by Jill Homer
Forty miles passed quickly, and I didn’t even pause until I reached the ghost town of Ophir. This cluster of uninhabited log cabins left over from the Gold Rush was used as a checkpoint for the sled dog race, but sat empty the rest of the year. Ophir was the landmark where I intended to camp for the night and ponder whether I was ready to make the full commitment. The first Iditarod mushers wouldn’t pass through for five more days, so I hadn’t expected to see anybody, but smoke was billowing from one of the cabins. A woman emerged from a barn-like building next door and waved at me.
“Do you need anything?” she called out. “Do you want coffee?”
At the place where I was supposed to do my solitary gut check, this unexpected offer caught me off guard, but I nodded gratefully. She directed me toward the wood-heated cabin. The woman and her husband were Iditarod volunteers, preparing the checkpoint for mushers’ arrivals. She heated up water for instant coffee and told me about the origins of the cabin, which was built in 1910. As I gulped down scalding coffee, she offered up a bag of cookies, then encouraged me to take two extra for the road.
“You need the calories more than the volunteers,” she said.
“I don’t know about that. I have a ton of food.” In anticipation of potential storms and becoming stranded in three feet of snow like Beat had the previous year, I’d left McGrath with nearly twelve pounds of food — about five days’ worth — which was everything I could fit on my bike. But I gratefully accepted the cookies and then surprised myself when I turned down an offer to sleep in another unheated cabin.
“I’m hoping to make it to Carlson Crossing,” I said, referring to a public shelter cabin maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. “It’s what, about twenty-eight miles from here?”
“We saw Phil on Wednesday. He told us it’s sixteen from the airstrip, and that’s only a mile from here.”
“Oh wow, seventeen miles would be fantastic,” I said, even though I didn’t remotely believe her. I may have been a Nome rookie, but I knew not to invest too much trust in any information regarding weather or distance, no matter how well-intentioned it was.
Mike still hadn’t caught up as I pedaled away from Ophir an hour later, and I was beginning to wonder whether he had decided to leave McGrath at all. He’d been hedging over his sore knee, and he did look particularly comfortable when he was sitting down to a big plate of mancakes at ten in the morning. Sudden loneliness struck, because although Ophir’s coffee and conversation had been unexpected, it was truly my last chance for outside interaction.
Twilight descended in darker shades of gray as I pedaled past collapsing cabins, skeletal frames of old front-end loaders, abandoned 1970s-era trucks, rusted barrels and piles of twisting metal — all remnants of the mining activity that proliferated in this region during the past century. Gold mining hadn’t been all that lucrative for a few decades, advancing the state of decay. I peeked inside one of the cabins, which looked like a time capsule from 1978, with moldy upholstered furniture and labeled canned goods sitting on shelves. I questioned what was more unnerving — a pristine wilderness ruled by wolves, or a blighted one that had been abandoned by humans in a hurry. Either way, I was entirely at the mercy of the elements in a place so harsh even animals stayed away.
For twelve miles after Ophir, the route contoured hills above a narrow river valley. The trail followed the bed of an old road, complete with concrete bridges across what might otherwise be treacherous ice crossings. I was making great time and anticipated reaching the cabin for early bedtime, until the trail veered around a steep mountain and split at a junction. To the left was the Iditarod Trail’s southern route — used during odd-numbered years by the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, this equally remote trail was put in place solely to guide mushers to villages at the southern end of the Yukon River. To the right was the northern route, used during even-numbered years by the sled dog race, every year by the Iron Dog snowmobile race, and the one we’d follow this year as well.
I walked a short distance out the southern route to appease my curiosity. It wouldn’t be traveled by any racers this year, but there was a smooth and fairly hard-packed trail broken by unknown snowmobilers. The northern route, conversely, was an utter mess. As soon as the road bed ended, the smooth base and any use by sane snowmobile drivers disappeared. What remained was the result of two-hundred Iron Dog racers tearing up the trail at more than sixty miles an hour, after two feet of snow fell onto bare, partially thawed ground. Their hard accelerations and aggressive turns dug into the powder and tossed it in every direction. Now that two weeks of hard freezes and occasional thaws had passed, the trail had solidified into a bumpy disaster — ridges up to two feet high and sheer drops into exposed tussocks and frozen mud.
As a mountain biker, I’d compare this terrain to riding over the dry bed of a mountain river, with endless finessing over and around large boulders. For snow biking, it was exceedingly technical — fun when you’re looking for a challenge, but less fun when you’re tired and hungry and just want to be somewhere. The sun set, and temperatures quickly plunged below zero. I was working so hard to navigate the moguls that I felt no need to add layers.
Even though I was sitting in the saddle and pedaling the entire time, the first four miles of this frozen-boulder trail took nearly an hour to complete. By the end of that hour, my leg muscles were in knots and my emotions were nearing a full-tantrum meltdown. Much of this frustration stemmed from misdirected expectations. I anticipated being alone in a wasteland, facing forty-below temperatures, powering through steep climbs and descents, and managing complete self-sufficiency for the next two-hundred miles. I didn’t anticipate a strenuous technical challenge that was going to demand more strength and patience than I had to spare.
Just as I stepped off the bike and held gloved, clenched fists against my ice-encrusted eyes, I noticed a headlamp beam approaching from behind. I turned as its source called out an enthusiastic “Wooooo!”
It was Mike, of course. The dude’s body language was exuberant, with shoulders raised and a grin visible from a distance, even in the gray twilight. He barreled over the snow boulders like a teenager in a terrain park.
“How are you doing? How’s your knee?” I asked as he pulled up behind me.
“It’s okay,” he said. “A little stiff. Hey, you don’t have any KT tape on you, do you?”
I shook my head. “I have some Leuko tape that I use for blisters. Might work. Do you want some?”
“I’ll wait until we get to the cabin. We’re almost there.”
I shook my head. “It’s twelve miles away. Could be three, four more hours if these bumps continue.”
“No,” Mike said with over-exaggerated indignation. “The lady said it was sixteen miles from Ophir. That’s what Phil told her.”
“You believed her? We’ve already gone sixteen miles since Ophir. It’s twelve more. Trust me. I wish it were anything else.”
Mike considered this. “I’m not even sure I can make it tonight,” I continued. “I’m exhausted. I may need to camp before Carlson Crossing. You go. You’re faster than me.”
“We’ll make it. We’ll make it together!” Mike yelled, his exuberance returning.
Mike launched ahead and I shadowed closely behind, attempting to mimic his maneuvers because he seemed more technically skilled than me. His overstuffed seat post bag swayed in a humorous fashion, and I lost concentration and toppled over onto an exposed patch of tussocks. He didn’t notice and pulled away. I thought he was gone, but five minutes later, I found him leaning against his bike next to a stream bank, waiting for me.
“How far do you think we’ve gone?” he asked.
I looked at my GPS. “Three quarters of a mile.”
“No. Is that all?”
“Sadly.”
When we rode together on the first day of the race, Mike and I discussed some of the races I’ve run. After I veheme
ntly defended sled-dragging, he assumed I was primarily a runner who only occasionally rode bikes. As we resumed bopping along the bumpy trail, he asked, “How fast do you think you could run this stuff?”
“Probably same speed, four or five miles per hour,” I said. “But not with a sled. With a sled, I’d be ridiculously slow. And even more grumpy.”
“I bet we can do ten-minute miles,” he said, turning the comparison back to running vernacular. “Two more hours.”
The pedaling effort was already more strenuous than any ten-minute mile I had ever run. Enduring twelve miles at that pace would be like running a half marathon up a steep and rocky mountain, with a heavy pack. Mike surged ahead and I summoned all of my reserves to keep up.
“I might need to let you go ahead,” I gasped. “I’m having trouble breathing.”
He slowed again. We resumed the fifteen-minute-miles as I concentrated on taking deep breaths through a face mask that was soaked with respiration. After a few more trundling miles, I wasn’t entirely sure his slow speeds were for my benefit. His body language was decidedly more subdued. Conversation ceased. Mike stopped in the middle of the trail to shovel food in his mouth, so I did the same. He handed me a log-sized frozen sausage stick from which I gnawed little chunks, and I shared handfuls of M&Ms. Mike and I could make a good team, I thought, like the odd couple — Mike being the eternally optimistic, goofy young guy, and me being the pessimistic, realist old guy.
Nearly two hours later, after covering a blistering six miles, I announced we were halfway there. Mike was incredulous.
“I don’t like that GPS,” he said.
“I love GPS,” I countered. “GPS tells me the truth, and it never lies. I’d probably go crazy if I let myself believe the cabin was sixteen miles from Ophir. By now it’s been five hours, so it must be right around the next corner. How do you cope when it’s not?”
Mike shrugged. “I’d get there eventually.”
The truth can be its own burden, though, when the night stretches out indefinitely and fatigued concentration pulls thoughts into a place where time and space are fluid. After days had passed and GPS still displayed a three-mile gap, I was beginning to wonder if I was losing my mind.
“Maybe there is no end,” I whispered into a cloud of my own breath. Mike was a hundred feet ahead, head lowered and shoulders hunched as his bike bucked and swayed through the yawning darkness. “Maybe this is all there is.”
This would be a proper purgatory for me — seeking respite that never comes, with a companion in sight but too far away to feel connected, riding a bicycle at my physical limit to achieve walking speeds, in the dark, in the cold, on terrain so technical that I could focus only on pedaling and steering, and couldn’t retreat to deeper thoughts or happier memories.
Still, when Mike stopped and pulled out his sausage log and a bag of crushed potato chips, the angst momentarily faded. We’d fill our mouths with salted satisfaction and stare up at waves of green light making their way across an unobstructed sky.
“Maybe this is heaven.” I always suspected that if there is an afterlife, the contents of it will reflect life experiences — a sort of ongoing consciousness rather than physical existence. Maybe heaven and hell are not only individual, but one and the same.
It wasn’t our turn to slip into eternity yet, although it felt that way by the time the cabin finally appeared around the next corner. It was well beyond two in the morning. The cabin stood on a wind-swept bank at the edge of the Innoko River, flanked by birch trees and barren ground. Mike and I propped our bikes against the porch and robotically launched into a flurry of chores. I hauled a pot and empty dry sack out to the river to skim snow off the ice, then fired up my stove to make drinking water. Mike found a couple of big logs and dragged them to a clearing to split them apart while I stripped to my base layer and hung sweaty jackets and socks on the wall, anticipating the drying warmth of a fire.
With the fire started and our bagged meals rehydrating in hot water, Mike again went outside. He was still absent ten minutes later when I realized the snow sack was empty, and left the cabin to collect more. Out on the river, a hundred yards upstream from where I crouched without a headlamp, I saw Mike. He was standing on the ice wearing only boots and bike shorts, rubbing snow into the bare skin on his scalp and chest. As best as I could tell, he was bathing, which I thought was an impressively brazen act in a place far beyond the sensibilities of civilization … a place where truly no one cared if we smelled like sweat and sausage log … a place where taking a shower meant dousing one’s naked body in snow when temperatures were below zero. We’d just left McGrath that morning, so I still felt relatively clean, but I could hardly imagine ever feeling so wretched that I would endure the cold to that degree.
I didn’t tell Mike I had caught him bathing when he returned to the cabin, smiling and shivering. “There’s some hot water,” I said, pointing to his Nalgene bottle.
“Oh great, I’ve been out of water for a while.” I also found this statement interesting — he was out of drinking water and no doubt was as hungry and tired as I was, but his first priorities were fire and personal hygiene.
Mike took the water and produced a small bottle of Fireball — cinnamon whiskey. At this point I was incredulous. Did this guy take anything seriously?
“It’s great in hot chocolate,” he said. “Try it.”
“Oh no, no, whiskey is the last thing I need,” I said. “I’m about to lose consciousness as it is.”
“Just try some,” he urged.
I reluctantly poured a few capfuls into my own mug of hot chocolate and took a sip. The cocktail was a taste sensation unlike any I had experienced — a sharp injection of warmth and vitality infused with sweet and spicy richness. “Wow … that’s just … amazing,” I stammered, genuinely floored.
“Told yah,” he said. “It’s extra weight but worth it.”
We finished up our bagged meals and settled in to sleep in the lap of luxury — the musty interior of a log cabin that smelled of pine wood and gasoline, with dust clouds swirling near the windows, capturing the silver moonlight.
*****
I made the mistake of not setting an alarm, justifying this with the excuse that I needed sleep to recover from our hard ride. Mike, of course, didn’t stir all morning. By the time I hobbled outside to pack up my bike, the winter sun was high in the sky. Sam and Katie — the touring couple from Durango — rode up to the cabin just as I was pulling away.
“Did you guys camp last night?” I asked.
Sam nodded. “About ten miles back. We’re just thinking about stopping here for lunch.”
“Lunch? What time is it?” I asked.
“12:30.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling deflated. Lazing around past noon was not an ideal approach to any race. “We got in really late last night. I had no idea it was after noon. Oh. Shoot.”
“We hoped to make it here last night too, but it was getting too late,” Sam said.
“The trail got slow, didn’t it? Are you shooting for Innoko tonight?” I asked, referring to the next shelter cabin.
“Yeah. It’s probably going to be a late night for us.”
“Us too, I suppose, now that it’s past noon. It’s forty-five miles to Innoko. I’m thinking ten, eleven hours.”
“Sounds about right,” Sam said. It was gratifying to hear someone else confirm my pessimistic projections. Mike was no doubt snoozing peacefully on his cot, secure in the hope that trail conditions would suddenly transform to smooth, fast ice that we could blast through the Innoko Valley at ten miles per hour.
Mike would have to rejoin reality eventually, and I figured I’d see him by nightfall. The one shred of optimism that I clung to — a hope that the trail would ride better in daylight — was shattered when I crossed the smooth river and returned to the bone-jarring grind. The valley’s snowpack had thi
nned considerably since Ophir, and beside the route there was only a thin layer of sugary snow mottled with bowling-ball-sized tussocks. Tall moguls still rippled across the trail where hard-packed snow had resisted recent thaws. I bobbed along at my predicted four and a half miles per hour, examining the tracks of the cyclists who were now two to three days in front of me. No one had used this trail since, and the cyclists’ perfectly preserved tire and boot marks told stories of swerving struggles and hopeful surges.
The area had recently burned, and the charred toothpick forests opened views of domed mountains surrounding the valley. I’d imagined this land as flat, with geography to match its blankness on the map. But the reality was as undulating as the trail, with seemingly endless drainages to climb and descend. At the bottom of every drainage was a creek. Some were wide and frozen solid. Others were narrow and flowing, with unstable ice bridges spanning the frigid water. Others were inundated with slushy overflow, with no guarantees of solid ice underneath. Each crossing spiked my heart rate, and adrenaline carried me up the next hill.
It was still early in the afternoon when I passed a cluster of burlap sacks next to the trail on an open slough — the supplies we had prepared for ourselves, which were air-dropped by the race organizers. It was only about eighty miles from McGrath, and I’d consumed fewer than two of the twelve pounds of food I’d carried from town. Briefly embarrassed by this excessiveness, I still sat down and sorted through my bag, restocking anything I could cram into empty spaces. There was no way to predict the next hundred and twenty miles, and I knew a storm could pin me down for days without warning. This is the burden of the pessimist — I’d rather endure slowness and fatigue than the misery of fretting about what might happen if I didn’t have enough food or gear.
Darkness arrived soon afterward — the burden of sleeping in. My necessary focus waned, leading to more crashes. Across burned and treeless hillsides, the Iron Dog trail was often more than a hundred feet wide. It became impossible to find a consistently rideable line. I’d bounce and swerve and plant my front wheel in a hollow, or veer off the trail into unconsolidated snow. Even pushing the bike was an ankle-rolling affair, and frustration bubbled to the surface. I decided I could no longer handle the truth and switched off the screen on my GPS, so there was no way to monitor my slow rate of progress.