AlaskAcross - Chena to Circle Hot Springs

Demand for a summer wilderness race with a course that could be called "fun" has been building.

The current Summer Classic course is too fucked, and nobody was raving about the old AlaskAcross course, in the Alphabet hills off the Denali Highway.

This course is the revival of the Hot Springs 100, a race from Chena to Circle Hot Springs. I heard it was fun. So I entered.

There are two main ways to do the trip: all overland, about 70 miles, where you wade or swim across Birch Creek, or by pack raft, where you hike almost 30 miles, then float down Birch Creek (for quite a ways) then take out and hike about 20 miles to Circle. Floating is more distance, and can be slower or faster depending on the amount of water. For no particular reason, I decided to go all overland.

Planning is not my greatest strength. I came up with a half-ass plan to follow a route suggested by my friend Frank. I didn't get a paper map, partly out of an unwillingness to drive two minutes to the map store. I had a GPS and some coordinates, though. In retrospect, driving two minutes is much easier than walking 8 hours, but at the time it didn't seem important.

On the drive to the trailhead, Bad Bobby G told me that he planned to go an alternate route that he thought was shorter than my route. I asked him if I could join him and we could go solo together. And so we launched.

Bob walks up the Far Mountain Loop outside of Chena Hot Springs. 

Caribou shed antlers in the tundra. I saw quite a few throughout the trip.

Still on the Far Mountain Loop.

Determining where we're at and where we wanna go.

Leaving the Far Mountain Loop and beginning a long descent to the ridgeline that would take us north to Birch Creek. Though we got some good walking after this, it was the beginning of a serious deterioration in terrain quality.

The alpine flowers were kickass, but I found myself reluctant to take the time to photograph them (1/600th of a second is too long to stop for Bob, who NEVER stops).

Can someone identify the flowers?

Traveling on the ridges.

He just keeps trucking along.

I mostly took photos of pretty places and good walking, although there were a LOT of hours of walking through shit like this. Depending on the age of the burn, the trees can fall in a criss-cross that is nearly impossible to navigate. Also the ground here is tussock grass, which is some of the worst walking you can imagine - uneven ground, and swampy.

This looks nice, but it's not. From a distance, Bob correctly identified the white fields as Cotton Grass. That's a bad sign - not only was it tussocks, but it meant that the ground was very wet. This is also my last photo of Bob - I lost him when we entered the Spruce forest visible in the distance.

This is what walking in tussocks is like - in between the heads of grass is a hole. This hole happens to be dry, but more often than not the hole is full of water. This further increases the tragedy of tussocks - not only are they terrible to walk on, but they also serve as mosquito incubators. The grass heads are unsteady and difficult to walk on top of. Walking through tussocks, needless to say, is very slow. I estimate that I walked through at least 15 miles of them during the trip, though.

As I finally neared Birch Creek, my glass was beginning to be half-empty. I had walked for about 3 hours through tussocks descending the ridge, and had gone only a few miles. And yes, those are mosquitoes.

I also had another major problem. Once I arrived at the Creek, I didn't know where to go. I knew that I was supposed to climb the opposite ridge, but I knew that there were multiple ridges and it was not as simple as 'walk uphill then follow the ridge'. Without a proper map, I couldn't figure it out (though I hadn't yet tried using the map in the GPS to figure it out, I know that those maps aren't typically very useful). I didn't really have much of a plan about how to solve this problem. I only had a GPS coordinate for the start of the mining road that leads to the finish, so I knew I wouldn't die in the wilderness, but that was it.

Arriving at the Creek at about 11pm, I was presented with a new problem. Bob and I's plan had been to either wade or swim the creek. Bob has the experience and the chops, and I had no doubt he would do it. However, I dislike swimming, I fear and mistrust water, and I absolutely HATE cold water. I decided that I would not swim the creek.

This presented me with a new set of variables. Shortly after arriving at the Creek, Scott Jerome, the UAF xc ski coach, floated past me on the river along with his twin outboards. He asked how I was doing and I didn't really know how to answer. I just said I was pretty sure I was fine. He didn't seem to believe me, but when you're floating past it is a bit inconvenient to stop for a real conversation. His concern would turn out to be rather prescient.

I decided that the thing to do was to walk downstream, since that was the right direction to be heading, looking for a place to cross. It didn't take me long to realize that there wasn't likely to be a spot that I could get across the river without swimming. I waited for the next packrafter to float by.

Though these wilderness races are races, people tend to focus on the 'wilderness' component of it more. The ethic is universally biased towards helping your fellow competitors out - after all, people tend to leave themselves with fairly small margins and travel extremely far from help and safety. Offering help and support without being asked is a widespread practice.

Race Director Mark Ross has a well-earned reputation for not adhering to these unspoken rules. He floated past next.
"How's it going?" he wanted know.
"I need a ride across the river, Mark." I said, without a trace of pride.
"You're my competitor, man!" he said, by way of telling me that he really didn't want to take the time to help. "How far ahead is Scott? Why didn't you ask him to give you a ride?"
"I didn't know I needed a ride, but now I do."
In Mark's defense, he was alone and putting two of us in his tiny boat would have been really awkward and unstable. He ferried his boat back and forth across the river.
"Down here it's only two feet deep!" he shouted from a ways downstream. "You can wade it!"
"Alright," I responded. I didn't believe him, but I wasn't sure how I was going to fit in his boat, either. "I'll give it a shot." Mark drifted away.

I turned back towards shore when the water reached chest deep. I continued bushwhacking down stream, waiting for the next group of boats and cursing Mark Ross.

It was a long time - over 3 hours - until the next group of boats caught me. I had been walking downstream, vigilantly keeping my eyes on the river for either an improbable wide spot where I could cross, or the next group of boats. I kept my eyes peeled up river, and saw a lot of scenes like the above photo. Occasionally the river would push up against a bank, like it does in the left edge of this photo, and it would force me off the river up onto the hillside. These areas were stressful as I feared boaters would go by without seeing me as I traversed the hillside above the river. 

Wading the Clums Fork, a tributary to Birch Creek. This is at 1:45am.

After hours had passed since seeing Mark, it became obvious that the first wave of people - the people that cared who won - had gone by. I had a suspicion that the next boaters that would pass would be the fastest of people who didn't care about winning, and that those people would be my friends Jay Cable and Ned Rozell. I also knew that they would be cheerful about chauffeuring me across the river. For once, I was right about something.

When I saw Jay and Ned, at about 2:30 am, I ran down from the hillside and back out to the river to wave them down. I didn't take any photos of the event, but Jay described my appearance as 'a bit crazed'. I wasn't really out of my mind, but I really didn't want to miss them (indeed, I believe it was many hours until the next boaters passed and I never saw them). I jumped in Ned's boat and paddled across the creek, then Jay paddled over and towed Ned's empty boat back to him on the other side. I thanked them and promised beers. Oh, and Jay gave me a map. This sure helped.

For those who didn't already suspect, Jay and Ned are the opposites of Mark.

Though I was now on the correct side of the Creek and my survival was looking much more likely, my luck turned bad again. Due to the terrain on the north side, I needed to continue along the river for about another seven miles before it made sense to hike up onto the ridge that I mentioned before (otherwise I would have had to drop again into a creek, or go the wrong direction for a ways).
For whatever reason, the walking on the north side of the creek was much worse - I pretty consistently battled tussocks, old burns full of blowdowns, steep embankments, or brushy creeksides. At some point during the night I figured that I was 19 hours in, I had at least another 25 miles to go, and I was going in the neighborhood of 1 mile per hour. This was a low moment.

Sometime around 4am the sun rose again. I had a rare moment of efficient walking through this burned spruce forest with pretty red moss on the ground and not too many down trees. It helped to brighten my mood.

Pretty scenes like this one could also feel pretty dismal. Obviously, the bank on my side of the creek is not walkable, forcing me into the forest.

The forest often looked like this. Or tussocks. Or both.

Gravel bars, when they happened, were short. And even then, they are difficult to walk fast on. The packrafting looked enjoyable.

Sometimes the bank was rocky. This was slow, but at least it was sortof fun to walk on.

This photo is from many hours later. At 7 am I reached the spot where it made sense to leave the creekside and hike up onto the ridge. This 2,000 foot climb took me two hours, after factoring in battling some brush on the way up (even nearly on the ridgetop).  I didn't take a single picture of the ridge, but it looked similar to what Bob and I enjoyed the previous morning. My survival was looking fairly assured, and though I was tired and frustrated with how things had gone, I was not entirely miserable.
(Though I never planned on winning, I did want to post a respectable time by finishing by the 24-hour or so mark. I knew that that was long past, and that I was going to be in the 30 hour range. As it turned out, no one finished in under-24 hours this year.)
I walked up and down the ridge crest, attempting to keep my speed up. 

I dropped steeply down the end of the ridge, but didn't take any photos. As I caught sight of the mining road in the distance, I saw Jay and Ned beginning their walk up the road. They had come in up Harrison Creek instead of via my ridge, but this road is where all the normal routes connect up. Up the road there was some active mining going on, and I saw some people (who actually didn't seem to think that our appearance was all that weird).  I pondered the style points of firing up a dozer and driving it back to town.

The road is 11 miles long. Along the way I caught up to Jay and Ned. I was happy to have some company and I walked with them most of the way. The road travels up and over a pass. The uphill wasn't too bad.

My feet had been wet for over 24 hours straight. This was due to creek crossings and the frequent occurrence of marshy ground. The little bit of immersion foot - soaked and wrinkly skin - that I had was not too bad. However, once I crested the uphill, I began to walk down. My foot pain rapidly jumped from about 4, on a scale of 1 to 10, to about 8 or 9. I stopped to remove the dry socks from my pack that I had judiciously packed with such a circumstance in mind.

They weren't in there. I must have dropped them somewhere along the way.

I continued down the gravel road. I began to limp.

I felt my wet skin on the balls of my feet begin to squish under my foot. I was developing blisters.

I walked with Ned and Jay. They were walking a bit slowly, and I wanted to hurry up to get off of my feet. I bid them adieu and increased my pace.

10 minutes after deciding that they were walking too slow and I wanted to walk faster, I was about 13 feet ahead of them. I was vaguely reminded of a scene in a movie, maybe No Country For Old Men, when two men, who have both been shot, are quietly and slowly chasing one another. I felt no desperation, however, about getting away from Jay and Ned, just about finishing. After 20 minutes my lead had opened to about 25 or 30 feet. I was getting there.

With about 3 miles to go a truck went by me. I very nearly flagged it down to get a ride.

I obsessively checked my gps, attempting to figure how far I had left to go. "2.5 miles until the end of the downhill. That will take about an hour. Then at least it will be flat." I continually checked my watch.

I scoured the ground in front of my feet. Tiny pebbles would dig into the soles of my trashed feet and hurt badly. I carefully chose my footsteps to find the smoothest bits of road.

"1 mile left. About half an hour."  

The end in sight

At the finish line, my weight off my feet, finally. I felt essentially fine at the finish except for my feet. However, after sitting for a few minutes, I had stiffened up something ferocious. Typing this now, two days later, I still hurt all over.

I finished in 31 hours and 12 minutes. I didn't take any breaks and only stopped to rummage in my pack. Bob finished about 5 or 6 hours before me (I'll edit this post with results once I have access to them). I'm disappointed in my time, and am sure I could have been at least *close* to Bob's time had I been more organized in my planning (although how I would have dealt with the creek crossing better is a standing question - apart from simply growing a pair and swimming it, which I clearly didn't want to do).

Next time I will bring a paper map and more pairs of dry socks, and try not to lose them. I'm not sure if the route that was originally suggested to me had better walking or not. If you could avoid most of the tussocks and deadfall, 10 extra miles would probably be worth it. I need to talk to someone who has done it.

Bob, a true gentleman, had been waiting at the finish, having passed on a possible ride home. Amy Marsh had generously come to get Jay and Ned. Bob and I squeezed in as well, and I only had to ask to stop once on the drive back so that I could straighten my legs.

Thanks Jay, Bob, Ned for the experience, and even thanks to Mark for putting the whole thing together!

Once the immersion foot dried out, the blisters remained.

The blister on my little toe doesn't show very well, but it nearly doubles the size of my toe.

The same blister seen from the other side.

Next year? It could happen. I think I'll packraft, though.