STOMP Under the Heel of Alaska

Iditerod Trail Invitational 2017

The ITI is a winter race utilizing the famous Iditerod dogsled trail. A racer can pick between 3 disciplines and 3 distances: fat bike, ski or run; 130, 350 or 1000 miles. It was dark – coal mine dark. The glow of my headlamp lit a small circle. Up ahead, I could occasionally spy the bobbing light of the biker who had passed me. The lack of detail in my view made me sleepy. I found a hollow in the snow near a tree, ran my sled back and forth to pack it down, then laid out the Gore-Tex bivy sack, took a last cold drink from a flask and crawled into the sleeping bag, zipping half of the bivy closed. I huddled into a ball until the bag warmed some. It was quiet, like the solid, insulated silence of a recording studio. I love to bivy in the snow, and it was not long until I was deep in a fatigue sleep. Something small but significant happened that night that would have dire repercussions later on. As in any extreme environment, a small problem can easily become a big one. I am not sure how long I was asleep before waking with a start. I was aware that something was wrong but not immediately sure what it was. I listened. Nothing. Then I moved a little and realized I was clammy. Actually, I was soaking wet. I was having some sort of hot flush. This is not good in such cold, remote conditions, since a dry sleeping bag can be a life-or-death source of warmth. I opened the bivy some more to circulate the air and lay there a long while wondering how I could rectify wet clothing and a drenched sleeping bag. I lay there until first light before dragging myself out. It was cold, and I was colder. I packed as best I could but found it difficult to squeeze the now frozen sleeping gear into its sack. I knew the best thing was to get moving, to circulate blood and, hopefully, some warmth. I started to march.

I hadn’t taken any significant calories for about 10 hours so was feeling weak, but I knew the best plan was to make Puntilla and regroup there. I figured it was about 20 miles and just got on with it. It ended up being a beautiful blue day with majestic vistas of the Alaska Range ahead. Once I got down out of the hills and past a tricky glacial section of cambered ice on the side of a ravine, it was a straightforward trail to Puntilla. The guide hut was a welcome milestone. The small wooden structure has a stove, bunks and water. I took a lot of my gear inside and removed most of my clothes for drying, then got some hot food into me. Busy with tasks, I felt alert and on top of things. I even slept for an hour in one of the bunks. But there is another significant thing that happened here that I cannot explain: I took most of the kit from the sled into the hut but totally disregarded my bivy gear. This was the perfect opportunity to try to dry the sleeping bag and its frozen zippers. I have no idea why, but I didn’t do it. I thought at the time I was very focused on regrouping and getting my kit back to normal, so how I could totally forget about one of the most important things in the sled, I don’t know. Fatigue and cold can do strange things to your mind, I guess, and this poor omission indicated I wasn’t on top of things as much as I thought. All I could think about was getting going again.

I left the hut around 2:30 p.m. and made off towards Ptarmigan Pass in beautiful, blue bird weather. As I walked, I went over checklists in my head and figured all was sorted. I had talked to some bikers who had returned to the hut earlier after experiencing high winds up ahead. Dave Johnston, on foot, had gone onward many hours before and hadn’t come back, so I decided to continue on. As I gained some

elevation I began to feel some of the breeze. I stopped briefly to get my goggles and other warm gear ready. Soon I had crested the first hill onto a barren plateau and felt the full brunt of katabatic wind in my face. I adjusted my gear and pace until the temperature felt comfortable. I remember being passed by three snow machines that went about a half mile ahead before turning around. They waved as they passed, and I waved back. I had worries about the next section, not just because of the weather but because the trail was drifted over with sugar-like snow. There were markers periodically, but it was incredibly difficult to see. It did not take long for my goggles to freeze up and I had to pull them down to try to spy the next marker. I had a balaclava on over an insulated peaked hat, a buff wrapped around my face and up over the back of my head, then all of it covered entirely with the hood of my down-filled jacket. I hunched forward, trying to push my way through the headwind’s brute force. After decades of working at sea in all types of weather, I guesstimated the wind to be a steady 40 knots with gusts to 50/60 knots that rampaged over the area in blustery violence. The sub-zero ambient temperature was one thing, but the addition of windchill factor was turning the place into a no-man’s-land. Later reports suggested temperatures of 60 below. The drifted snow was a further impediment, and it felt like the sled weighed many times its actual weight. At times I could not see any mark or any tracks and wandered on in the general direction, hoping to spy something ahead. I spent a lot of time looking at my feet and searching for signs of someone who had crossed before me – tracks from a bike, boot or snow machine. Occasionally, I would post hole up to the knee and knew I had left the packed trail. At those times I would barely lift my head, using the hat’s peak as a sort of windbreak and peering through the tiny slit in the material around my face as I tried to deduce on which side of the trail I had gone off. I am already totally blind in one eye from an accident on a ship many years ago, so I imagined I was a periscope on a submarine scanning a raging sea. I continued as best I could and didn’t want to stop moving, as to stop even briefly could mean freezing within seconds. This presented a problem with taking in calories and fluid, as the need to do either sometimes required stopping or removing mitts for dexterity. But at this point I felt okay, and my hands and feet also felt fine. I had put some Neo overboots over my La Sportiva winter shoes and had some double layer mitts over liner gloves. I just needed to keep moving. After about five hours under this heavy workload, I felt my body growing weak. The relentless wind was taxing me physically and mentally. The lack of calories also meant my metabolism couldn’t fire up the internal furnace to help keep my body warm, so I was starting to chill from the inside out. As the light began to fade I felt some pangs of loneliness. I am a loner at heart, but on this brutal evening it felt like I was standing on the edge of the world. At one point, there was a long uphill section and I very nearly had to crawl to get my sled up the hill. At the top I surveyed the landscape, hoping that the trail would wind down into a gulley where I could get some protection from the wind. There was nothing to be done but to move on until something resembling shelter appeared. I kept going for hours, waiting to stumble

onto a place where I could take a break, refuel or bivy. I had broken a pole on my sled, which made going downhill a little difficult. I recall one section where I let the sled go in front and walked behind. I was losing energy and needed to soon make a very important decision: seek refuge from the elements in the sleeping bag, try to continue forward, or simply put the wind to my back and return to Puntilla. After losing some altitude, the wind dropped a little and I came out onto some small rollers on a plain. I decided right then to bivy, recover some energy and push on when, hopefully, the wind would have dropped further. I scanned the darkness looking for any sort of protection from the wind and settled on a small scrape behind some ragged scrub. It looked more exposed than I wished, but I didn’t want to gamble on terrain that might be even more open up ahead. I figured I needed to get into the sleeping bag as quickly as possible to maintain warmth, so I fairly ripped it off the sled and threw it out. My hands got mighty cold during this small exercise. My merino liner gloves may have been damp from sweat, and as soon as I slipped the mitts off, they froze – along with my fingers. With the mitts back on, I stomped around, flipping my arms to get blood into the fingers while trying to stop the sleeping gear from blowing away. Then I shook the snow off my boots and climbed straight into the bag with them on, figuring I would remove them once warm in the bag, but I never did. I grabbed a thermos of what was now cold fluid, some frozen bars, another down jacket, heavy mitts and a pee bottle. I managed to zip the bivy up, but the bag zip was frozen. I breathed hard on it, but it was a block of ice. The bag was a stiff, unwelcoming lump, and my heart sank when I realized my terrible mistake of disregarding it back at the hut. Clutching myself into a ball, I lay a long while trying to generate some heat. My hands hurt and the right one was locked into a sort of claw. The bivy slapped in the wind and sounded like buckshot as the snow peppered it in loud bursts. Focus was also a problem – trying to concentrate on details that might affect the outcome of my situation. I had already decided not to leave the bag until daylight, if that was possible. So now my goal was to get warm and stay warm. I felt fear – I have no problem admitting that. There were a bunch of factors against me, I had made some unfathomable mistakes and had some gear malfunctions, and I knew that any or all of the above could crescendo into something out of my control. I knew quite surely that in these types of extreme conditions, things could unravel in a matter of seconds. The year before, I had been climbing on Denali and our team tried to ferry a load onto a ridge above the headwall at 15,000’ when a 60-knot Bering Sea storm swept the area. We made it back down to camp at 14,300’ but got pinned there for 9 days in apocalyptic conditions. It’s a different feeling when you’re with a group, have an established tent camp and a dug-out kitchen 8 feet deep to make hot meals than when you’re alone in a flapping bivy wondering if you should be there. I thought about Dave Johnston, one of the legends of this event, who was out there ahead somewhere. The guy is like a bulldozer, eating up terrain in a steady take-no-prisoners cadence, his long ponytail beating up and down like a metronome. We had leapfrogged each other in the early stages of the race, but I never saw him again. He made it to the

finish in McGrath way before anyone else on foot – his 5th victory. I am not even sure if I slept at all or just dozed fitfully between shivering. As tired as I was I didn’t really want to sleep, as I was afraid I might not wake up. Thoughts of early Polar explorers perishing in their tents crossed my mind more than once. I do remember at some point hearing something approaching across the ice. The wind had died down by then and the scraping of a sled reverberated across the plain, sounding like an axe being filed on a sharpening steel. I waited, ears pricked, for the interaction with another living thing. “Grant is that you? It’s Pete.” It was Peter Ripmaster, a guy from North Carolina who had fallen through ice into a river the year before, saved himself and made it out alive, only to return for another go at the race. I had no doubts about this bloke’s strength of will. At that time, I could not think of a better person to call my name in the icy blackness. I felt a pang of relief just to hear his voice. He asked – twice – if I was okay, did I need anything and was I sure. That’s the sort of guy Pete is. I will remember that moment for a very long time. I wasn’t completely honest with my reply to him, but I felt an overwhelming guilt to burden anyone out there with my problems as they might also be toeing limits and fighting demons. Triage and self-preservation are important and pragmatic factors to accept in extreme environments. Pete indicated that he would sleep nearby and we would leave at sunrise. I drifted off then. Later, I heard Pete as he walked past again saying he needed to move. He was most probably cold himself and felt better to keep going. I should have done the same but felt unable to move at that time. I also wanted to see the sun. It felt like I could hear his pulk scraping the icy surface for an hour after he left. It was a very lonely feeling. I just stared at black nothingness in my bivy and thought about the difference between solitude and loneliness. I dozed again. When I awoke my eyes were frozen shut. They had been weeping from the beating they had taken and both sockets were bowls of crystals. Picking and scraping allowed me to pry them open. There was wane light filtering through the bivy, and I knew I needed to get up and move – either forward or to retreat – but I lay there a long while loosening my body up and getting motivated for the cold outside. I didn’t want to become a part of the landscape, but all I felt was lassitude. Then I went through the angry phase and started talking loudly, castigating myself for this lack of will. Almost frantically, I ripped at the frozen zippers, slithering out of the bivy and stomping wildly around camp to get warm. The morning was bright blue, but bitter. The wind had gone but the cold was the creepy stuff that seeps into bones. I packed haphazardly. I couldn’t get all the frozen sleeping gear into the storage sack, as my hands were like claws. I did what I could, threw a strap over it, connected the harness and started to pull. The need to circulate blood and warm up was foremost in my mind. It seemed like I just looked at my feet for hours as I marched. I felt very fatigued and tried to calculate how long it had been since taking substantial calories but could only work out that it had been a long time. I knew the Alaska Range was to be off my right shoulder and the trail should head in a southwest direction towards Hells Gate, where we would skirt around the south end of the range before heading north to Rohn. My navigation was no more complex than that. If I had pulled the GPS

out, I doubt I would have been able to operate it with the current state of my fingers. The mountains were in stark relief to the sky and my primal instinct now was to move forward and to keep moving, even if slowly. Progress was everything; it felt like stopping could be the end. At one point, I glanced up across the plain and thought I saw something. I had done this many times before, only to pass a bush or piece of wood frozen to the landscape. But then I stopped and concentrated on this one thing – and it moved, I was sure of it. Walking harder, I glanced up again and was convinced it was a person. Soon after, I stood with Kyle Durant and his pulk. The glare of the white landscape was almost painful. We talked very briefly, and each made sure the other was okay, then continued on. Every time I glanced up, he was further ahead. Our cadence was similar but his longer legs covered more ground with each step. I didn’t chase him; it was enough to know he was in the vicinity. I went back to looking at my feet, trying to block that terrible elongation of time when doing long hard miles at a slow pace. Then all of a sudden I noticed a shadow in my view and there was Kyle again, stopped and pulling out a stove. “I took your advice,” he said. “Thought it was time for a hot brew.” I don’t recall saying this, but it was indeed good advice. I was carrying a Jetboil – not the best choice, but I had a small cooler box on my sled to keep fluids, fuel & batteries insulated. The Alaskan gods must have been laughing as I pulled out a frozen fuel canister that refused to light. Kyle, another selfless person out there, immediately offered his white gas stove. “No problem. We will keep boiling until we have enough, don’t worry.” I watched, impressed, as he deftly conjured the flame and soon the stove purred. Something looking like an Arctic Fox circled around us at some distance, eyeing us curiously. We ate freeze-dried meals and filled thermoses as we watched him watching us. It can’t be underestimated how warm food in your belly can change your entire outlook in a frozen environment. As we packed and headed further south, I felt much better. Once again, I let Kyle forge off ahead and settled down to my steady plonk of footfalls.

It was a long morning and a longer afternoon of wondering when the trail would reach the southern terminus and head off to the west to skirt the end of the massif.

There were some tough climbs up through the forest and my earlier energy had worn off hours before, leaving me flat. Both poles had now broken on my pulk rig, so the downhill sections left me cursing. After one particularly aggravating descent, the trail suddenly swung to the west and soon I was on the cold ice of Hells Gate. It was generally the halfway point on this long stage from Puntilla to Rohn. The terrain was easier, and I was thankful for that. As I came around a blind corner, I ran into Kyle again. He was just getting underway, and I stopped for a while to put some warmer clothes on to face the evening and the cold breeze coming down the river. The trail would be mostly on the frozen river all the way to Rohn and I hoped to push on for the remaining 30 miles, but after dark I started to get the head nods and caved in to sleep. I threw my bivy out again and crawled into the frozen bag, not thinking about anything but rest. I slept fitfully and woke at one point when I heard something walking around me with soft footsteps. I thought if anything were to eat me, it would be like chewing on frozen pemmican and probably give it a slushy brain freeze. I crawled out at first light and spent another very long day slogging away at it. My hands were still numb and I worried a lot about that, but there was nothing more I could do than put hand warmers in the down mitts and keep going for Rohn. During the day my mood was sparked by seeing some other racers as they came by. They all stopped to say hi and ask about me. Jo Stiller rode up and stopped on his tricked-out fat bike. We chatted briefly, then he hung off the bars and gave me a huge bear hug. Simple but effective therapy. We smiled in the waning light, then he was gone, disappearing ahead along the icy snake of river. The young couple I had met at the hut in Puntilla pedaled up and chatted. They looked fresh and relaxed. A couple of times I ran into Dan Powers, heading to Nome on skis, his unruly backpack perched like a gargoyle on his back. At one point we stood there for a while, not saying anything. He stared at some distant mountain with a hand-rolled cigarette drooping from blue lips. We both got lost in the void for a bit before hustling off to our own beat. I recall getting really thirsty this day and stopping a number of times to fill a bottle whenever I found a hole in the ice. I had grab packs of Tailwind drink mix and would empty one into the bottle, then skull it down. I am sure the electrolytes and carbs helped me get through the rest of the mileage. It sure tasted good, even if it was painfully cold. Every time I stopped I would put a nutrition bar or piece of cheese into my mitts, then clutch it for a long while until it softened up enough to eat. I had spent a lot of the event slipping into a huge calorie deficit, making me weak and cold. It was poor self-management and left me flagging and disappointed with myself.

Five days earlier, I was at the start line at Knik Lake, fresh and eager. I had set an easy pace and taken good care of myself, well aware of the huge mileage to cover. I’d felt strong the first 130 miles to Winter Lake, but in the storm after that, I had worn down. I had bivied out every night except the first one, which I went straight through without sleep. The first time I slept was by the Shell Lake Lodge, mile 110, under a tree by the wood shed. Soft, drifted snow and wind made the 20-mile leg from there to Winter Lake Lodge very trying, so after a hot meal at the checkpoint I had napped for an hour in the racers tent before pushing off into what was now new territory for me. [I ran the 130-mile event last year, which finished at Winter Lake.] I had taken it easy when I left that lodge, knowing I was heading off into the real Alaska backcountry. There was a section in the dark coming off a river crossing that was short but very steep. I must have had 15 goes at getting up that incline – slipping and falling, clutching at snow with my mitts and trying to haul my pulk up. It was funny and fucking frustrating at the same time. I had been quite vocal about it, probably to the consternation of nearby woodland creatures. Then there had been a long arduous uphill section. On reaching the crest, I had stopped to chat to a few blokes camped there with snow machines. They had dug a deep pit and loaded it with huge timbers that were roaring with flames. The tendrils had reached out to me like octopus legs to shake my hand. I found myself staring at the fire rather than the guys as I answered their questions. It was way too cozy so I had taken my leave, pushing off into the ink. It had taken a long time to get my night vision back after all the light.

The trail had climbed and fallen through black mountains, making me sweat on the uphills, then shiver on the down. At one point, I had spotted a biker just ahead of me but he had disappeared, swallowed up by the gaping maw of the backcountry. My sled had become unwieldy after I broke one of the two tow poles. A rigid tow rig makes it easier to go downhill, as (theoretically) the sled cannot overtake you. In reality, it means 60 or so pounds trying to steamroll over you as you run, arms wind-milling, faster than you want to. With a broken pole, the rig had become asymmetrical and slid around on the downhills. I had tried reaching back to grab the broken section connected to the sled and help steer it, but that had made even my gait asymmetrical, making me feel like I might trip and fall. Long into the night, I had crested a rise and looked down a steep track that hugged the side of a dark drop-off. As my speed had picked up, the sled fishtailed a little. I felt a seemingly innocuous jerk and was suddenly launched backwards off the trail as my pulk had sailed off the edge for a more direct route to the bottom. I had rag-dolled into a drift and clung rigid on the side of that escarpment as a squirrel does on the side of a tree, the weighted sled like an anchor trying to drag me down to Davy Jones’ Locker. I think I had yelled something like “Are you fucking kidding me!” before punching holes in the powder with mitts and boots, trying to get some purchase. It had seemed like a long while before I hauled that cantankerous lump of lead back up to the trail onto the narrow traverse. Everything I wore had been filled with powdery snow. I had swung the sled around in front and let it slide down the track until I could find a wide enough stopping place to regroup, clomping behind it like an ornery bear. After cleaning out my clothing, I had pushed on for another few hours before setting up my bivy under the tree – the tree where I would have the hot flush and soak everything, the point where a critical thread of my race had begun to unravel.

My last day on the trail, with Hell’s Gate now behind me, I struggled. Every endurance event I have ever participated in becomes a struggle at some point. None of them are easy. You have the classic low points but you wade to the other side, and continue on. But this day was different for me because I was worried about my hands. I had a bone deep fatigue and a sore body, which is standard during any long distance race, but the specter of a serious injury or of losing body parts weighed heavily. I hadn’t even taken off my liner gloves to look at my hands since the storm, just stuffed chemical warmers into the liners and bundled my hands into a fist inside the large down-filled 8,000-metre mountaineering mitts that hung like ping pong paddles at my side. With my wooden fingers curled into claws, even small tasks – like opening a plastic food packet or undoing the plastic buckle on the sled harness – became frustrating chores that left me spitting expletives through clenched teeth. Imagine trying to undo belts, buttons and zips on down-filled over pants and Gore-tex wind pants to try to get through thermal tights to thermal underwear just to take a pee. Then trying to do it all up again. With my head hung low and the harness rubbing into my hips, I shuffled north on the frozen Kuskokwim River, the miles falling away at such an agonizingly slow pace it felt like the hour glass was filled with frozen treacle. Finally, the trail led off the river into the forest, and with a sigh of complete relief, I knew I must be close to Rohn. Rounding a corner, I suddenly came face to face with a bush plane, quite a juxtaposition after days of vast backcountry vistas. A guy standing nearby enquired, “You must be Grant? I’ve been watching your satellite tracker for a couple days and waiting for you.” He introduced himself as OE (One Eye) and I immediately liked him. He took me to Dave’s Roadhouse, which is a tent, and made sure I got settled inside. It measured about 15’ x 10’ and half of the floor was covered with pine branches a couple of feet thick so you could sit or lie there and be insulated from the frozen ground. Two other volunteers worked around a potbelly stove and a gas cooker. Tammy fed me cup after cup of hot chocolate, while Adrian whipped up some Bratwurst on a bun that slid down my cake-hole like proverbial nectar. The cold came on fast as soon as I stopped walking, even in the warm tent. I dragged my gear in and started to change my damp clothing. Finally, I knew it was time to inspect my hands. OE was going to come back to check them, so I needed to first make the effort to look after myself. It was clear when I had trouble peeling the liner gloves off that there was swelling. Ugly fluid blisters were noticeable on all my righthand fingers, as well as a few on the left hand. My nose was also numb and hard. I dried them softly and found some dry wool liners to put on, then waited patiently. Three bikers came in, and Tammy and Adrian fussed over them like parents, making sure they were fed and watered while hanging their damp clothing over the stove. It was humbling to watch them care for us. It was a blissful little oasis in the wild. It wasn’t long before OE came back and asked how my hands were. Silently I raised them before my face, turning them over for his perusal. He looked me straight in the eye and told me it was fair to say I was not going on. The worse thing for frostbitten areas is to refreeze them, and with another 165 cold miles to the finish in McGrath, there was absolutely no sense in taking that risk. “There are no heroes out here, only

survivors,” a biker commented. Then OE said, “Look, there is a plane taking two other frostbitten guys out. The pilot has agreed to squeeze you in, but you have to go now. Can you throw your gear together and walk back to the strip?” And that was it. I think I was in Rohn for maybe half an hour. Then I was staring down at the mighty Alaska Range as it slipped away below, the thrum of horsepower in my ears. The pilot pointed out places on the trail I had passed in a dazed state of fatigue days before. The view to the horizon giving me a scale of how far I had actually managed to come. 225 miles is a long way in anyone’s book. I was disappointed, but pragmatic: Maybe I needed Alaska to give me a good kick in the ass so I didn’t get too complacent in the great outdoors? I decided to take it as a valuable lesson. And then all I thought about was chocolate milk and sleep.

   

  Photo  credits:  Joe  Stiller  Editing:  Susan  Jobe