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

  Into the North Wind

  A thousand-mile bicycle adventure across frozen Alaska

  By Jill Homer

  Distributed by Arctic Glass Press

  Cover photo by Mike Beiergrohslein

  Chapter photos by Jill Homer © 2015-2016

  Copy edited by Tonya Simpson

  This is a work of narrative nonfiction. Dialogue and events herein have been recounted to the best of the author’s memory.

  “Into the North Wind” chronicles Jill Homer’s record-breaking bicycle ride across Alaska on the Iditarod Trail. Jill is one of those “accidental athletes” who stumbled into endurance racing shortly after she moved to Alaska in 2005. After a hundred miles, her first race only scratched the surface of the historic trail that spans a vast and frozen wilderness. Ever since, she dreamed about the chiming of ice crystals at thirty below zero, black spruce shadows in the moonlight, the ethereal dance of the Northern Lights, and a journey that could take her deeper into this transcendental world — the thousand-mile race to Nome.

  After ten years of dreaming, she finally made the leap in 2016. Fitness, however, remained elusive as ambitious preparations left a wake of failures, sickness and injury. Even the existence of the trail remained in question — throughout the winter, Alaska experienced unprecedented heat waves and snow melt that threatened to render the Iditarod Trail impassable. By the time Jill lined up at the start, she was ready to chuck her dream into the barely-frozen lake.

  Instead, she pedaled across waterlogged ice, repeating her mantra of “one day at a time.” This account is not just a story about seeking beauty, overcoming setbacks and uncovering hidden strength — it’s a journey into the benevolent heart of the coldest, loneliest trail.

  Chapter 1

  The Relentless Wind

  When the wind sweeps in from the north, all that remains is white fury.

  I stopped walking and held a mitten against my face mask to shield microscopic holes from a flash-freezing blast of air. Ice shards pummeled my goggles and I squinted in spite of them, unable to see anything through the whiteout. The view was featureless either way — a moonscape of blue ice and snow drifts along Alaska’s western coast. The treeless Shaktoolik Peninsula wasn’t distinguishable from the frozen sea, which started two miles beyond and stretched an unbridgeable distance to the next point of civilization. I might as well have been standing on another planet, alone, buried to my knees in snow, and shivering in my warmest coat as I slumped over the handlebars of a useless bicycle.

  I pressed both mittens against my ears, desperate to shut out a high-pitched roar that echoed as unfocused terror. I was frightened with nowhere to run. I was battered with nowhere to hide. I was vaguely disgusted with myself for purposefully wandering into such a dire situation, yet again. A raging ground blizzard at the edge of the sea ice was a backdrop for my worst nightmares — but in reality, I was on vacation.

  The itinerary of this “vacation” was a solo bicycle tour of a 250-mile section of the Iditarod Trail, following the ice-bound coast along the Bering Sea. At the time my partner, Beat, was attempting his third thousand-mile crossing of Alaska as part of an organized event, the Iditarod Trail Invitational. A dedicated runner, Beat traveled on foot. My plan was to start ahead of him in the village of Unalakleet, pedal and push a heavily loaded fat bike to Nome, and greet him at the finish.

  Beat and I are a well-matched if somewhat unlikely couple. He’s a Swiss software engineer with a doctorate in physics, a swimmer’s lithe body and a runner’s bold heart. I hail from Utah — sturdy Mormon pioneer stock — and stare at words for a living. We met during the summer of 2010 at an ultramarathon in Montana, where I was living at the time. Beat was completing a hundred-mile race through the rugged Swan Mountains, and I was a sleep-deprived volunteer at the finish line. He had the most captivating smile I’d ever seen, even after thirty-four hours of difficult running through the wilderness. I was a cyclist, not a runner, but Beat said I should take it up. I countered that I’d need some guidance if I were to venture into such a punishing sport. There’s a longer story of course, but six months later, I finished my first hundred-mile foot race in Alaska, and then moved to California to live with him. We’ve been prodding each other into bigger and bolder adventures ever since.

  When I set out from Unalakleet in March 2015, Beat was farther behind than I’d anticipated. Two weeks earlier, as he and three other Iditarod Trail Invitational racers approached the most remote, least-traveled segment of the route through Interior Alaska, a storm buried the trail in two feet of fresh snow. Breaking trail through knee-deep powder, they struggled to travel ten miles over each exhausting day, and then temperatures dropped to forty-five below. By the time they emerged in the Yukon River village of Ruby, having not seen another human in nine days, all four had narrowly escaped the brink of survivability. A woman on foot, Loreen, had a badly frostbitten hand, and her cycling husband, Tim, decided to evacuate as well. Beat and his good friend from San Francisco, Steve, entered a race against the calendar. Already deeply fatigued from their trail-breaking odyssey, they walked upwards of fifty miles a day on the Yukon River to make up time. In addition to a thirty-day race cutoff, the volatile weather of spring was fast approaching. Even if Beat and Steve ignored the race constraints, they might have to contend with the slushy trails and dangerously thin ice of the season that Alaskans call “Break-up.” Of course, the idea that spring would ever arrive was difficult to conceptualize while gasping into windchill so low that the back of my throat froze.

  It was three days before the spring equinox, and wind gusts only gained ferocity as relatively warm air over the Pacific Ocean siphoned frigid air from the Arctic. This narrow but exposed passage across the frozen Norton Sound was a veritable wind tunnel from which there was no escape and nowhere to hide. Years earlier, the local Malemuit tribe funded the construction of an emergency shelter cabin on a peninsula that juts into the sound like a broken finger. They painted the cabin bright orange so it could be spotted in a whiteout. When I squinted through shards of ice swirling around my face, I could see a speck of color, even though the cabin was still six miles away.

  I’d been moving so slowly throughout the day that I’d made plenty of calculations, only to determine that six miles was an impossible distance. This was day four of my trip. Battling these winds, I’d managed to only make about fifty miles of forward progress in that time. As it was, I was only eight miles beyond Shaktoolik, a village I’d made my third attempt to leave seven hours earlier.

  The first attempt happened before dawn the previous day. I stepped out of the school — the only public building in town and thus where travelers stay — to gales raging at fifty miles per hour. Truck-sized snow drifts had piled up in the village’s single street overnight. Even after I found a way around them, I couldn’t locate the trail as blowing snow and darkness created television static-like confusion.

  I tried again after first light, as a cheerful man operating a front-end loader cleared the piles of snow blocking the road. He waved at me — a mostly unidentifiable human riding a bicycle while wearing a veritable moon suit. I waved back. The Iditarod Sled Dog Race was in full swing, and more than twenty mushers were holed up at the village’s checkpoint, waiting out the storm. A volunteer pointed me to the trail, which also was buried in drifts. From there, I wrestled with my bike for three hours, making less than three miles of progress before I opted to return to Shaktoolik. The school librarian told me she wasn’t s
urprised to see me back in town, as even the caribou hunters were staying home that day.

  “If the caribou hunters don’t go, you don’t go,” she said with an ominous tone.

  For the rest of the day, I sat in the teachers’ lounge with wind-blocking tape still stretched across my face, checking musher standings and weather forecasts online. The weather station at the airport recorded a temperature of three above zero and north winds of thirty-eight miles per hour, gusting to sixty. Overnight lows were forecast to be ten below zero, and the librarian speculated that the caribou hunters were going to stay home the following day as well. But as the frigid night fell, mushers became impatient and trickled out of their checkpoint in groups. I vowed to make one more attempt at first light. As it was, I had only a day and a half of food left in my bicycle bags. Mushers had almost entirely cleared out the village store of dry goods, so resupply was impossible. I really only had one more chance to salvage my trip.

  The following morning, nothing had changed. The wind still roared from the north, and the front-end loader operator was clearing drifts that had again buried the street. The caribou hunters had again opted to stay home. But I could see new evidence of dog teams — fresh feces and dog booties filled to the brim with drifted snow and scattered along the trail like colorful rocks — so I knew a number of mushers were attempting the sea ice crossing.

  By afternoon, I was questioning the wisdom of following mushers. Those guys are crazy, and they had an actual race to finish. What the hell was I doing?

  The North Wind answered only with a deafening roar, like an approaching freight train that would never arrive. To secure the bike and my body, I wedged the front wheel into a drift and propped my leg against a pedal as I turned my back to the wind and squatted. After seven strenuous hours, I was terribly hungry and thirsty. But the windchill only allowed for infrequent breaks — just long enough to reach into my coat and pull out my hydration tube, or grab some trail mix wedged into a bag on the top tube of my bike. There was never time to do both before an unnerving sensation of ice entered my blood. I pulled my face mask down and felt the wind flash-freezing the skin around my cheek bones. At the moment I was more desperately thirsty, so I frantically unzipped multiple layers to reach the hose more quickly. This was a poor choice, as cold air poured into my breached defenses, and I began to shiver violently.

  I yanked up the zippers and whirled around, now desperate to start moving again. Motion was my only means of generating heat — without motion, I would freeze to death. This was a daunting reality to face once I conceptualized what that actually meant — that something as simple as a twisted ankle or a seized bicycle wheel could kill me. On my bike I carried a sleeping bag rated to fifty below, along with a waterproof bivy sack and thin sleeping pad. In an emergency these items would probably keep me alive, but I could only guess how long I could remain pinned down while exposed to this wind. When I was already shivering from the cold in my warmest clothing, it was difficult to put faith in any of my gear. I was deeply afraid.

  Just then the wind’s roar amplified to jet engine decibels, and I knew a major gust was charging south. I knelt onto the snow and placed my head against the frame of my bike — as though this pile of lightweight metal and rubber could shield me from an ice hurricane. The force of the gust rattled my whole body, and for several seconds I was utterly helpless. When I stood again, I felt blind. A thick ground blizzard obscured the horizon, and any semblance of a trail had long since been erased by blowing snow. When I glanced over my shoulder, my own footprints were already wiped clean, leaving no evidence that I had passed through moments earlier. I was little more than a ghost moving through a great white expanse — except that ghosts have no mass, and cannot feel the wind.

  Because the trail no longer differed from the rest of the landscape, I’d depended on a line of wooden stakes to find my way. A good number of these stakes had blown over, and the swirling ground blizzard had intensified to the point that I could no longer find them in the distance. Initially I didn’t panic about this, since I had both a compass and GPS to keep me moving in the right direction. But as I waded into deeper drifts, I understood the perils of venturing away from the established path. Even though the trail was buried beneath drifted snow, there was still a packed base. Off trail, I punched through unconsolidated snow that swallowed my hips. I must have looked like a wounded caribou as I thrashed through thigh-deep snow, yanking my overturned bike beside me. I could only hope an opportunistic wolf wouldn’t mistake me for one.

  Wrestling my eighty-pound bike through these drifts had been maddeningly difficult. But as I stepped onto a pristine white surface and felt my legs sink to the waist, frustration flushed away in a cold rush of terror. The bike punched in below the wheels, and with my heavily fatigued shoulders and back, I couldn’t summon the strength to lift it. Leveraging my bike, I tried to pull myself out of the drift, but I might as well have been sinking in wet cement. When I looked down, I could see wind-blown snow gathering around my torso — slowly burying me deeper.

  “They’re going to find me here,” I moaned out loud, as though trying to motivate my own muscles to work harder. “They’re going to find my frozen body buried to the waist in this drift. This is how I die.”

  But who would find me? I looked over my shoulder, desperate to see evidence of humans, but even my own tracks had already blown away. It was as though I’d never taken those steps at all.

  Fatigue forces a strange kind of detachment between intellect and emotion, and my primitive self resented the ambitious woman who stranded her in this cold, featureless hell. Still, she realized that this hell was “our” choice. Every step I’d ever taken led me to this place. The same could be said for anyone at any moment, and none of us really know where our paths will lead. But we all must choose a path.

  Most would say I picked a strange one. The merciless environment of the Alaska backcountry is a rare choice for people like me — a white, middle-class woman raised in a sheltered religious culture where I was taught that my role in life was chosen before I was born. I spent a happy childhood clinging fervently to this notion. But somewhere along the way, I lost faith in the American Dream. To get married, secure a career, have children, buy a home, buy more possessions, and strive only for a comfortable life shielded from the chaos of the world — it all felt inauthentic, deceitful even. The particles of the universe explode all around us whether we acknowledge them or not. People and emotions evolve and change whether we want them to or not. Homes and possessions can disappear with the strike of a match, or not — but the truth remains that everything is ultimately temporary.

  The American Dream was just that — a fantasy that progress is infinite, people are static, and happiness is as simple as checking off a to-do list. Even as a religious and routine-driven child, I observed comfortable lives rotting under their own stagnation, people clinging to shadows of love, people whose souls were charred by smoldering hurt and anger, whole families imprisoned by debt and fruitless obligations. Even then, it was difficult for me to believe that God wanted this for His children — this fearful inertia. Winds shift, seasons change, water flows from mountain to sea to sky, and particles expand and collide and decay because the entire universe is simply energy. How are we different?

  As I grew into an adult, I became more convinced that motion was the virtue I sought. Motion expands perspectives, encourages knowledge, and cultivates understanding and empathy. If we’re moving through a place, we inevitably become a part of it, dependent on the terrain, infrastructure and inhabitants. Staying in one place allows a person to become intimately familiar with it. But as with all things familiar, curiosity eventually fades and quiescence sets in. Comfort breeds discontent, discontent breeds anxiety, and soon we’re locked in lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau described, our hearts beating with a longing that we’ve mistaken for fear. I’ve fallen into this trap before, clinging to the familiar as disconten
t encompassed me like a lukewarm pool. Every time I emerged, damp and shivering in the breeze — these were the moments I felt most free.

  Out on Alaska’s icy expanse, thousands of miles from home and hundreds of miles from the nearest accessible road, I was as free from familiar routine as I’d ever been. I was as dependent on motion as I could possibly be — and I was trapped in a snow dune. Yes, somewhere in this tumultuous journey, I’d lost my way.

  A surge of adrenaline rushed against the deepening chill. I dropped the bike and punched my arms frantically into the wind. This full-body flailing finally created the momentum I needed to extract myself from the drift, tumbling out of the snow onto a patch of hard ice. Gasping for breath, I turned to grab the overturned bike and pull it forward.

  It was an exhaustive effort. My heart raced and every nerve in my body fired jolts of relief and terror. Where would I find the strength for six more miles of deep snow drifts? And that was just to reach a shelter cabin. From there, thirty-five more miles of sea ice still stood between me and the next village. Thirty-five miles at less than one mile per hour, no opportunities for rest, locked in a strenuous effort that was surely burning at least six hundred calories an hour, with only enough water-carrying capacity to last ten hours, and only four thousand calories of food. My primitive mind ruled, but you don’t have to be good at math to see the imbalance. When all but the mileage subtracted to zero, could I survive?

  My primitive mind recognized this pointless fretting and put the rest of my intellect in lockdown. It had come to this: survival mode. Survival mode is an instinct-driven state that records very little in long-term memory, so the next six miles have been lost in a cerebral blur. But shortly after my frightening battle with the snow dunes, I spotted a wooden stake and made my way back to the trail. Then continued, exhausted, for five more hours, until I reached the orange cabin at the neck of a broad bluff — Little Mountain.