, and at least twelve hundred calories. I accepted gratefully and sat down at the table with the other McGrath finishers, answering a smattering of questions and feeling predictably overwhelmed.

  After breakfast, my thoughts fixated on chores. I needed to collect the box of supplies I mailed to McGrath, dry out all of my gear, do my laundry, take one last shower, and make sure everything was in place for the seven hundred miles still in front of me.

  “I need to get it together,” I fretted. My hands were visibly shaking. I looked at others sleeping peacefully on the couch and wondered why I couldn’t feel they way they did — that satisfying combination of accomplishment and relief. My dread had only intensified as I glanced out the window at snow flurries and conceptualized the distance beyond.

  “I can’t believe I came all this way just to feel so bad again,” I complained to Leah, who had arrived about nine hours before me.

  She and others had words of encouragement to offer, but my gut check was failing. Sure, the ride to McGrath had gone well. And sure, I had promised myself that if I arrived here healthy and strong, I would at least start toward Nome. But dread had eroded my resolve. Wearing a T-shirt and yoga pants that Tracy lent to me so I could wash all of my clothing, I traipsed outside into the overcast, ten-degree afternoon to call Beat on the satellite phone. It was our first voice contact since the start. Beat sounded tired but cheerful. He’d come down with food poisoning at Winter Lake Lodge, and had spent the past day struggling to recover. He was resting near the top of Rainy Pass, where the wind was gusting and skies were gray.

  “But it’s so beautiful,” he said. “I wish you were here.”

  “I wish I was there, too,” I said genuinely. I should have walked with Beat. I didn’t want to be alone in the great unknown. I told him about my trepidation, about locking myself in a bathroom so I could cry out of sight from the others, about feeling vastly under-prepared for this monumental task that I’d spent a year convincing myself I wasn’t fit to attempt.

  “How would you feel if you got on a plane right now?” Beat asked.

  “I’d feel terrible,” I sighed. “I’d feel disappointed.”

  “So I guess you know what you want to do.”

  Previously I’d intended to take a shower and a nap, then leave McGrath that same day. After all, I’d arrived early in the morning, and one piece of advice every veteran shared with me was, “Get out of McGrath!” The longer you stay in this warm haven of abundant mancakes, they warned, the less likely you are to leave. As the hours dragged on and my gut check continued to fail, I convinced myself that one last full night of sleep in a warm house would make everything better.

  Mike showed up in the afternoon, and spent most of the remaining daylight hours tinkering with his bike outside. His knee was bothering him, but he also planned to pedal away from McGrath the following morning as long as the pain was manageable. When I admitted my own reservations, he told me he was a pharmacist and had an assortment of asthma medications in his possession. We agreed to set out together, but he warned me that he doesn’t “like to get up early.”

  Five men had gone on to Nome ahead of us: Phil Hoefstetter, a hospital administrator who lived in Nome, was far off the front and nearly halfway across the two hundred miles of utter emptiness that separated McGrath from the Yukon River. Three others — Jay, Kyle, and Bill — appeared to be traveling together about a day behind Phil. Robert Ostrom left just an hour before I arrived in McGrath, but our long stay would put Mike and me a day behind him. It was unlikely we’d ever see any of those guys. Still, there were others coming from behind, including Tim Hewitt and Beat. Relative to previous years on the Iditarod Trail, this was a crowd.

  Just before I went to bed, I sat down at the kitchen table with Bill Merchant. Bill set out a couple of days before the race to drive a snowmobile all the way from Anchorage to McGrath, and planned to leave that evening to return. He took pity on my bruised and swollen right arm — an injury that I’d barely considered amid all of my emotional fretting — and offered his own supply of lidocaine patches to ease the pain. While telling the story of the crash, I mentioned my numb hand, and Tracy Petervary offered up her own padded bike gloves to help relieve pressure.

  Throughout the ride to McGrath, I promised myself that if I failed to reach Nome, I was going to be brutally and publicly honest about the reasons. So without a hint of intimidation, I unabashedly admitted to Bill — who in 2010 told me outright that we needed to discuss my place on the Iditarod Trail, and who had seen me at my worst two months earlier — “I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do this.”

  “You’re braver than you think,” he said, with a sincere grin spreading across his face beneath a handlebar mustache. “Tell you what. All you need to do is go to Ophir. It’s a beautiful ride. Eat something, get some sleep. Do your gut check there.”

  Bill may have been a grizzled Alaskan, but at heart he only wanted others to have the same incredible experiences. I beamed back at him.

  “One day at a time.”

  Chapter 9

  Bumps Along The Way

  At 10:30 Friday morning, after spending twenty-four hours in the lavish oasis of McGrath and finally not able to stand it one minute longer, I made my break for the unknown. Mike wasn’t being facetious when he told me he didn’t do early starts — he was still grazing from the breakfast table when I announced that my pent-up anxiety would explode if I didn’t get out of there. Two other cyclists who had laid over in McGrath — Sam and Katie, a couple from Durango, Colorado, who were not part of the race but were planning to tour the entire Iditarod Trail — also were in no hurry to leave.

  Remounting my bike after a full day felt like prying open rusty hinges in my joints. I pedaled through a maze of snow-covered streets, following Peter on his snowmobile. He hopped off at a crossing of the Kuskokwim River and pointed to a lone pyramid-shaped mountain to the west.

  “Stay to the right of the mountain, and you’ll be fine,” he said gruffly. I reached out to give him a hug.

  “Thanks for everything you do,” I said. I figured his was the last friendly face I’d see for a while.

  Pedaling away from town, I assessed my physical state. The injured arm and hand were tender and numb, but the rest of my body was surprisingly nimble. My butt wasn’t sore, and my legs felt strong. During my two previous 350-mile finishes, I arrived in McGrath sufficiently broken. In 2008, I struggled to drag myself up the stairs after the six-day bike ride. In 2014, a week of dragging a sled for eighteen hours a day left me with painful shin splints and crushing fatigue. Those ex
periences made Nome seem physically impossible, and it took a big leap of faith just to challenge the notion that 350 miles of the Iditarod Trail was truly all I could handle. Even though I believed I could surmount pain with mental toughness, I continued to be astounded by how efficiently a focused mind can drive my body. Simply by deciding that I wasn’t close to being done, my body wasn’t close to being spent.

  Despite feeling fresh and strong, the tears started to flow when I looked back toward McGrath’s radio tower and remembered what I was actually doing. The village of Takotna was just fifteen miles away, and beyond that was a depth of remoteness I had not yet experienced. The two-hundred miles separating Takotna from the Yukon River were inhabited by no one. There were a few abandoned mining camps, but this swath of the Interior saw no winter travel beyond the Iditarod races and the occasional snowmobile-driving tourist. The land was so desolate that even hunting and trapping were infrequent, because there were few animals. It was, I reminded myself, the kind of place where one could wallow in deep snow and minus-fifty temperatures for ten days without encountering anyone.

  This day was gray and mild, with temperatures around twenty degrees and intermittent snow showers. I fell into a quiet rhythm, climbing along the base of the pyramid mountain and descending into Takotna. The village was eerily quiet for the early afternoon. Chained dogs slept in front of shuttered homes, not even barking at me as I passed. Beyond Takotna, the trail veered back into the hills, rising more than a thousand feet on an old road bed, then traversing a ridge beside the fog-shrouded peaks of unnamed mountains.