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

by Jill Homer

  I pedaled timidly as the wind blasted my side with shards of snow. Feathery drifts swirled over the ice. A chill needled into my face mask, so I stopped to adjust it. When I looked up, I saw the silhouetted profile of a mountain so eerily familiar that the chill rippled through my spine, because of course I hadn’t been here before. It was a broad peak with sheer cliffs that plummeted directly into the river, rendered by the moonlight in high-contrast silver and black. Was this spooky recognition something from a dream? A dark premonition? And then the memory came to me. It was Steve’s photograph. This was the place where he learned his wife had died.

  Mystery dissolved into sadness, which bubbled over into more tears. I was ashamed. Similar to my experience at Little Mountain a year earlier, it seemed inappropriate to indulge in such reactive emotions. It wasn’t my place to feel so sad. And yet, a large part of the human condition is empathy toward others’ experiences. I held my limp hand to my chest and drew a cross over my heart.

  “I was many thousand miles from home.”

  The streets of Koyukuk felt as empty as the mile-wide river stretching beyond the village. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to move past the companionship of other people, even if they were strangers, perhaps unwelcoming, and hidden away in their homes. The school was locked, so I pushed my bike into the playground and rolled out my bivy sack on a patch of gravel next to the slide. Electric street lamps illuminated the snow-covered schoolyard, and I felt comforted by the yellow glow.

  The temperature was a moderate seven degrees, but I became chilled as I struggled to put on my down coat and pants. The numbness in my right hand was becoming worse, to the point that it was affecting mobility. This sharp reduction in dexterity and strength in my dominant hand was a worrisome injury to incur. Out here, my life might depend on an ability to zip up a coat quickly, start a fire, or fix a broken bicycle chain. Limited use of my hand meant limited trust in my survival skills. My frustration compounded as I struggled to strike a match, and then repeatedly failed to light my stove. I was just lucky it was a forgiving seven degrees, as this kind of delay at forty below could rapidly spiral into danger. Jack London’s short story, “To Build a Fire” — in which a series of mishaps causes a man to freeze his hands, leading to his death — came to mind.

  Although I managed all the chores of cooking dinner, melting snow, and unrolling my bivy sack, a rigid hand meant everything took twice as long as it should have. After curling up in my sleeping bag, I spent several minutes massaging my hand and wrist. Even warmed up, the fingers refused to clench into a fist.

  “We’re sure fragile creatures, aren’t we?” I thought with disgust. First it was my lungs. Now this. I wondered whether the numbness was caused by vibrations from the handlebars, cold temperatures, or impact from a crash. But it didn’t really matter. My hand had undoubtedly gone bad. Now it was just a question of whether I could stay out of “To Build a Fire” scenarios for the rest of the journey to Nome, which was still more than four hundred miles away.

  *****

  Dawn’s gray shadows cast Koyukuk in a depressing light as I rose to streets still empty at seven in the morning. Many of the homes were windowless, constructed with particle board or logs, with some leaning dramatically over unstable foundations. This is the physical reality of villages where nearly half of the population lives below poverty line, supplies are expensive and difficult to ship, subsistence-based livelihoods have been compromised by decades of cultural suppression, alcohol abuse is rampant, and resources for health and safety are limited. Even before factoring in climate change, challenging weather, and winter darkness, life is hard in rural Alaska. Suicide and domestic violence rates are extremely high, and populations are declining as young people take any opportunity to leave.

  I can’t pretend to understand what life is like in rural Alaska, but I do wonder what will happen to these communities in the next fifty years. I can only imagine extremes — abandonment after the economics become completely unsustainable, or an onslaught of development after climate change creates a more desirable environment for outsiders. Even if a happier scenario can be realized, dramatic change is inevitable. I felt grateful for this opportunity to experience the Iditarod Trail at what may just be the end of an era.

  As I wheeled my bike past rusted goal posts in a snow-covered soccer field, a young man approached from the street. He appeared intoxicated, but in a subdued way. His gaze was piercing and vacant at the same time, and he regarded me — an unaccompanied white woman with a bicycle — with no hint of surprise.

  “Are you looking for wash-ateria?” he asked.

  “No, I’m just passing through,” I said. I didn’t want to admit I camped in the schoolyard overnight, although he appeared to be wandering aimlessly and likely already noticed my bike propped against the swing set.

  “It opens at eight. You can wash something.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m good. I’m going to Nulato. Do you know how far away it is?”

  He looked thoughtful. “No. Hey, what’s your name?”

  I told him.

  “Are you on Facebook?”

  I laughed. This guy was clearly drunk at seven in the morning, but he wasn’t threatening and he was friendly enough. “Yes. You?”

  He grinned. I noticed he was missing a few teeth, even though he looked to be in his early twenties. “Yeah.”

  “Well, look me up if you get a chance,” I said.

  “Okay!” he said excitedly, and took off at a full run up the street. I didn’t get his name and felt disappointed that he surely wouldn’t remember our conversation. I would have liked having a Facebook friend in Koyukuk.

  Back on the Yukon River, the temperature was a brisk eight below zero, with a quartering wind nipping at my nose. During mornings after a night outside, I had a more difficult time recovering. My arms and legs were stiff, and sleepiness cut so deep that for an hour my vision was blurry. While I relished the limitless independence I felt every time I awoke to ice and snow — still alive — the energy expenditure required to survive a subzero campout seemed to take a toll. Although I was technically resting while I set up camp, cooked, slept, and packed up in the morning, my body still had to work incredibly hard to produce the heat that filled my insulated clothing and sleeping bag. The urgency of mornings highlighted just how much energy I was expending all of the time, and this same urgency limited the number of calories I ate as I hurried through my chores. After ten days on the trail, the appreciating energy deficit was becoming apparent around my hips and thighs, where both body fat and muscle protein were being rapidly consumed.

  Running a calorie and protein deficit while riding a bike all day in freezing weather generates incredible fatigue. It’s difficult to quantify, because after ten days my body was so entrenched in survival mode that it was tapping into veins of energy that haven’t been used by a majority of humans since the Bronze Age. Every muscle fiber was engaged, in ways I wouldn’t have even noticed were it not for the soreness emanating from inexplicable places, such as my ribs and forearms. Energy is extracted from every available cell because the body has no choice — a halt in heat production would mean death.

  My body was still operating well, and yet my mind was unbelievably tired. With shoulders slumped and head lowered, I blinked through frosted eyelashes, straining and failing to sharpen the focus of blurred river bluffs and washed-out marks on the trail.

  The Iditarod didn’t offer a moment of respite. Back on the river, recent winds had buried the trail in several inches of unconsolidated snow. “Sugar,” as this wind-drifted snow is often called, is composed of polished, round crystals that won’t adhere to anything else. Increased village traffic only worsened the sand-like surface as snowmobile tracks stirred up the drifts. Uneven mounds made it difficult to steer, requiring extra focus that I didn’t have.

  Despite this strenuous grind, I made consistent progress to Nulato,
covering eighteen miles in three and a half hours. The warming temperatures and hard work drained the last of my drinking water, so I hiked into the village to refill my bladder. As the only public building in a town of three-hundred, the school was surprisingly large — nearly the size of the building where I attended grade school in suburban Salt Lake City, which had more than three-hundred students enrolled. This would be an ongoing theme in villages along the Iditarod Trail — large, modern schools appeared vastly out of place amid rustic cabins and modular homes.

  It was recess time, and dozens of students were playing basketball in the gym. A petite Native woman intercepted me at the front door with an enthusiastic greeting. She appeared to be in her late fifties and introduced herself as “Girlie.” I asked her if I could refill my water bladder.

  “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, sounding flustered. “Let me check. How much do you need?”

  “Only three liters,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be special water. I can just fill up in a sink in the bathroom.” All of these schools had indoor plumbing, which also amazed me, because running water was a luxury in rural Alaska.

  “Let me check,” Girlie said, and rushed away. I waited and fidgeted with my backpack as children swarmed past, surprisingly uninterested in me. Five minutes later, Girlie returned and informed me the employees in the kitchen said no, but there was a laundry room behind the school. I practically had to run to keep up as she led me through a maze of hallways and outside to another building. This all seemed like a big production for a small amount of water, and I wondered if I should have just stopped on the river to melt snow.

  At the laundry room sink, Girlie peppered me with questions. Where was I from? What were the schools like in California? Was I alone? Was I scared? Where was my gun?

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  “No gun?” Girlie yelled. “How can you travel without a gun? What will you do about wolves?”

  “Actually a guy near Fairbanks once told me about this trick where you grab a willow branch and whip the wolf on the snout to scare it away,” I said. The man who told me about that ancient technique was also incredulous that I didn’t have a gun. Gun possession is often the first thing local people inquire about in rural Alaska, and their response nearly always contains references to wolves. Although I am afraid of wolves, I wonder how this fear came to be so prevalent. Attacks on humans are exceedingly rare — there have been only a handful of documented cases in a hundred years. Drunken snowmobilers, moose, and even stray village dogs are a far bigger threat. There must be a reason rural Alaskans are so specifically leery of wolves. I suspect this reason has the same primal roots as survival mode.

  Before I left, Girlie urged me to meet the principal, who was a young white man with a broad smile. I waited impatiently in his office while he continued an extended phone call. This seemed like a large waste of time, and I regretted stopping in the village. At the same time — how many chances would I have to visit Nulato? I glanced out the small window and watched two children playing a game of tag while driving four-wheelers along a snow-covered street. One looked too young to even be enrolled in school — no more than four years old, driving a vehicle. I smiled. Remove the snow and cabins and frozen Yukon River, and you’d still never see that in California.

  The principal finally ended his call and asked whether I needed anything. I asked if he could call ahead to the school in the next village — Kaltag — to let them know I was coming.

  “It’s thirty-nine miles. Think you’ll make it?” he asked.

  “I’m doing about six miles an hour right now. Might drop to five. Eight hours?”

  He frowned. “Eight hours? That’s a little late.”

  “Well if the school’s closed I’ll be okay. I camped out last night.”

  “All by yourself?” Girlie interjected from the hallway.

  “Yes, all by myself. It’s really okay.”

  By the time I left Nulato the sun was high and hot over the Yukon River, although my thermometer registered thirteen degrees. A mile and a half away, the village was still in sight, but I was already exhausted and took a break to call Beat on the satellite phone. He was making his way along the bumpy trail north of Ophir, traveling alone but near Pete and Eric, who took shorter sleeps but longer breaks during the day. Even so, he often only rested four hours a night. The trail wasn’t as deserted as it was when I traveled through Poorman. The first mushers of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race had already caught him.

  “Aliy Zirkle asked ‘do you like bacon?’ and then handed me a bag of bacon,” he laughed, referring to the woman musher who was leading the race at the time. “It was cooked and everything. Delicious.” He asked how I was doing.

  “I’m so tired. I don’t get it,” I said. “Trail’s been mostly rideable, and I’ve been eating lots and sleeping full nights. I don’t even understand how you keep going on so little sleep. If it’s so hard to ride fifty or sixty miles a day — walking must be impossible.”

  Beat said he thought conditions were good and wished he was moving faster. He regretted that he wasn’t in better shape. After the winter’s bicycle training and two-month-long battle with pneumonia, Beat was effectively competing in a thousand-mile foot race off the couch.

  “You’re one of the few people strong enough to do that,” I offered as encouragement.

  “Dumb enough to do that,” he corrected me.

  Our call ended and the afternoon wore on. I had jelly legs and ragged breathing, and swore loudly when my strenuous pace fell below five miles per hour. The Yukon River splintered into braids, and the trail followed narrowing channels flanked by golden willows. Just when I began to fret that I was nearing a dead end, the willows parted to reveal the mile-wide main river channel. A village stretched along the far bank, with distant windows reflecting the last glimmers of orange sunlight. I’d arrived two hours earlier than I expected, somehow no more exhausted than I was in the morning.

  The Kaltag school principal was a heavyset white man named Doug. He enthusiastically guided me on a tour of every room in the school before offering to put me up in a vacant apartment in the teachers’ quarters. This apartment was the height of luxury, with my own bed, electric stove, shower, washing machine, and dryer. I was beginning to feel guilty about these unexpected indulgences on what was supposed to be a soul-rending wilderness adventure. Still, no amount of competitive spirit could inspire my wobbly legs to venture farther into the night.

  “The Yukon was almost a breeze,” I tapped into my phone as I settled into the open sleeping bag I’d spread out on a bare mattress. “Will the coast grant me the same kindness? Seems unlikely.”

  Chapter 12

  My Best Day On A Bike, Ever

  The Iditarod Trail connects the Yukon River to the Norton Sound via an eighty-mile overland traverse known as the Kaltag Portage. The geography here resembles a crinkled piece of paper, with small mountains rippling across every horizon. Travelers follow path of least resistance through along the Kaltag River, where the trail wends in and out of steep embankments on a gradual rise to a pass. Beat told me the Kaltag Portage was one of his favorite segments of the Iditarod Trail — high tundra where everything is sparse, except silence.

  I rolled away from Kaltag at first light, when the sky was still a gray pall. I struggled to engage even my lowest gears as I pedaled through a suffocatingly thick forest. My breathing was disproportionately labored for this meager effort.

  “It’s just a morning funk,” I assured myself, ignoring the similarities to the early stages of every other physical shutdown I’d experienced in the past year.

  Despite the respiratory angst, I felt a thrilling buzz of anticipation. This electric sensation hearkened back to Friday night adventures as a teenager, riding shotgun along State Street and stretching my arm out the open window, as far as I could reach into the summer night. It was the feeling tha
t anything and everything could happen, and not even the stars could predict what life-altering experiences my friends and I would forge before the neon-lit darkness faded to dawn.

  My life had changed a fair amount since my greatest adventures encompassed dragging the main strip of downtown Salt Lake City in a Chevy Cavalier, but this adolescent zeal returned each time I ventured beyond the edge of my known universe. I believe outdoor adventures are a fountain of youth for many reasons, but the most prevalent is their preservation of childlike joy.

  I’d ventured far beyond my pessimistic expectations, and every bend in the trail was a new triumph. The Kaltag River was laced with open leads that burbled menacingly, but every crossing was spanned by an ice bridge. After pedaling across four of these bridges without incident, I felt invincible. The trail climbed to the cusp of tree line, and the thick forest gave way to spindly black spruce, which gave way to bare, rolling hills.

  Each crest brought a steep descent, which I hadn’t encountered in days. Now that my numb right hand was almost rigid, I no longer had the dexterity to steer or the strength to press the rear brake lever. As a result, my descending skills were severely compromised. I clasped the front brake and held on for my life as the rear wheel fishtailed dramatically, stirring up clouds of snow. I managed three lucky drops, but on the fourth hill, I lost control at twenty miles per hour. The front wheel plunged into a snow bank, flipping my body over the handlebars and tossing me into a hollow more than six feet off the trail. I was buried face-down in a drift, thrashing violently amid an exhilarating rush of adrenaline. After freeing myself and crawling back to the trail, I shook like a wet dog. My coat, hat, and boots were packed with snow, and the explosion of powder evoked a maniacal laugh. Nothing could touch me! I was unstoppable!