Last man standing plods on in unsupported Arctic trek
1,000 KILOMETERS: Three started in Point Hope; only one is left to complete the journey.
Published: July 9, 2006
Last Modified: July 9, 2006 at 05:07 AM
DIAL FINISHES
• According to the group's web site, Roman Dial reached the Dalton Highway just after midnight Wednesday, 23 days and 8 hours after starting out. In his blog for Thursday he said he would walk a mile on the highway before hitchhiking home. Arctic adventurer Jason Geck is home in Anchorage now appreciating the comforts of civilization.
Former Brooks Range companion Ryan Jordan is back at his residence in Bozeman, Mont., nursing the injury that forced him to abandon a planned 1,000-kilometer trek across the top of North America about a third of the way into the journey.
And Alaska Pacific University professor Roman Dial struggles on, pushing day by day closer to the Dalton Highway and the end of the muscle-tearing, body-beating, spirit-challenging Arctic 1000.
Begun more than three weeks ago at Point Hope on the Chukchi Sea, the 1,000-kilometer (620 miles), unsupported trek through some of the wildest country left on the continent was billed as a test of men, gear and the capacity to go long distances using only what one could carry in a backpack.
Jordan, an advocate of horizon-stretching ultralight backpacking and founder of www.backpackinglight.com, was the impetus behind the journey. Geck and Dial -- veterans of a variety of other half-crazed adventures -- were the local knowledge on Alaska Bush travel.
Dial, in particular, has been almost everywhere and done almost everything in the 49th state.
Still, Geck said in a telephone interview after arriving back in Anchorage Tuesday, this journey would end up challenging even Dial's indomitable grit and spirit.
"It was work,'' Geck said. "At times it felt more like a job than anything. I think, mentally it was harder than physically.''
INJURY ENDS SUFFERING
Hostages to the terrain and the footing, traveling 10 to nearly 50 miles per day, the men would walk themselves to near exhaustion, make camp, eat and go to bed wrestling with the knowledge that tomorrow they would have to get up and do it all over again.
For Jordan, the suffering was over by day nine, days after he tore the tendons loose from the bone in his lower leg. He didn't know that at the time of his injury, of course. It would take doctors back in Montana to make the official diagnosis.
All Jordan knew in the beginning was that he'd strained his leg. At first, it didn't even seem a reason to stop. He didn't think he was hurt all that badly, he said by telephone last week from Bozeman where he is recuperating.
The events leading up to the accident were common by Alaska standards:
Jordan was approaching the edge of a snowfield, where the snow always goes soft. He punched through the surface and twisted his leg on a rock below.
"I head a pop,'' Jordan said. "I figured I'd sprained it.''
He thought he could walk it off. He'd done that before. And the strategy seemed to work.
"Coming into camp that (first) day, I was hurting,'' he said, "but we were hurting at the end of every day.
"The next morning, I woke up, and I was walking fine.''
The leg had swollen, but some swelling in the lower extremities is normal after a steady day of walking 25 miles over rough ground. This was more swelling than normal, Jordan noted, "but I had pretty much minor pain.''
Still, the leg was ugly to look at.
COLD WATER SOAK
"It turned purple and black in the beginning,'' Jordan said. As long as it worked, though, he was committed to walking on.
Ibuprofen dulled the pain. Wading through cold water in the holes between tussocks helped to keep the swelling down and provide some comic relief for the group.
While Dial and Geck would be struggling to find the easiest walking from tussock top to tussock top, Jordan said, he would be slogging through the water between the mounds trying to keep his leg cooled.
It was a gallant effort, and it worked until the swelling went down. Coming down off a ridge on the day that happened, Jordan said, "the pain went through the roof.''
Everyone knew then he'd have to bail out. The trio struggled to a Bush airstrip and called on a satellite phone for an airplane to come get Jordan and fly him out to Kotzebue.
Parting was tough for everyone.
"When Ryan flew out, there was nothing that seemed more safe than getting in that plane and flying out,'' said the 33-year-old Geck. "It was very tempting.''
Staying was, for Geck, a bit of a struggle. Leaving, for Jordan, was even more so.
"It was really hard for him,'' Geck said. "He had more of an (emotional) investment. For me, it was just another Alaska trip.''
"It was going great,'' Jordan said. "Everything was perfect. It was an amazing place. Our gear was working great. Our route finding was, well, Roman was doing a great job. (The leg) was the only negative thing we had.
"I took a bad step.''
One bad step and his trip was over. For Dial and Geck, it was really just beginning.
Jordan flew out on Day 9. Dial and Geck didn't make the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, one of the few outposts of human habitation in the Brooks Range, for another 12 days.
TWICE OVER DIVIDE
The last day on the way there they did 44 miles in 23 hours, Dial reported on a trip blog that has been maintained at www.Arctic1000.com.
"En route,'' he wrote, "we crossed the Continental Divide twice, struggled through the worst five miles of the trip, and stopped to take our packs off only five times.''
The day dished them a whole load of Alaska backcountry travel at its worst: flooded willows, monster tussock fields and talus slopes. When they looked down from a mountainside to see a line across the tundra -- the track of an all-terrain-vehicle trail heading straight for Anaktuvuk -- it was like seeing a gift from the gods.
An experienced wilderness traveler, Geck had already developed a strong appreciation for the value of a trail -- animal, miner, hunter, musher or whomever -- but this trip underlined what a blessing a trail can be, even if he did confess that he'd about had it with moose trails.
"Moose," he said, "they never go straight, whereas caribou, they're just zipping along in a straight line.''
Granted, he added, the caribou on the direct route from Point A to Point B don't seem to care what stands between. If there's a mountain there, they'll often go up and over even if it would be barely shorter and a lot easier to traverse around. But at least caribou don't wander around in circles until they seem to somehow make their trail magically disappear altogether, Geck said.
Off and on every day, he added, he and Dial would find themselves in discussions about the trail they were on, where it was going and whether to stay with it. There were often no obvious route choices, but finding terrain with good footing could make for all the difference in a day -- both physically and mentally.
When they guessed wrong, the going was hellacious.
When they guessed right, well, Geck said, "some days it was the best hiking I've ever had in Alaska.''
Still, by Anaktuvuk, he'd had enough. He and Dial were several days behind schedule. As the co-race director for this year's Mountain and Wilderness Classic, he had a commitment to be in Central for the finish of that event. He'd lost 15 pounds off an already lean frame since the start of the Arctic 1000 in June, and he was almost out of food.
"I ate a lot more food than Roman,'' Geck said. "At first, it was a burden.''
LIGHTENING THE LOAD
About 45 pounds in his 61-pound pack at the start was food, he said. To get weight down and make travel easier, he tried to eat as much as possible early on. He probably ate more than necessary, he said, and thinks Dial ate less because of his menu.
"He just had chocolate and chips,'' Geck said.
After days and days of that, the food becomes pretty unappealing, Geck noted, which might be a good thing.
"Maybe less variety causes less hunger,'' he said.
The participants in the Arctic 1000 agreed going in that they wouldn't supplement what they carried with natural food stuffs, but Geck confessed he and Dial more than once thought about doing that. They saw fish that would have been easy to catch or spear, he said, and often there were edible greens.
Living off the land, he added, might have helped with the unavoidable problem of weight --the anchor on any Alaska backcountry journey.
The more you carry, the slower you go. The slower you go, the longer it takes to get anywhere. The longer it takes to get anywhere, the greater the chances of running out of food altogether.
The weight issue was so significant, Geck said, that "everybody else was into burning gear.''
Dial, at one point, even wanted to burn his heavy polypropylene long underwear, thinking the trip's early cold was behind them.
Geck, who admits to being something of a tightwad, took them instead, arguing they were in too good shape to burn up. Dial gave them up instead of firing them up, but a few days later --when the thermometer plunged back down -- was asking for them back, Geck said.
"I think at some points we were cutting it close in terms of gear,'' he added.
WEIGHT VERSUS SIMPLICITY
Fortunately, the gear they took all worked pretty well. Geck said he was particularly impressed by some of the lightweight equipment that looked frighteningly flimsy, but more than did the job. Jordan, he added, was the master at getting the weight down.
"His style was all about weight reduction,'' Geck said. "Our style was more about simplicity.''
If there was something Jordan thought he might need, he found or designed a really lightweight version or variation to bring along.
If there was something Dial or Geck thought they might need, they left it behind in favor of things they knew for certain they would need.
The only significant gear problem of the trip, Geck said, was Dial's Salomon adventure racing shoes. Though generally recognized for their durability, the shoes had topsides that failed Dial. He burned up a lot of camp time and much of the group's dental floss keeping them stitched back together, Geck said.
On the upside, Dial -- who has been plagued by foot problems in the past --- reported on the blog that "my feet are sore, but the infections, which I've treated with antibiotic ointment and nightly scrubbings have seemed to curtail somewhat. So I plan to finish the final 70 miles to the Dalton Highway.''
Geck on the other hand is putting his feet up and relaxing.
"I actually wanted to race (the Wilderness Classic),'' he said, "but my feet right now are pretty tender.''
They did, however, have one race left in them. As soon as Geck landed in Anchorage, he beat feet for the Moose's Tooth Pub and Pizzeria and ordered up the High Protein Land pizza thick with Canadian bacon, Italian sausage, pepperoni, mozzarella cheese and some veggies.
Forgotten in his body's screaming lust for calories was the fact that he used to be a vegetarian.
Forgotten also, at least temporarily, was the wilderness addiction that so often puts him in vast, wild country.
"I'm jazzed to be back in town,'' Geck said.
Los Anchorage might have lost its connections to the Alaska wilderness. But it remains close enough to be a great place to resupply on the way in and out.
