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  Be Brave, Be Strong

  A Journey Across the Great Divide

  By Jill Homer

  Edited by Diana Miller

  Jill Homer

  Copyright by Jill Homer 2011

  Published by Arctic Glass Press

  Smashwords Edition

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distributed by Arctic Glass Press, www.arcticglasspress.com

  Editor: Diana Miller

  Cover Design: Jill Homer

  Interior Design: Jill Homer

  Cover, top: Jill Homer collects herself after crashing her mountain bike in the Marin Headlands, California. Self portrait by Jill Homer.

  Cover, bottom: The “last tree in a hundred miles” stands in Great Divide Basin near Atlantic City, Wyoming. Photo by Jill Homer.

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

  Riding the Spine of the Rocky Mountains

  Each year on the second Friday in June, several dozen mountain bikers from around the world set out to challenge speed records on the world’s longest off-pavement cycling route, the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. Scouted and mapped by Adventure Cycling Association in 1998, the unmarked route features gravel roads, dirt tracks and jeep trails that follow the contours of the Continental Divide.

  The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route begins in Banff, Alberta, and travels 2,740 miles through the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the United States of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. By the time cyclists reach the Mexican border, they will have climbed nearly 200,000 feet over some of the highest and most remote passes in the Rocky Mountains.

  Endurance legend John Stamstad became the first to set a speed record on the Great Divide, blitzing the route in eighteen days and five hours in 1998. In 2004, a handful of mountain bikers collaborated to challenge that time, organizing a self-supported race on the route beginning at the Montana border. Mike Curiak established a new record at sixteen days. Since then, Great Divide racing has steadily grown and evolved. However, it maintains the same minimalist format: No entry fee, no course markings and no support. For many distance mountain bikers, completing the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route as fast as possible has become the ultimate challenge.

  The following is the story of one woman’s journey to do just that.

  Chapter One

  Disaster on the Iditarod

  Somewhere on a blank slate of tundra, where the shadows of nameless mountains devour the snow, I tried to bury the pieces of myself that I longed to leave behind — the pieces that were careless, the shards that were weak, and the remnants that were terrified of the unknown. Beneath crushing cold and fatigue, they cracked like glass in my cupped mittens. Low-angle sunlight reflected moments from an impossibly distant past — my existence beyond this deep-frozen swamp, before this odyssey that left me both shattered and enigmatically whole. As a ground blizzard raged around my ankles, the wind scattered the pieces like so much glitter. I watched glimmering reflections of myself swirl through the snow until they were invisible, and then gone. I felt like I had crossed an irrevocable divide. One I would likely never approach again.

  One year passed. The winter sun glared hard and heatless when I lined up for the Iditarod Trail Invitational a second time. Forty-five runners, skiers and cyclists crowded the starting line for an adventure race across the frozen wilderness. My boyfriend Geoff, a runner, stood next to me, though my bicycle created a barrier between us. A small crowd of spectators gathered around the race start, which was little more than a single banner stretched over the edge of a frozen lake. Anxiety crackled in the cold air. We looked like specks on the tongue of Alaska’s backcountry, staring down its cavernous throat. With only minutes remaining before the start, I contemplated the overwhelming task of pushing deep into its frigid heart.

  I felt like a skydiver in an uncontrolled free fall, watching the wilderness close in around me. I took short, quick breaths. One for each of the 350 miles in front of me. Seconds languished on clouds of breath. Geoff coughed and cleared his throat. A gurgling sound rose from his lungs, broadcasting a deepening infection.

  “This is going to suck,” he said.

  “Are you feeling any better?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the powder-swept lake.

  “No,” he said. “I feel even worse than yesterday.” He coughed again. I struggled to feel sympathy for him. It was a terrible thing, the fact Geoff was sick, but overarching instinct told me that traversing 350 miles of Alaska wilderness during the winter was a bigger battle than either of us should have had the capacity to fight, healthy or not. And yet, I had finished the race before. It took every ounce of energy from my emaciated body, but I had finished it one year earlier. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, even to myself, I needed believe I could do it again. And because we were partners in life, I needed to believe Geoff could do the same.

  An informal “go” rang out and we launched over the starting line. I rolled my bicycle onto the lake and bogged down almost immediately. Geoff jogged past as I wrestled the bike through the loose snow.

  “I’ll see you at Yentna,” I said. “Good luck.” Geoff nodded and continued ahead.

  I watched him fade into the crowd of skiers and runners as I struggled with the other anchor-weighted cyclists. “I forgot to hug him goodbye,” I thought, with selfish disappointment that he hadn’t bothered to hug me either. Justifiable pre-race anxiety had strained our final interaction before the start. But there was something more, too — something more ominous, a thinly veiled sadness, as though we both suspected certain doom.

  I crossed a frozen lake and labored up the first hill, finally mounting my bike as the snowmobile trail became more packed at the top. I wove around runners and skiers. I passed Geoff, running steady with his sled attached to a harness, about a mile down the trail. “With this cruddy trail, you’re going to pass me again,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he replied. I slowed my pedaling and thought about saying goodbye, just in case I didn’t see him again, but no words came to my lips.

  The last non-cyclist I passed was Pete Basinger, a multi-year veteran and record-holder for the 350-mile race to McGrath. The human-powered race on the Iditarod Trail had reshaped itself frequently over the years, but Pete remained a constant, lining up for the adventurous if obscure event with his bicycle. He always finished, and usually won. In 2009, he decided to try something different. I approached him as he chopped up a small incline on a pair of skis, his first venture into the medium.

  Pete was the athlete I credited with sparking my otherwise inexplicable desire to enter a race that involves riding a bicycle over 350 miles of snow during winter in Alaska. Pete’s endeavors had a way of inspiring passion, simply because he consistently refused to give up even as situations became so difficult and ridiculous that they defied all logic and sensibility. Then he would return to race the Iditarod again, even though the race did nothing to garner success or even notoriety. A tiny circle of endurance athletes revered him, but to everyone else, he was nobody. As Pete toiled year after year through unrewarded suffering and solitude, his silence spoke volumes about a deeper meaning behind the race. I listened to his terse reports. I looked at his stark, mostly colorless photographs. Through both, I sensed a power and beauty that I could scarcely comprehend. I wanted so badly to understand.

  In 2008, I signed up for the race. Then I finished it. My six days on the Iditarod Trail had been the most eye-opening and intense experience of my entire life. Amid my body’s slow-motion collapse at the finishing point, I convin
ced myself I had reached my goal — a deeper understanding of beauty and strength that I could reference for the rest of my life. And yet there I was, just one year later, riding a bicycle into the Alaska wilderness again.

  “Thanks for working on my bike, Pete,” I said as I passed. “It’s running awesome.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Can I borrow it?”

  I laughed. “Skiing is rough, huh?”

  “It’s OK,” he said. “I just can’t get a good glide.”

  “It has to beat pushing a bike,” I said. “I doubt this trail will hold up for much longer.”

  “Good luck,” Pete called out as I pedaled farther ahead. I smiled and hoped I’d see him again. In the low sunlight of mid-afternoon, spruce trees cast long shadows over the clean, new snow. Alder branches glistened with hoarfrost, forming a white wall along the straight and narrow trail. The undulating surface of the snow created a sensation of rolling waves. Pedaling a bicycle felt like paddling a canoe on a stormy lake. I caught up to a group of five cyclists riding in a line. The last cyclist in the peloton was a woman, Catherine Shenk, a rookie from Colorado. I pedaled behind her and made small talk, asking where she was from, what other races she had entered and what kind of time she hoped to make. She was, after all, my competition.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to ride in Alaska, ever since I heard about this race. I just want to finish the thing.”

  “That’s certainly the goal,” I said.

  We entered an open swamp where a blast of unobstructed and shockingly cold wind spurred us to silence. Against an ice-blue sky, we caught our first glimpse of the Alaska Range, with the hulking white mass of Denali piercing the horizon.

  “This place is incredible, just … ” Catherine said as the wind stole her words.

  “Isn’t it?” I answered.

  As we rode across the swamp, the trail became more drifted with snow until it was no longer distinguishable from the untrammeled surface. Our bicycle wheels no longer rolled through the deep powder, and we had to probe the snow with our feet, searching for the packed trail. Our group, which for an hour had worked so well together, proved to be mismatched while pushing our bikes. The cyclists at the front of our pack languished and often stopped to rest in the middle of the trail. I walked around them, looking back one last time just as the evening sun cast orange light on their faces. “See you soon,” I said to Catherine.

  The trail veered back into the woods. I was able to get back on my bike for a slow-motion ride through the soft snow. Ski tracks were etched like brush strokes into the powder, and after a mile I caught up to their graceful calligrapher, skier Cory Smith.

  Cory, from what little I knew about him, was a former world-class Nordic skier who had since retired to raise a family. He had no aspirations to greatness in a race like the Iditarod Trail Invitational, only adventure, but he seemed to be holding a solid lead over everyone but the fast cyclists. I pedaled harder to catch Cory, but he remained a few strides ahead of me. Eventually we reached a long slough, where the trail became wind-drifted again. I hopped off my bike and commenced pushing, watching with envy as Cory glided over the choppy snow. The gap between us grew quickly, and his graceful figure faded around a bend.

  Nearly a half hour later, I rounded the bend and emerged on the open expanse of Flathorn Lake. It was there I crossed that vague line between day and night, drawn by the orange glow on the southwestern horizon as a purple shadow advanced from the east. I turned my head away from its ominous cloak of darkness, focusing instead on the iridescent pink edges of Mount Susitna. The wind felt stronger and colder on the lake, without even the meager protection of spruce trees to hold it back. I squinted into the wind-driven snow until the sunlight faded to nothing more than narrow strokes of crimson paint on black canvas. The inevitable prospect of night made me nervous. I had traveled only twenty-five miles with an unknown number to go before I slept. I pulled on my mittens and rifled through my pocket until I found my thermometer. The temperature was several degrees below zero already, and dropping fast.

  I trudged through wind-driven powder and fed myself M&Ms that I had stowed inside my handlebar covers. In the fading light, I couldn’t distinguish the official trail from a maze of snowmobile tracks slashed across the surface of the lake. I flipped on my headlight, but its white glare only made things worse. Granules of snow pummeled my face like a frigid sand blast.

  “Please stay,” I said to the slivers of red light, the last hint of color in an increasingly bleak landscape. It answered only with the roar of wind, and squeaks from my footsteps on the deep-frozen snow.

  How I came to take my last innocent step, I can’t be sure. I’ve relived the scene in my mind a thousand times, with no clear conclusion about what exactly took place. I remember seeing the footprints of other racers, swept with drifted snow. Their bikes’ tire tracks were almost obliterated even though our separation could still be measured in minutes. I remember following those fading footprints, the only way I could discern the trail from a seemingly bottomless basin of powdered sugar.

  Then the bottom fell out, literally. I lifted my boot from the snow and set it down on nothing. My leg swiftly dropped into a gut-sinking void, pulling my body and bike down a shallow trench. My right foot had punched through a thin layer of ice and plunged into the lake. I wrenched my body sideways but my mitten-covered fingers still clung to the overturned bike, as though it had the ability to save me somehow. My right leg sank all the way to my upper thigh as frigid water gushed into my boot, which dangled freely over what I later determined had to be the icy depths of the lake bottom. My left leg, which twisted painfully but managed to stay planted on solid ice, sprung up as I let go of the bike and plunged my hands into the snow. I clawed up the shallow embankment, pulling my right leg out of the pressure crack through which I had broken.

  My bike still lay atop a sliver of thin ice. The handlebars had punched through the surface, and slushy water surrounded the entire front end. I dropped to my stomach and slowly inched down the trench until I could wrap my fingers around the ice-coated rear wheel. With what felt like a fully exhaustive burst of strength, I wrestled the bike out of the water. The right handlebar cover was completely soaked. A white layer of ice coated my sleeping bag cover and frame bag. I reached into the handlebar cover to rescue my bag of M&Ms, but they were already gone — sinking, most likely, to the bottom of Flathorn Lake.

  Hot adrenaline seared my veins as I knelt down to assess my own damage. A veneer of flaky ice formed around my pant legs, and larger chunks clung to my boot and gaiters. I shook my foot and heard water sloshing inside the boot. I tugged at the Velcro on the gaiters, but they had already frozen shut. Subzero air needled into my wet clothes, driving a powerful cold, along with its accompanying fear and hopelessness, directly to my core. This was the kind of mistake that ends races. This was the kind of mistake that ends lives. But it couldn’t happen here, I told myself — not on Flathorn Lake. Not so close to civilization and the beginning of my Iditarod adventure.

  I stood up and looked toward the tree-sheltered shoreline, which was still about a mile across the lake. If I could just make it to there, just to extract myself out of the deadly wind, then I could deal with my wet foot. I could build a fire, put on my down booties and crawl into my sleeping bag. I didn’t know what my most rational option was. All I felt capable of understanding was a primal sort of fear, driven by the wind to an intolerable intensity, and I had to escape it.

  I continued marching down the lake with my headlamp beam fixed on the fading footprints. Water sloshed around inside my boot, but the liquid didn’t feel cold. In fact, the water felt like it had already warmed up to the same temperature as my foot. I wiggled my toes. “Maybe my insulated boot is allowing my body to heat the water,” I thought. “Maybe it’s reached equilibrium. Maybe it’s not so bad.”

  About forty-five minutes passed before I reached a cluster of spruce trees at the end of the lake. By then, a solid ba
rrier of ice had wrapped around my entire lower leg. I stopped in a sheltered spot, took off my frozen-stiff mittens, and clawed at the ice on my gaiters. It was at least a centimeter thick, as solid as an ice cube, and it refused to budge. If I couldn’t take my gaiters off, then I couldn’t take my boots off, and if I couldn’t take my boots off, then I had no hope of extracting the water that was still sloshing around my foot. And even if I did, what then? I still had wet socks and a wet lining inside the boot, so even spare socks wouldn’t stay dry for long. I could crawl into my sleeping bag, but that would only put the situation on hold until I some kind of help came along. I could build a fire, but didn’t like the idea of stopping forward motion for an extended period of time. The temperature was plummeting with the deepening night, taking with it my capacity for patience. The wind was so cold, and the water in my boot felt so warm.

  “If I just leave the water in there, maybe it will keep my foot warm, like a chemical warmer,” I told myself. “I can monitor this. I’ll just wiggle my toes, and as soon as I can’t wiggle them anymore, I’ll stop and build a fire.”

  I put my mittens back on and continued to beat at my ice-coated leg just as another cyclist, Sean Salach, walked up. His beard was crusted in ice and his nose was a dark shade of red.

  “Um, are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m great,” I said. “I’m just stopping for a little break.”

  His eyes betrayed skepticism. “Really?”

  I sighed. Sean wasn’t in any position to help me, but it seemed pointless to lie to him.

  “I went through the ice,” I said. “Back there on Flathorn. I soaked my whole leg.”