Alaska Life

The call of the wild

Sometimes it's easy to forget Alaska is more than just a U.S. state with glorious summers and long, dark winters. But there comes a reminder about this time every year when the almost mythical nothingness of the far north draws people from all over the country, and the world, to test themselves against some sort of wilderness-challenging benchmark made legendary by the likes of author Jack London and poet Robert Service.

"Have you known the Great White Silence?" Service asked, "not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver?

"Have you broken trail on snowshoes? mushed your huskies up the river?"

Nobody much breaks trail on snowshoes anymore. There are snowmachines to do that. But plenty still mush those huskies up the river, or drag themselves foot by foot forward on the Iditarod Trail in dogged pursuit of what Service tagged "the call of the wild," or roar north on high-powered snowmachines for who knows what.

It's certainly not for the money. Like the prospectors of old, some of these people do dream of finding "color" in the celebrity-driven Internet world of today. Much the same way the prospectors panned for the yellow of gold, they set up Web sites to promote their adventures hoping this might, in turn, yield some of the green of cash. But by and large, it doesn't work.

As with the gold miners, for every one who strikes it rich there are dozens barely eking out an existence. Only a handful of people manage to make a living off the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, despite its $525,000 purse. Nobody makes a living racing snowmobiles in the Iron Dog, which has managed to grow its prize money to within about third of the Iditarod's but costs so much to run that even the race winners lose money on the deal. And then there is the Iditarod Trail Invitational, which attracts bicyclists, skiers and snowshoers from around the globe, willing to race for nothing but the honor of saying they raced.

Five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson from Two Rivers, the winningest musher in Iditarod history, once remarked during one of the many periods Iditarod was struggling through financial troubles that competition was so deeply ingrained in the fabric of Alaska that mushers would, if necessary, race to Nome for nothing more than a bag of dog food at the finish line. The cyclists, skiers and runners in the Iditarod Trail Invitational can top that. There isn't even a Clif Bar waiting for the winner of the race in McGrath, 350 miles north of Anchorage on the other side of the Alaska Range.

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Getting over the range isn't easy, either. Last year was epic. It snowed so much at one point that race organizer Bill Merchant gave up trying to break open the Iditarod Trail with his snowmachine. After getting stuck for the umpteenth time and worrying he was going to exhaust himself digging out again, he finally just abandoned the sled and took refuge in a remote, albeit roofless, shelter cabin to wait out the weather. Some of the "racers," having by that point given up racing in favor of becoming survivalists, joined him there. One of them, Californian Louise Kobin, later wrote about trying to leave, discovering that was a bad decision, and retreating back to the wreck of a cabin:

"The wind and snow had really picked up and our bikes were covered in snow," she wrote. "So were the tracks made by the racers in front of us. We took off from the cabin, and couldn't even figure out how to get to where we had come from. There was just waist-deep, soft snow everywhere. The wind was blowing really hard, and we barely made any progress. After about half an hour we decided it was pointless; there was no way we could make it all the way to Rohn by ourselves, so we turned around to go back. Our tracks had already been blown over. It was so frustrating, overwhelming, and kind of scary...''

You can read the full account on Kobin's blog.

Luckily, Kobin and companion Eric Warkentin, another experienced California ultracyclist, found their way back to the cabin where Merchant was waiting, which was a good thing. Having physically pushed herself in the snowy wallow, Kobin was in a bit of a metabolic meltdown. Even curled up in a sleeping bag wearing all the clothes she had with her, she couldn't get warm. Merchant, who had been through this himself before, started cooking. He knew warm food would help more than anything, and it did. Kobin eventually recovered to push on to suffer some more.


Ahead of her and Warkentin, on the north side of 3,160-foot Rainy Pass, a gaggle of bikers and former cross-country ski racer Cory Smith from Anchorage were meanwhile breaking open a trail by swimming through waist- to chest-deep snow.

Even the wilderness-tested, battle-scarred Smith admitted he at one point "began wondering if this is what the Donner Party experienced. I was envisioning us being stuck for another couple of days. Things were going to get worse before they got better." (Smith's blow-by-blow account of suffering is also available online.)

If your history lessons skipped the sad tale of suffering, death, cannibalism and possibly murder when snow trapped the 87 members of the pioneering Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1846, Wikipedia has a decent account with links to even more. Suffice to say, the Donner disaster left 33 dead. None of the Alaska wilderness races -- not the Invitational, not the Iditarod and not the Iron Dog -- have killed anyone yet, but there have been close calls. Some of the Iron Dog racers have suffered life-threatening injuries in crashes. Several Iditarodders have come close to death from hypothermia after being caught in storms. And well-known Invitational mountain biker Rocky Reifenstuhl from Faribanks once got worried enough about his situation that he decided it was worth burning up his plastic water bottle (yes, they will burn) to start a bonfire to save himself from freezing to death in the Dalzell Gorge at 40 degrees below zero.

And yet people keep coming back for more.

Fifty of them -- two skiers, 18 runners-cum-hikers-cum-snowshoers, and 30 fat-tire cyclists -- will set off from Knik into the wild on Sunday. Only 13 are Alaskans. The rest of the field is more global than American. Of the 37 from Outside, 19 are Europeans and one a Kiwi. Why do they spend all those Euros on specialized Arctic gear and airplane flights to Alaska in the dead of winter -- not to mention the $1,000 Invitational entry fee -- to participate in a wilderness trail race that might or might not even have a trail, all depending on the weather?

"They are testing themselves,'' said Rich Crain of Talkeetna, an Invitational trailbreaker for more than a decade. "They may not even recognize they are testing themselves.''

Crain himself goes north for the road trip. Odd as this might sound, even to urban Alaskans, he's got his Bush skills dialed in so well that this is what a journey up the Iditarod trail has become to him. When his 13-year-old Ski-doo Tundra II snowmobile sheered an axle near One Stone Lake on the south side of the Alaska Range one year, Crain camped and called a friend with an airplane to come get him. Crain doesn't remember if the year was 2005 or 2006. He's been up the trail so many times. But he does remember that he flew out, got parts, and flew back the following weekend to discover Steve Flanigan, one of the few people living in the area for miles around, had towed the snow machine to his cabin so Crain could work on it in a warm place.

Crain replaced the axle -- the way most people might replace a flat tire -- and rode home. He plans to take the same old tried-and-true Ski-doo back up the Iditarod Trail on another road trip with the Invitational competitors this year. For him, all those racers are just an excuse to get out and see the country.

"It's different as an older person,'' he said. Or at least it's different as an older person with Crain's body of experience. He is among the few who live in that Alaska where the wilderness is the backyard. And the backyard is by means of association a familiar place no matter what difficulties it might throw at you. This is the Alaska known to people who live in the Bush, and that comparative handful of hearty adventurers who foray forth from the state's major cities on a regular basis.

For everyone else, Alaska is that place of Jack London's short stories alive with icy danger.

"The bottom line is I'm doing it for the challenge of doing it. I'm just an average person trying to do something extraordinary,'' Jody Baumgarnter, a consultant in Greensboro, S.C., told his local newspaper when he decided to take a shot at the Invitational back in 2003 at the age of 65.

Reifenstuhl, Jacques Boutet of Anchorage, Jeff Oatley of Fairbanks and even young Peter Basinger -- cyclist and trekkers who have long been in-country -- would not think this challenge extraordinary. That there is a challenge, all would agree -- but a relatively simple one to be met with preparation, persistence and common sense. But then, they own the experience around which is formed that common sense that when you get right down to it isn't common at all. Without experience, the challenges of the trail do become extraordinary, in part because they exist against a background of primordial fear.


People still die of exposure every winter in Alaska, where you can still quite easily freeze to death alone in the wild. It is not that hard to do. Nothing, in this respect, has changed in the more than 100 years since London's short story "To Build a Fire" was published in 1908. London wrote:

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He should not have built the fire under the spruce tree. He should have built it in the open. But it had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire. Now the tree under which he had done this carried a weight of snow on its boughs. No wind had blown for weeks, and each bough was fully freighted. Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated a slight agitation to the tree--an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster. High up in the tree one bough capsized its load of snow. This fell on the boughs beneath, capsizing them. This process continued, spreading out and involving the whole tree. It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out! Where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and disordered snow.

The man was shocked. It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death. For a moment he sat and stared at the spot where the fire had been. Then he grew very calm. Perhaps the old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right. If he had only had a trail-mate he would have been in no danger now. The trail-mate could have built the fire. Well, it was up to him to build the fire over again, and this second time there must be no failure. Even if he succeeded, he would most likely lose some toes. His feet must be badly frozen by now, and there would be some time before the second fire was ready.

Such were his thoughts, but he did not sit and think them. He was busy all the time they were passing through his mind, he made a new foundation for a fire, this time in the open; where no treacherous tree could blot it out. Next, he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the high-water flotsam. He could not bring his fingers together to pull them out, but he was able to gather them by the handful. In this way he got many rotten twigs and bits of green moss that were undesirable, but it was the best he could do. He worked methodically, even collecting an armful of the larger branches to be used later when the fire gathered strength. And all the while the dog sat and watched him, a certain yearning wistfulness in its eyes, for it looked upon him as the fire-provider, and the fire was slow in coming.

When all was ready, the man reached in his pocket for a second piece of birch-bark. He knew the bark was there, and, though he could not feel it with his fingers, he could hear its crisp rustling as he fumbled for it. Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it. And all the time, in his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing. This thought tended to put him in a panic, but he fought against it and kept calm. He pulled on his mittens with his teeth, and threshed his arms back and forth, beating his hands with all his might against his sides. He did this sitting down, and he stood up to do it; and all the while the dog sat in the snow, its wolf-brush of a tail curled around warmly over its forefeet, its sharp wolf-ears pricked forward intently as it watched the man. And the man as he beat and threshed with his arms and hands, felt a great surge of envy as he regarded the creature that was warm and secure in its natural covering.

London's protagonist, of course, ended up freezing to death. All of the racers who cross Alaska today hope they won't. But the fear they might remains part and parcel of the allure. It is a different world out there. The little things to which one fails to pay attention become big things. The big things become dangerous things.

Early in last year's races, Invitational cyclist Jill Horner from Juneau went into some overflow on Flathorn Lake and got her feet wet, just like the character in "To Start a Fire.'' Her boots promptly froze. Faced with the choice of stopping at the edge of the lake to start a fire to thaw the boots so she could get them off to warm her feet or pressing on to the next checkpoint to do that, Horner decided to push on. Her feet, she thought, were still warm enough in her boots. Then the temperature dropped.

At 25 below zero, the boots froze full and so did Horner's feet. She made the next checkpoint, but instead of going on along the trail from there she went back to a hospital to be treated for frostbite. The misadventure would appear to have dampened some of her enthusiasm for extreme biking, but she's still out climbing the snow-covered mountains of Southeast, finding new adventures in that place unlike any other.

That place called Alaska.

Craig Medred leaves Knik Sunday on a brand new Ski-doo Tundra LT (Crain is jealous) to cover the Iditarod Trail Invitational to McGrath. Watch for his stories here, and catch his bulletins at http://twitter.com/craigmedred. He hopes to be back in Anchorage by the start of March to follow the tail end of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race all the way to Nome.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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