by Jill Homer
After rolling up beside what was in fact the McKinley Creek shelter cabin, I spent several seconds looking around for the shepherd. But there were no people, no sheep — something wasn’t quite right. I began blinking rapidly as though waking from a deep sleep.
“Where am I?”
As pieces of reality began to snap back together, my confusion only deepened. “Snow, but how? What year is this?” The McKinley Creek shelter cabin stood stoically, buried to its windows in hardened snowdrifts. The sight of these drifts finally revealed the answers. Alaska. 2016. The Iditarod Trail. Did I really ride my bike all the way to Golovin Bay? As perception rose to the surface from an ocean of memories, I looked back at the mottled gold-and-white hillside. This landscape was completely displaced from the one I just witnessed, and I marveled at the intensity of my hallucination.
I pedaled onto the smooth ice of Golovin Bay and continued to ruminate on the strangeness of the experience. It couldn’t have been more real to me if I had physically traveled back in time to relive a few minutes of the Race Across South Africa. If I were more inclined toward superstition and hadn’t experienced endurance-related hallucinations in the past, I might insist that this is actually what happened. That I’m a time traveler. I’d be convinced of it. It’s unnerving to ponder an imagined experience compared to known experiences and conclude that perhaps none of them were real. Maybe everything is a hallucination. Individual perception is our only window into whatever’s actually out there, and it’s jarring to realize you can’t trust perception. Why, then, should we believe anything we see or feel?
This is how I entered the village of Golovin six miles later — coughing, exhausted, and fearing for my mental health. I wasn’t in the mood to interact with normal humans, so I quickened my pace through the village street, which stretched across a thin peninsula that divided Golovin Bay from Golovin Lagoon. I’d nearly reached the other side when two girls darted out of a youth center building. They looked to be about seven or eight years old and were wearing cute pastel outfits that I considered inadequate for the zero-degree temperature.
“Will you sign our coats?” the taller girl asked. There was a hand-painted sign in front of the youth center welcoming mushers to Golovin, and I got the sense the girls were watching out the window for dog teams.
“But I’m not a musher,” I said, “I’m a bicyclist, see?” I patted my handlebars.
“Here,” the girl shoved a cheap marker in my hand, then pointed to a spot on the chest of her puffy coat.
“Are you sure? That looks like a nice coat. I don’t know if your Mom will like me writing on it.”
“No, it’s okay,” she insisted, and pointed to another scribble that a real musher had left on her back.
The marker was frozen and my hand was similarly stiff, but I managed to scrawl a faint and sloppy autograph on the coats of two little girls in Golovin, and I have to say, it made my day.
Just beyond town, two men on a snowmobile pulled up next to me. The younger man introduced his father and then asked if I would pose for a photo. The old man stood stiffly next to me as I gave an awkward thumbs up. I felt embarrassed but bemused about my apparent celebrity status in the tiny village of Golovin. There was a bulky canvas sack in the back of their sled, so I asked if they’d been hunting.
“Yes,” the younger man said, adding no details. This was typical of my interaction with Native Alaskans. Questions brought honest and succinct answers. There was never a hint of bloviation, even when it seemed warranted.
As I pedaled beyond the meager protection of the peninsula, the North Wind raged across Golovin Lagoon. After four long days on the coast with many hours of pedaling directly into the wind, I’d become resigned to the Sisyphean grind. My thoughts flickered, again searching for memories of anywhere else, when suddenly the bike stopped cold. My body lurched forward, hitting a wall of wind that bucked everything sideways before tossing me awkwardly on the ice.
Still lying on my side, I spun around to see what I’d hit. The ice was clear. When I brushed my arm over the rear wheel, it wouldn’t budge. For long minutes I examined everything from the brake pads to the crank to the derailleur. Just when I was utterly stymied, I realized that the obstacle was a strap from the rear rack, tangled in the cassette.
As I tugged at the tight knots, the windchill sucked all the heat from my arms, forcing me to rewarm my hands by stuffing them in big mittens and swinging my arms wildly. My right hand had so little strength that I couldn’t make a fist. Untying knots was out of the question, even before my hands became cold.
It was hardly an emergency, but my mental health was fragile and every emotion was exaggerated. I panicked. “I can’t untangle this. I’m stuck!”
Tears streamed into my face mask as I tugged and slammed the wheel against the ice, only tightening the strap and making things worse. Since McGrath, I’d feared the minor mechanical that was going to end my race. This had to be it. I removed my left hand from the mitten and pulled a tiny pocket knife out of my vest, then tried slicing at the strap. The blade was dull, not even as wide as the strap, and seemed just as useless against the knots as my dead right hand. My fingers froze to the point I couldn’t move them at all.
With two numb hands and mounting frustration, I plopped down on the ice, filled with irrational but paralyzing fear. I was only eight miles beyond Golovin, with perhaps eight more miles to the village of White Mountain. Neither were too far to walk, but the distance seemed insurmountable if a seized wheel reduced me to dragging my bike on its side. I scanned the white expanse for movement — anyone who could pluck me away from being stranded on sea ice. All was still, except for the North Wind.
As I sat, shivering and becoming colder, a whisper of rationality crept in — if only one end of the strap is tangled around the cassette, the other end must still be free. Of course. The other end of the strap was still hooked to the rack. All I needed to do was release the buckle, and the strap would be loose enough to loop it backward around the cogs until it was untangled. The knife, knot wrangling, hyperventilating and panic — especially the panic — were never necessary. How embarrassing.
This sheepish embarrassment about my own ineptitude lingered as I reached the edge of Golovin Lagoon and pedaled into low-lying hills surrounding the Fish River. Physically I was having a good day after the early coughing fits, but between the hallucination and overreaction to the strap incident, I feared my mental state was not nearly so solid. It was still early in the day, the weather was relatively decent, and I’d considered blazing through White Mountain in favor of seeking out a shelter cabin or even making a big push to Nome. But the comfort of the village beckoned. I rationalized a vital need for sleep before venturing into what can be the most dangerous stretch of the Iditarod Trail, a mere fifty miles from Nome: The Solomon blowhole.
I also knew White Mountain was the home of a beloved trail angel, Joanna Wassillie. Joanna lived with her husband and two young children in a small cabin off a bank of the Fish River. She first became associated with the race ten years earlier, when she spotted a light moving slowly up the river. Fearing this was an injured hunter who had lost his snowmobile, she fired up her machine and raced out to meet him. She found a man alone, dragging a sled, and shuffling with a pronounced limp. When she urged him to hop on her snowmobile, he said in a thick Italian accent: “No, no. I race.”
Joanna looked around, confused. Race? It was late at night, at least twenty below, and she hadn’t seen another runner come through the village in, well, ever. The man was Marco Berni, an Italian runner competing in the 2006 Iditarod Trail Invitational. Through miming and interpreting his broken English, Joanna gave Marco directions and invited him to rest at her house.
Marco ended up staying with Joanna for two days. He’d fallen on ice and hurt his hip, and the long rest allowed him to recuperate enough to finish the final eighty miles to Nome. Joanna joked that Marco ate only Par
mesan on the trail and smelled strongly of sweat and old cheese, but he refused to take a shower. He spoke almost no English, but they carried on boisterous conversations all the same. This was her introduction to the “ITI crazies,” and she’s opened her home to human-powered travelers ever since. Beat had spoken fondly of his time with Joanna and her family, who clear out their own bedrooms to make space for visitors, and prepare coffee and homemade meals at any time of the day or night.
I rolled into town on a bright Tuesday afternoon, and scanned the hillside for the official screen-printed sign that Joanna pinned in front of her cabin. She ran toward the river wearing a colorful kuspuk with a fur trim, and waved for all of the three minutes it took to ride toward her house. With a strong embrace, she welcomed me to White Mountain and ushered me inside.
“I’ve been watching for you,” she said. “I made French press coffee. Do you like coffee?”
Even though I’d never visited White Mountain nor met Joanna, it felt like coming home. Any weak ambitions I harbored for a big push to Nome melted with this question. I nodded vigorously.
After I’d finished my coffee, Joanna asked if I wanted to take a bath.
“A bath?”
“I bought these Epsom salts,” she said, holding up a fancy-looking package. “I thought it might feel nice for you guys after a long day on the trail.”
“I’d very much like that,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, I lowered myself into Joanna’s tub and dunked my head beneath the water, relishing the comfort of complete sensory deprivation. I examined my body for the first time in sixteen days — skin speckled with purple and black bruises, a patch of windburn across my lower back, slightly swollen calves and feet, missing a few pounds around my torso and thighs. All in all, nothing looked too bad, and now I was a mere eighty miles from Nome, reclining in a warm bath. A bath! What forces in the universe were responsible for this kid-gloves treatment on the famously ferocious Iditarod Trail?
“Beat is going to tease me about this,” I thought.
Of course, submerged in warm water, it was easy to forget about the North Wind and the dangerous task that still lay ahead. The race was far from over. For the final leg, I would need to climb over the notoriously steep and exposed Topkok Hills, then drop back onto the coast. There the beach butts up against mountains, and for the next twenty miles I’d pass narrow canyons that serve as straws, siphoning the frigid air of the Interior toward the ocean. Wind speeds in this area can top a hundred miles per hour, and gusts of at least fifty miles an hour happen nearly every day of the winter. For every nice story I’d heard about the final stretch to Nome, there were ten stories about the horror of the “blowhole.”
After the bath, I sat down to spaghetti dinner with Joanna and two other women who were ski-joring — skiing while harnessed to two huskies — from Unalakleet to Nome. Laura and Robin, both Alaskans, swapped trail stories with me as we speculated about the upcoming weather and route. I found this conversation empowering. Here we were, three intrepid travelers and a life-long resident of this harsh land — all women — sitting at one table.
Laura knew of a weather station that recorded wind speeds in the Solomon blowhole, with graphs posted online. She’d checked it earlier in the day, when the North Wind was cranking at fifty-five miles per hour. By dinner time, it had fallen to thirty-five. She figured they’d hit that stretch two days later, when the forecast called for a reduction in wind speeds. My plan of going through late the next morning was more risky.
“I’d get up really early,” Laura cautioned. “Avoid going through there after noon.”
“I can always wait it out at the Topkok cabin,” I said. Previous ventures into winds near sixty miles an hour had knocked me off my feet, even when I didn’t have a seventy-five-pound bike and only one good hand. There was a real chance I wouldn’t be able to move amid such powerful gusts, and the land was so exposed that hunkering down was impossible. It would sure be a pity, so close to the end, to blow out to sea and never be seen again.
Chapter 15
The Saga of Jason Mackey’s Ski Pole
Although the cabin had just one and a half bedrooms, Joanna set me up in the bed where she and her husband, Jack, usually slept. Mike showed up around sunset, just as I was rifling through leftover supply boxes to discover a treasure trove of peanut butter cups, jerky, and trail mix that was not my trail mix. I hoarded it all — just in case I was pinned down in the Topkock shelter cabin for two days — and went to the entrance to greet my elusive trail companion.
“I’m going to try to leave by five at the latest,” I informed Mike, who laughed at me.
“That’s the coldest part of the morning,” he said.
“But it could be really windy by afternoon,” I countered.
Just before dark I connected with Beat via Joanna’s home phone. He was making his way over the Kaltag Portage and planning to rest at the Old Woman cabin. The weather in those hills had become much colder — thirty-six below — and he felt worn down by his own solitude. Tim Hewitt was three days ahead, and Eric Johnson was two days behind. As he spoke, I imagined clouds of frozen breath swirling around Beat’s face as he marched through that lonesome, haunted valley. Beat said he was proud that I’d made it so far, but gave me some light-hearted grief for taking a bath at Joanna’s house.
“It was so amazing. If Joanna lived somewhere farther down the trail, like Kaltag, I’d probably never leave,” I said. “But since it’s only eighty miles from Nome, I guess I have to go.”
Just before 5 a.m., I crept into the kitchen to heat water for instant coffee. Despite trying my best not to make noise, Jack rose from a nearby couch and offered to cook pancakes. Joanna made a bleary-eyed appearance as well, apologizing for “not being a morning person.”
“Neither am I,” I said. “But Nome is still a long way from here.”
I was surprised Joanna and Jack made an effort to see me off, and thanked them profusely. Here on the harsh Bering Sea coast, kindness and hospitality are worth more than any material reward. Soaking in the warmth of White Mountain felt just as fulfilling as finishing the race. As I indulged in the most peaceful sleep of my trip, I almost convinced myself that the journey was complete. Of course there was still that frayed end of the Iditarod Trail, a lonely and dangerous stretch that just won’t let it be over until it’s over.
Outside Joanna’s cabin, the morning was eerily still. Surprised by the absence of motion, I held my breath, as though the North Wind was a predator that would swoop in if I made my presence known. Instead, a sharp chill latched onto my skin. The thermometer at the house registered minus thirteen, which isn’t terrible. But it was likely to keep dropping, especially on the river, until the sun came up.
I made it about two miles up the Fish River before I was already hungry again, and pulled out a particularly special treasure that I excavated from another racer’s drop bag — miniature white chocolate peanut butter cups. Looking back toward the village, I saw a glittering speck in a vast indigo void. Wisps of ice fog hung over the village lights, accentuating their glow. White Mountain was so inviting that I instinctively moved toward it, taking several steps before I realized what I was doing. Turning to face west again, I saw only yawning darkness. It was very cold.
The snack break proved costly. By the time I was back in the saddle, my whole body was quaking with shivers. This sparked a quiet panic, which prompted me to sprint up the river. I pedaled with all of the strength my cold muscles could muster to pump warm blood back to my limbs. The furious effort quelled my shivering, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be warmer. I rode harder.
Breath poured into a swirl of fog so thick that I could scarcely see through it. I wasn’t wearing goggles, so frost collected on my eyelashes and eyebrows, freezing into large white clumps. Steam rose from the collar of my jacket, because I was beginning to sweat heavily. I knew I shouldn’t invit
e this, but it felt so wonderful to be warm, to breathe cold air, and to ride fast. I was doing it! I was riding to Nome!
The biosphere within my clothing continued to produce heat and moisture as dawn broke. Violet light appeared above the black profile of distant hills, accentuating the expansiveness of the valley. The sky brightened to a deep shade of blue, and all of the snow-blanketed land was the same color, just a few degrees lighter.
There was a cluster of anemic spruce trees at the mouth of a canyon. This was the gully that would take me into the infamous Topkok Hills — thirteen miles of steep, rolling terrain at the head of a narrow peninsula. These trees would be the last I’d see on the Iditarod Trail. Beyond here, the trail was wind-swept, exposed, and shelter-less, save for a few cabins in varying states of dilapidation that were specifically built to save lives.
I made a quick stop to pee, and within seconds I was again wracked with shivering. Racing toward the climb, I reached for a heat-generating peanut butter cup, only to find the bag’s zipper had frozen shut. The entire top tube and left side of my frame bag were coated in clear ice —droplets of respiration formed from hard breathing, which then funneled down my face mask and rained onto the bike, where the water instantly froze. The front of my jacket was an ice bib as well. My base layers were as soaked as they could possibly be. Being this wet wasn’t a good thing. One might argue it was the worst mistake I’d made on the Iditarod Trail.
Feeling desperate for calories, I forced myself to stop and yank at the frozen zipper with my one good hand. When it was freed and I had a few peanut butter cups in my stomach, I felt brave enough to check my thermometer. “Oh geez, it’s minus twenty-four!” I yelled. Minus twenty-four isn’t unusual or extreme for this part of the world. Minus twenty-four would be fine, really, if I’d worn all the correct layers to begin with, and I wasn’t soaked in my own sweat. But because I was wet, a chill clamped down the moment I stopped, and every second compounded the danger. If warmth becomes violent shivering in five minutes, one can only surmise the proximity of deadly hypothermia.