SKWENTNA -- As the nighttime temperature dropped toward minus-20 and tentacles of cold sneaked along the floor to warn of the world outside every time someone opened the door, the leaders in the Iditarod Trail Invitational shared one concern: "Where's Pete?"
The Pete in question was six-time champion Peter Basinger, a now 33-year-old cyclist who grew up in Anchorage to become a long-distance endurance racer of some note. He held the record for the 350-mile Invitational race to McGrath until it fell to Jay Petervary of Idaho last year.
Petervary isn't back, but Basinger, now a school teacher in Moab, Utah, is. He came into the roadhouse almost two hours behind already departed race leader Tim Berntson from Anchorage, but left only half an hour behind as others relaxed in front of the big-screen TV in the lounge -- watching motocross races, soaking up the warmth and regularly slipping around the wall hiding the staircase to the dining area to try to remedy their calorie deficits.
"I always wondered why people stayed so long in this checkpoint," said Charly Tri, a rookie competitor from Rochester, Minn. A solidly built man whose athletic appearance said more "football player'' than "endurance cyclist," Tri was one of a half-dozen savoring the food and warmth.
Like most them, he also struggled to muster the motivation to leave the comfort of the warm checkpoint for a cold, hard trail. A veteran of these races back almost to the days of his youth, Basinger had his own idea of the meaning of a cold, hard trail.
Rock and roll, baby. Rock and roll.
"This is the best I've ever seen it," Basinger said later when he reached the Winterlake Lodge, another 35 miles along the trail. He put a strong emphasis on the word "is."
White sidewalk of hard snow
For 130 miles from the race start back in Knik on Sunday, the cyclists and runners have been on a white sidewalk of rock-hard snow. On soft trail two years ago, Tim Hewitt, a Pennsylvania lawyer in love with the Iditarod Invitational, walked away from the cyclists to lead the Invitational over the Alaska Range.
With the range bold, beckoning and bright only miles north of the Finger Lake checkpoint on Monday morning, Hewitt was nowhere in sight. He was somewhere far back along the trail with the other runners and walkers moving at a pedestrian 3 to 5 mph. Cyclists on fat tire bikes are rolling at 10 mph or more.
Heather Best of Fairbanks, the eighth cyclist into the classy Winterlake Lodge beside a pretty lake, was all smiles as she wolfed down a breakfast burrito of fresh eggs, beans and rice. Best is in her second Invitational.
Her first was an unmitigated disaster in 2012. She dropped out of the race in Skwentna after days of pushing her bike through fresh snow that was up to thigh deep.
"I never really practiced pushing my bike,'' she said.
Women's course record in offing?
Best was not alone in her suffering. From the beginning of that race, cyclists were lined out in a push-a-thon. The smartest ones quit at Yentna Station, the first Invitational checkpoint. The toughest ones pushed on for Skwentna, only to abandon the race there.
Only the slightly demented kept going. Of the more than 30 cyclists who started the race, which is limited to 50 "invitees,'' only eight finished. Basinger led them in followed by Phil Hofstetter from Nome, another rugged cyclist with a growing reputation in Alaska. He paced everyone to the Nome end of the Iditarod Trail in the 1,000-mile version of this race last year.
Best was not there. She took a year off to contemplate the crazy adventure she had been lured into by husband Jeff Oatley, a past winner of the Invitational to McGrath. She is back this year, pushing Oatley to keep pace and looking like she could be toying with a women's course record.
This is what everyone expected in 2012. A 5-foot-11-inch basketball and volleyball player at Bradley University in the late 1990s and a member Bradley's Athletic Hall of Fame, Best has spent her Alaska years transforming herself into a cyclist and winter triathlete.
When it comes to the bike, she might not be the best pusher, but she's a first-class pedaler. Pushing, it took her three days to do 95 miles to Skwentna. Pedaling, she hit the 130-mile mark this year in 21 hours. Mother Nature has delivered the conditions she needs.
Invitational 2014 is the polar opposite of Invitational 2012, or maybe the anti-polar opposite. When the "polar vortex" slipped south across Canada into the eastern United States in January, a tropical troublemaker known in Alaska as the "Hawaiian Express" came screaming north.
Rain fell. Previous snows turned to slush and mush. Then conditions went back to normal, and winter returned to make ice of everything. The result was rock-hard snow. The kind you can walk on instead of sinking into.
For some Invitational competitors, like Best and Berntson, this is proving an advantage.
Favoring the road cyclist
"He's a road cyclist," Basinger said of the latter, not by way of criticizing Berntson's fat-tire cycling skills but as a way of noting Berntson's ability to turn up the cadence. By contrast, Basinger is a notorious grinder with a special gift for riding gnarly snow. He can ride a straight line through soft crud while other cyclists are snaking all over the place.
Soft crud, however, is nowhere to be found this year. Where normally fat-tire cyclists are letting air of out of their tires to get more float on soft snow, this year they are pumping them up to get better roll.
When Basinger rode into Finger Lake, he said there is no way he can catch race leaders Berntson and Kevin Breitenbach from Fairbanks if the trail continues like this, as expected. Oatley, who is planning to ride to Nome this year and thus has a reason to ride conservatively at the start of a 1,000-mile journey, confessed he can't keep up with Best in these conditions.
Her natural cadence is just too high, he said. Oatley has to work harder than he wants to stay on her wheel.
"She definitely rides fast," added Coloradan Tim Stern, "Faster than I want to go."
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com