Tough and resilient as he is, Alaska mountain biker extraordinaire Peter Basinger is swearing off the Tour Divide, a 2,745-mile solo off-road bike race from Banff, Alberta, to Mexico.

Clearly, he's jinxed.

In 2004, he biked a predecessor of the race that stayed within the United States and finished second, 25 minutes behind the cyclist who set the course record. In subsequent Tour Divides, he caught a bug and got so sick he scratched one year, then fell apart physically in New Mexico and pulled out the next year.

But those disappointments were nothing compared to this year. Not an official entrant, Basinger was doing the Tour Divide as a time trial in an effort to improve his time.

On June 30, high in the Colorado Rockies near the New Mexico border after 13 long days of biking, Basinger was headed downhill on a twisty dirt road while a truck ascended. They collided head on.

"It happened real quick," Basinger said by phone on Monday. "It was a big truck coming out of a turn on a narrow road. We just hit each other.

"I thought I was dead."

He wasn't. But he'd broken his collarbone. He and others feared much worse.

Evacuation by airlift to a Pueblo, Colo., hospital took more than six hours. But even in this remote corner of Colorado, an Alaskan was there to offer solace.

Fellow endurance cylist Jill Homer, deputy managing editor of the Juneau Empire, was one of 43 race entrants. Homer knew that Basinger was riding the route, too, and hoped they'd cross paths. She'd first met Basinger at the 2006 Soggy Bottom 100 race in Hope. Two years later, he helped her through the 350-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational. Her book "Ghost Trails" includes her account of the Knik-to-McGrath wilderness race.

Homer finished last month's Tour Divide 14th, setting a new women's record of 24 days, 7 hours, 24 minutes. Her blog account begins shorter after 11,910-foot Indiana Pass, the highest climb of the race route near the New Mexico border. It's been edited for brevity:

"I had to engage the high gear to get up it without walking," she wrote.

Near the top, a thunderstorm rolled in with "black clouds ... rapidly disintigrating into sheets of rain before I even slowed down to put my rain gear on. Deafening bolts of lightning streaked through every corner of the sky. Even the trees were too small to cower behind."

There was nothing to do but descend as quickly as possible.

"I was already shivering from the cold but too frightened to stop and put on more layers. My fingers felt frozen to my grips; my legs were stiff and quaking. The lightning wouldn't leave me alone, and the pouring rain was pooling in potholes and streaming dark mud down the soft road."

"I was as cold as I have ever been on a bike, even all the times I rode in driving sleet in Juneau."

As the storm abated, Homer pedaled a few more miles before encounting the first vehicle she'd seen in a while, a police car. Then, about a mile later, she pulled up behind two ambulances inching down the road no more than 5 mph.

When they reached an open area, both vehicles stopped and the drivers got out.

"Are you with this biker?" one asked.

"Wait, that's a biker in the ambulance?" Homer said. The driver nodded slowly. "A cyclist?" He nodded again. "Who is it?"

I felt a thick lump of bile gurgling up from my stomach. "Is it Pete Basinger?" The driver nodded. All the blood left my head, and I said in a broken squeak, "Is he OK?"

"He's responsive," the driver said. "He's talking to us."

"What happened?"

"He was hit by a truck pulling a horse trailer. Head-on."

"A head-on collision?" I squeaked. "With a truck? Do you know what's wrong?"

The ambulance driver shook his head. "We have him stabilized and we're trying to call in to see if we can land a helicopter in here."

"Where are you taking him?" I said.

"Not sure," the driver said. "Do you want to talk to him?"

I stepped into the ambulance and nodded at the two EMTs sitting inside. Pete was strapped to a bed and his head was completely stabilized so he couldn't turn his neck. Based on the severity of the accident, the way he was strapped in and the fact that the EMTs were calling in life-flight, I was convinced I was looking at a man who was badly injured, possibly paralyzed.

"Hey Pete," I said, startled by the shakiness in my own voice.

"Um, Jill?" he said.

"Yeah, Jill," I said.

"Heh. This is pretty crazy, isn't it?" he said.

"It's intense," I said. "How long ago did this happen?"

"It's been about a three-hour process getting here," he said.

"Are you in much pain?" I asked.

"It's not too bad," he said. "Now."

We paused and the silence echoed. I looked down, muddling for anything to say.

"I'm really sorry this had to happen," I said.

"Yeah," Pete said. "(Stuff) happens. Just sucks right now, three days from the end."

"Three days," I mustered a laugh. "I was thinking more like seven."

"It won't take you seven days," Pete said.

"That was really bizarre," Basinger said of the encounter, "but it was kinda cool to see her."

Basinger, it should be pointed out, is a man with an extraordinary pain threshhold. The course record holder for biking the frozen, 350-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational in February, Basinger has done that race nine times and is the only person to win in two disciplines -- biking and skiing. He's legendary for using a single-speed bike to humble fit cyclists with dozen of gears.

But this was something new.

"When you bounce off the front of a truck at 30 mph, you're really sore," he said. "I couldn't move for four or five days."

Doctors took several scans, worried about his spine. His father flew to Colorado, but Basinger was in too much pain to get on a plane for a week.

"Really, when you think about it, I got pretty lucky," he said.

Yes, he had a destroyed bike, a broken collarbone and an immense bill as a result of the airlift and hospital stay. But he was alive and well enough just a month later to win Saturday's Arctic Bicycle Club Hillside Time Trial.

"I'm mostly worried about the residual damage," he said. "I'm going to feel this when I'm an old man for sure.

"I'm a little gun shy about biking right now, especially biking on the roads, but I don't think it'll last very long.

"Every time you get away with it OK, you hope you get away with it again."

And Basinger has been on the other side, too.

Almost exactly a year ago, Basinger was the first to find 15-year-old Petra Davis, badly mauled by a grizzly bear, at 1:30 a.m. during a 24-hour bike race in Bicentennial Park. His swift and sure actions getting her to safety helped save Davis' life.

So on Saturday, when Basinger won the Hillside race less than a week after getting back on a bike for the first time since the collision, he could share the joy of simply being able to ride with another racer intimate with the feeling.

Davis won the women's division.

Reach Mike Campbell at mcampbell@adn.com or 257-4329.

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