PILGRIM HOT SPRINGS — On our sixth day of skiing across Alaska's nose, six of us slid along a contour of the Kigluaik Mountains on the Seward Peninsula. The breeze nibbling our cheeks was taking larger bites.
After a visit to Pilgrim Hot Springs that afternoon, we were all steeled to sleep outside for the night. I was thinking of delicious warmth soaking into my legs when I'd shove them into my sleeping bag.
We rounded the shoulder of a treeless hill, and with each stride we felt a firmer shove from the right. The rat nipping our bare skin was now a barracuda. The lead skier in our group, Ed Plumb, was disappearing in the white. No matter how hard I squinted, he was falling out of focus.
Within a few yards, we'd stepped into a gale straight from the North Pole. An icy, liquid wind knifed through gaps in clothing, pulling heat from our damp bodies. The visceral response was immediate: Find shelter. Don't stop until you do.
We'd found a blowhole, one of those places on the Seward Peninsula where the wind roars for no logical reason.
That inelegant word had made me shiver a week before as I stuffed my backpack for the April ski trip from Shishmaref to Nome in Northwest Alaska. In those 200 miles on lightweight racing classic skis, our six bodies would be the most prominent things jutting from the landscape.
Such raw, open terrain was not my first choice for a pleasant spring ski. But the hooks were irresistible:
• Visiting two remote hot springs.
• Drawing a new Sharpie line on my yellowed Alaska map.
• An invite from Ed Plumb, hydrologist, packrafter, buddy and master of wilderness logistics.
With Plumb, John Shook, Brian Jackson, Robin Beebee and Bob Gillis, I had shared enough trail to know I would not be breaking much of it. On a ski trek to Melozi Hot Springs a few springs earlier, I lagged behind Plumb, Shook and Jackson even though they were stomping through crust and pressing in a path for me. Last spring I watched Gillis pass me and disappear 90 miles into a 100-mile race after 20 hours on his feet.
Heat-sucking winds
We were a good team of common mind. Along with seeing new country, we looked forward to the reduction of thoughts. Existence boils down to a few elements: covering miles, fueling the machine, shelter.
Living in Fairbanks and Anchorage, none of us could prepare for the heat-sucking winds of the Seward Peninsula. On our sixth day, we shuffled into the Golden Gate Blowhole, named after the creek that runs through the middle of the area.
At that point on our traverse, we were regaining the snow-covered Kougarok Road, a frozen artery from Nome that was our route much of the trip. The road is closed in winter, but there is a drifted snowmachine track along it.
On the side of the road, fuzzy in the blowing snow, was a rectangular box painted canary yellow.
"I'm going to check it out," yelled Brian Jackson, the team bulldozer. He turned into the wind and powered his way toward the building.
It is poor form to use a private cabin without permission. But in the words of my late father as he ducked into the ladies room: any port in a storm. As the wind chewed my nose, I prayed that there was no padlock on that trailer door.
Brian shouldered into the metal door. He shoved it open and clambered inside. Seeing the door pop open from 50 yards away, I threw my hands in the air. The wind clinked my poles together.
I'm no fan of close quarters. On cabin trips with my daughter and friends, I sleep outside with the owls. But I could not have been happier to be with five sweaty bodies and their vinegar-scented socks inside that cluttered trailer. Pringles chips and faded food boxes on the shelves had expiration dates of 2006. Few people had visited since. We ate the Pringles.
The structure had no heat — the oil tank was long sucked dry — but the absence of wind on our flaming faces made it a sauna. After an hour we all noticed and appreciated something unusual: silence. The wind that threatened to rip the door off could not be heard from inside. Somehow that little survival pod hushed it.
We snored with our heads facing each compass direction, snug inside the 20-by-10-foot space. We were ecstatic to be granted that trailer, towed out the road long ago by some miner who may not have known he parked in the Golden Gate Blowhole.
2,000 people a year
We carried two tents and my bivvy sack, but only used them once, during an unusual benign night on the ice of the Pilgrim River. Each of the other six nights we had a roof over our heads and blessed plywood walls that deflected the wind and created snowdrifts that didn't melt until July.
As we skied along each day in one anothers' tracks on the spotless landscape, our hours became meditative. Out there, in a white world defined by cedar tripod trail markers, climbing to white heaven, there was nowhere to go but inward. I zoomed out and imagined where I was, shuffling across Alaska Map E.
On that black-and-white landscape, the most vivid color memories came from visiting hot springs so hard to reach, I will probably never get back. Fewer than 2,000 people a year stay overnight anywhere in Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.
Serpentine seems a unique place on the planet. In a valley of sentinel granite tors, in country where we saw no other rocks, Serpentine Hot Springs is Mordor, from J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth.
With a golden eagle soaring overhead, we soaked in a 10-person square wooden tub protected by a shed-like frame structure that cut the wind. The first step in the water was heaven, a warm massage bubbling up from the earth.
Remnants of 1918 Spanish flu epidemic
While caribou drifted through the tors on the slopes above, Wilber and Cary from Shishmaref, 50 miles away, visited on snowmachine. Inside the red Serpentine shelter, Wilber boiled us some Folgers and insisted we take some Blazo (white gas). The walls of the bunkhouse and workshop structure had names written in marker: Tocktoo, Weyiouanna, Nayokpuk. It felt like Natives own this mystical place that is part of Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, which protects a remnant of the 1,000-mile-wide grassland that connected Asia and North America during the last Ice Age. There can't be anywhere else in the National Park system like it.
Our three-hour visit to Pilgrim Springs included a soak in a beer-can-shaped tub in an old potato field. Here in a remote corner of Northwest Alaska was one of the most intriguing Alaska structures I've seen — a two-story, tin-sided church that was Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Mission, featuring a great horned owl sitting on a nest constructed on a small balcony. A stamped tin wall ran along a wooden staircase and there was an operational set of confessional booth shutters connected by rope and pulley.
Dozens of kids orphaned by the 1918 Spanish flu grew up here. When they left, the place ghosted out.
Pilgrim Springs and its sulfurous breeze supported comforting life forms we were reluctant to leave: trees. Balsam poplars 60 feet tall (which may have attracted the owl and her mate) along with lodgepole pines, larch and a few spruce.
After our soak, the team voted to move on. We wicked dry in the breeze after soaking. Then we stepped into skis and pointed them toward the road that led to Nome. We expected to camp somewhere in a patch of willows.
We were headed toward those twigs when life got cold and blurry. Of all the images that come and go during a trip, that relentless, hand-numbing-in-seconds wind — and the euphoric contrast of escaping it — will be the memory that endures.
But another has sadly trumped it. We didn't know we were on Brian Jackson's final ski trip. The 39-year-old strongman, master storyteller and agent of fun was killed in a hunting accident in Wisconsin seven months later.
Out on the Seward Peninsula, he seemed to need shelter the least. He was the one taking video in screaming winds, postholing to check oil tanks and carrying two backpacks when the need was there. Knowing what I know now, I take the unknown into account when contemplating a trip. You never know how precious those photos and memories might become.
When in doubt, go.
Ned Rozell is a science writer for the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute and an avid outdoorsman.