by Jill Homer
Riding so hard from the outset was a critically poor choice, but now there was little I could do about it. I could put on my down coat, but I still considered that coat for true emergencies. Wearing it while riding remained my “only if you think you’re going to die” game plan. The moisture clinging to my body would seep into the coat’s insulation, so its life-saving properties would be nullified. Since I wasn’t quite so desperate, my best option was to keep riding and wait for the sun. It would come up eventually. It always did.
The Topkok Hills provided an undulating wave of varied but consistent pain. The first climb out of the meager forest brought a whisper of heat, just before the grade steepened enough to force me off my bike. My throat gurgled as I coughed, spewing a fountain of snot and breath fog that turned quickly to ice. As I pushed up the hill, heat drained from my core. I’d reach the top shivering again, knowing I had to descend a hundred feet into the bowels of Hell frozen over.
Then the next climb repeated the pattern. My body’s power meter plummeted, and I had to gasp and gurgle my way through a ploddingly slow push. Warmth was an elusive phantom, emanating from my hard-pumping heart, only to escape through porous weaknesses in my arms and legs. All the while, a strip of pale pink light stretched across the snow a half mile to the north. As I climbed and descended, the light never stretched any closer.
“This is a life of quiet desperation,” I thought. “Not sitting at home. This.”
I wanted to cry, only because I was so desperately uncomfortable, in this mess of my own making, and there was no relief. The battle against hypothermia had consumed all of my energy, and stopping to cram a few peanut butter cups into my mouth just made things worse. Soon heavy fatigue and low blood sugar added to my woes. Climbs became impossibly steep, descents unbearably cold. My good hand tingled and my bad hand went numb. If I tried to pedal or push any harder, I became dizzy and lapsed into coughing fits. I did start to cry, but only briefly. Tears froze to my cheeks, a shocking sensation that cut the faucet immediately.
“Quiet desperation,” I repeated, if only to remind myself of the relief that awaited if I managed to survive the ride to Nome — the wonders of boredom and lying barefoot on carpet and never putting myself through another adventure, ever again.
Fear trickled into my gut like cold water, and I berated myself for continuing to put unearned faith in my body’s ability to keep moving through any difficulty. A year of failures already debunked this delusion. When was I going to accept that I was no longer strong enough for such extreme adventures? Entrusting my survival to these legs and lungs was sheer foolishness.
Was it ever not foolish? There is nothing special about me — I have no remarkable athletic gifts, no unique powers of endurance or ability to withstand the cold. There’s only one quality that separates me from other humans who don’t ride bicycles across Alaska in the winter: desire. When I lie in bed on a hot summer night, I dream of wind-swept tundra. When I push a cart around a grocery store, I imagine crossing frozen swamps beneath a sparkling night sky. The desire to return to Alaska is so strong that my daydreams occasionally take over, leaving me blinking in confusion at a row of cereal boxes, wondering how I arrived at this bland existence so distant from the intensities I’ve known.
Then there is reality — the frail and fearful human that can’t withstand these intensities, at least not to the satisfaction of my desire. This desire will never be satisfied. Ten years of cowering in the cold, crawling up and down mountains, fearing for my life — it will never go away. Desire is a raving maniac, cackling as I struggle through insidious situations, pushing me blindly toward peril. If I fail, desire grows louder, and if I succeed, it becomes deafening.
So I suppose I’m mad. This is just another reason why I’m not special. We’re all mad, driven to our own idiosyncrasies by the absurdity of life. It’s probably just a fluke of fate that I think amassing wealth is a waste of time, and riding across frozen tundra is desirable. This is my way of living large, and living large always comes with a higher price.
*****
Many hours but only twenty miles beyond White Mountain, sunlight finally connected with the trail. The temperature had risen to minus eighteen. At that point I was shivering lightly, but consistently. Climbs no longer provided a shot of warmth. My body was too depleted to produce extra heat. The Topkok Hills continued rippling toward a sharp blue horizon. Those too would never end. The fingers on my right hand were entirely rigid; I didn’t even bother wrapping them around the brake lever anymore. With the front wheel locked and the rear wheel unhindered, the bike fishtailed wildly. I didn’t care. I almost hoped for a swift end to my misery.
But I didn’t crash, and I didn’t succumb to hypothermia. Eventually the sun rose above the ridge, eliminating shadows. Solar reflection from the snow melted the ice sheet from my jacket and bike bags. I could afford to stop long enough to eat more peanut butter cups, returning some semblance of energy to my muscles. Fatigue still gnawed at my limbs, casting a heavy curtain over my thoughts. This wasn’t sleepiness, though. It went deeper than that, into places hidden from me, where my desire resides. I no longer cared whether I made it to Nome or quit somewhere just shy of the end. This too is the absurdity of life — wanting something so badly that we smother all desire in pursuit of it. Desire would rebound, of course, but for those moments I would have given anything to return to a dull life. I fantasized about sitting in traffic, doing dishes, or pushing a cart around a grocery store.
Arriving at the crest at what I was certain would be the last climb, my jaw dropped at the sight of another wall in front of me. It truly was a wall, launching out of a stream bed and straight up a near-vertical slope, gaining five hundred feet in what had to be less than a quarter mile of trail. I could see hollows where snowmobiles spun their tracks at full throttle, tearing up what little snow remained on the trail.
Just as I entertained an urge to start crying again, I heard a jingle and looked back. A dog team was approaching, with faces coated in frost and tongues flapping wildly. The musher dug a ski pole into the snow, meekly pulling his sled along.
“These hills are crazy,” he said with a guttural growl.
“They sure are,” I answered, and watched as he passed. His blue coat was emblazoned with the word “Mackey,” which led me to surmise he was Jason Mackey, brother of the legendary four-time Iditarod winner Lance Mackey. As a hopeless Iditarod fan, I knew about their family and back story, and Jason was a person I admired. I watched as his team floated down the hill before hitting the wall, where they ascended a short distance and stopped moving. Jason walked to the front, grabbed the harness of his lead dog and guided them up the headwall. After three minutes, he remounted his sled and commenced poling up the slope while his dogs clawed and wove all over the wide trail. I stood and watched until they were over the crest and out of sight, seething with envy at their strength.
My own ascent was a slobbering, coughing, backsliding mess. There wasn’t enough energy left to be upset, nor was there enough oxygen left to cry. The surface crust was solid and slick, forcing me to kick steps into the snow to leverage the weight of the bike. Every hoist of the handlebars felt like bench-pressing a hundred-pound barbell. I’d take a few gasping breaths, kick another step, and shove the bike forward. One step at a time, for five-hundred vertical feet. By the top I was choking on phlegm, exhausted, and dizzy. My throat was ragged from the cold air, and my legs were quivering. I threw my bike down and sat on the trail, burying my ice-crusted face between my knees. When I regained enough composure to sit up straight, I noticed a black pole lying across the trail a few feet in front of me. Picking it up, I recognized the crooked profile and medical tape holding two broken pieces in place. It was Jason’s ski pole.
For several seconds, I clutched the pole in a mittened hand while scanning the landscape ahead. From that altitude, I could see more than fifty miles in all directions. The fathomless blue water o
f the Bering Sea filled the horizon, rimmed with a sandy shoreline and miles of glare ice. Bald, white mountains came within a few miles of the coast, but I could tell the route along the shoreline was flat. If the legendary blowholes were cranking, I saw no evidence — the air was clear all the way to Cape Nome, a snow-covered bluff some forty miles away.
“This is my window,” I thought. “I need to get through there before the wind picks up.”
Then I looked down at Jason’s pole. His team had beaten me to the top of this hill by at least forty-five minutes. There were still fifty more miles to Nome. My leg muscles felt like refrigerated gelatin and my lungs were filled with shards of ice. “It’s mostly flat,” the thought process continued. “I wonder if I can catch Jason and return this pole?”
That thought was like a shot of adrenaline, spurring me to frenzied action. I stuffed the pole underneath a bungee cord on my front rack and launched into the steep descent. It was another fishtailing mess, but exhilarating all the same. In a blur of blue sky and frozen tears, I unraveled seven hours of energy-bankrupting hardship. Without changing anything but my attitude, I arrived at the driftwood-strewn shoreline feeling as though I’d just woken up in White Mountain all over again — renewed.
Sunlight reflected off frozen tide pools, baking the air to a balmy five degrees above zero. As I stripped off layers that were still crusted in frost, a red fox darted across the trail. The fox stopped briefly and sniffed at the air, then moved a few steps toward me. As I waved my hand, it made a small leap and swiveled mid-air before nonchalantly trotting away.
“I’m going to catch Jason!” I said out loud to the fox that did not care.
Iditarod dog teams typically travel between seven and ten miles per hour. My moving average over the entire route was closer to five and a half. Jason Mackey’s dogs were meticulously trained athletes possessing the bloodlines of Idiatrod champions dating back to the 1970s, while I was a fading shadow of a human athlete who was not much of a competitor to begin with, and who now had Jell-O legs and scarred lungs. But never mind all that. I was going to catch Jason!
Beyond the Topkok shelter cabin, the first two miles of flat trail traversed a frozen lagoon. I was too timid to open up my effort on the slippery ice, and continued to lose ground on Jason. But once the trail rose onto a wind-scoured, bumpy jeep track, I laid into the pedals. I wasn’t sure I had much left to give; I only knew I’d be spending it all. It wasn’t about returning a broken ski pole to a musher who couldn’t possibly care, or about showing up a random team of canine superiors at the very end of a long race, or even about reaching Nome more quickly. I’d told myself “no” too many times during the past year. There were so many “you can’t” and “you’re too weak,” and a number of “you’re not talented enough” and “you’re too old.” I was tired of all the doubt. I was tired of holding myself back. I was just tired.
Instead, I defied “you can’t” by pedaling as hard as I possibly could. Mounds of frozen dirt undulated beneath my wheels as the North Wind brushed my side — a whisper at ten miles per hour. I kept glancing to the right for evidence of the Solomon blowhole — snow blowing from the hillsides or the blurred horizon of a ground blizzard. The air was clear, but I’d heard stories of gusts erupting out of seemingly nowhere, and didn’t let my guard down.
My breathing was shallow and swift, in an oxygen-starved environment I knew all too well — the cusp of my lungs’ limit. It was a place I feared and avoided, but for this day — with the North Wind whispering quiet threats and my imagined competition outpacing me somewhere beyond — I was ready to embrace the literal suck. In and out, in and out, breathe, breathe, breathe. In this focused meditation, life became refreshingly simple, swiftly retreating from the scariest place on the Iditarod Trail. The North Wind had me cornered in its most fearsome territory, and yet it held back, as though conceding this battle out of sympathy for an already broken opponent. Quietly, my confidence returned. I was going to catch Jason.
I pulled into Safety Roadhouse, the final sled dog race checkpoint, a few minutes before four in the afternoon. Just twenty-two miles from Nome, the roadhouse has origins dating back to the Gold Rush, when twenty-two miles was considered a good day’s travel. Safety earned its name because it’s just beyond reach of the Solomon blowhole, so travelers knew they were safe. These days the roadhouse is only open for summer tourism and one week in March. Iditarod fans take helicopter rides from Nome to have a drink at the bar, volunteers sit next to the fire, and mushers rush in and out for one final push to the finish line.
A handful of spectators who were standing on the porch clapped politely and asked if I needed anything. I pulled Jason’s bent ski pole off the front of my bike.
“I found this on the trail; I think it belongs to Jason Mackey,” I said. “Is he here?”
“Sorry, he just left,” one man said. “He was in and out in under five minutes.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling deflated. I’d been averaging more than ten miles an hour since shortly after Topkok. In twenty-five miles, I’d nearly caught up to Jason after losing an hour to his team on the last Topkok hill. But the trail had become increasingly soft as it crossed into an area more protected from the wind, and the final twenty-two miles featured a rolling climb over Cape Nome. I’d already calculated that if I didn’t catch Jason by Safety, I wasn’t going to catch him.
“In that case, is the bar open?” I asked. “I’m really thirsty.”
I removed my outer layers and wrapped them around a bar stool, where I sat down and ordered a can of Pepsi. The bartender was an older Native man, probably in his seventies, engaged in an animated conversation with two veterinarians. As I guzzled the soda he turned his questioning to me, asking about my day so far, and how long I thought it would take to ride to Nome.
“Probably four more hours,” I said. “There’s that big climb over Cape Nome, and my brakes basically don’t work anymore, so I might have to walk downhill.” (Not only was my right hand too weak to press the rear brake lever, my front brake pads were also nearly worn out.)
“Those guys who came through a few days ago took the road, went around the cape,” the bartender said.
“Really?” I didn’t mask my surprise. Between Nome and Safety was a gravel road that wasn’t maintained or regularly traveled during the winter, so the wind-blown snow covered it in deep drifts. I attempted to ride this road two years earlier, while I was waiting for Beat to arrive in Nome. It was a mess, and at one point I was buried to my waist in the sugary snow.
“No, I think the road is a bad idea,” I said. “It’s always drifted in.”
“The Iron Dog went that way, and it’s still clear,” the bartender insisted. “I think those bikers got through fast.”
I finished my Pepsi and considered the bartender’s suggestion, but didn’t hurry out the door. Instead I struck up a conversation with a veterinarian, who interpreted my praise for the dogs’ athleticism as disapproval of their treatment. It took several minutes of circular arguing to set him straight. I guessed that he’d fielded a number of complaints about animals spending long days running nonstop through cold and difficult terrain — but I was a human doing exactly that, and it’s what I admired about them.
As the minutes passed, the bartender watched with a disapproving look on his face. It was strange, but I was reluctant to leave. The Safety Roadhouse was cold and musty, and not really a place I wanted to linger. But the prospect of ending this adventure suddenly held me back.
I left Jason’s ski pole propped against the door — perhaps it would help another musher over Cape Nome — and ventured into the breezy afternoon. The temperature was ten degrees, so I stood outside with only a thin hat and jacket, and no gloves. Three tourists who had just arrived by helicopter watched me pack up my bike.
“Aren’t you cold?” one asked.
“Not anymore,” I answered.
I rode a q
uarter mile up the trail while glancing toward the coast. A row of shuttered fishing shacks lined what I assumed was the road. At the last minute I changed my mind and pedaled overland across punchy crust to connect with it. It isn’t like me to trust trail information from bystanders. Although I still believed the bartender was wrong about the road being the faster way to go, a part of me just had to find out.
The first few miles were covered in a thick layer of snow, but it was well-packed and smooth. I enjoyed watching green mile markers count down the remaining distance to Nome. The road wrapped around the base of Cape Nome, where it was blown clear of snow. My tires crackled loudly on the icy gravel. On the other side of the broad hill, the road intersected the Iditarod Trail once more. Familiar orange stakes indicated the Iron Dog snowmobilers took the trail. The road continued on a parallel route one mile to the north, and its condition was unknown. After twelve hours of strained breathing and striving, my thoughts were as scattered as drifting snow. Without ruminating, I followed the road.
There was a mile of glare ice interspersed with soft snowdrifts, which were more frequent as I became more committed to my choice. The now-hidden road dropped into a shallow drainage, which trapped a winter’s worth of wind-driven snow in drifts that were more than six feet high — true snow dunes that could swallow me whole. Even as my logical mind lamented my mistake and visualized turning around, my primitive self blindly went forward. The front wheel pressed into a fan of powder and — to my logical mind’s astonishment — effortlessly rolled onto the surface of a snow dune. A hard crust had formed over the drift, with a texture and shape not unlike the slickrock formations of southern Utah. The combined weight of my bike and body barely made an imprint as I rolled up and over steep mounds of petrified snow, giggling like a child.