AlaskAcross 2015

(I have re-posted a better version of this on FasterSkier's website, with more photos, captions, and maps. Check it out there.)

There is something unique about wilderness racing.

Bob, Drew and my steps up through the tundra had begun to drag. Late night is always the crux – it’s when your brain is sending the strongest signals that you should be sleeping – and for us late night happened on the biggest climb of the trip. I was excited because we’d just seen the unmistakably asymmetrical lope of a wolverine running across the tundra, but I knew that neither another caffeine pill nor the beauty of our surroundings could wipe the fatigue from behind my eyes. I’d have to wait for sunrise, just a couple of hours away, to hit my face and flush away the greyness of the sub-arctic “night”. And in the meantime, I’d have to take another step. And another. And another.

We were racing in the AlaskAcross, a Fairbanks-based wilderness race. It’s a point-to-point race, where the only rules are that travel has to be human-powered, and can’t follow the road corridor. We started just east of Healy, along the Healy River, and ended at Lost Lake, on the Richardson Highway about an hour from Fairbanks. If it wasn’t a race, the trip would take the better part of a week.

“I wanted to cap it at 100 miles,” Mark Ross, the race organizer and mastermind of the course, said in an offhand comment. “So that it fits into a weekend.”

Fitting 100 miles of cross country travel into a weekend means no sleep. We walked up the Healy River, across Cody Pass, to the Wood River. That was about 27 miles. We floated down the Wood River for about seven miles, then hiked overnight up Kansas Creek and dropped into an unnamed creek to the West Fork of the Little Delta, another 15 or so miles. On the shores of the Little Delta we stopped to look at a map. A sudden wave of dizziness struck me, and I dropped immediately to my knees to avoid falling over.

“Are you going to be okay?” Bob said, concern pinching his voice.

“I think so,” I said, rising unsteadily back to my feet. “I think… I think I just feel shitty.”

Bob Gillis and Drew Harrington started as a team. I started as a solo racer. But we were going the same speed, and so eventually the pretense of being competitors was dispensed with entirely. We’re all friends, and this was not our first time being strung out in a wilderness race together. I needed their encouragement. And I wanted to look over their shoulder at their maps, too.  

We looked apprehensively toward the river. “Would it or wouldn’t it?” we wondered. Would it have enough water to float the packrafts we’d carried all this way? Thirty-five miles of cobble river beds had taken their toll on our feet, and the idea of walking down river an unknown distance to find sufficient flow wasn’t something any of us wanted to consider. It was 6am on Sunday, we were in the Hayes Range and we were headed to the far side of the Tanana Flats, 50 river miles away. We wanted to be done that day.

The West Fork had enough water, but barely. The emotional crux of the trip was the butt-dragging down the river in our tiny boats. Our butts constantly bounced off rocks, and each of the hundreds of times we had to get out after being grounded on a gravel bar was one more aggravation.

Nodding off in the boat became common. But once in the faster current of the Little Delta, the miles sped by. We followed each other, and when one person chose the wrong river channel they got fired from their job, and another of us took over.

We took out together late Sunday night on the banks of the Tanana River. We packed our boats and thrashed through the woods to get to the finish line at Lost Lake. It wasn’t supposed to be far, but it felt like an eternity. Eventually, we stumbled into the Lost Lake Boy Scout camp together. But for the final walk down the road through the camp, I couldn’t keep pace. My soaked socks and water-softened skin had me hobbling on blistered feet. When I arrived at the Lost Lake boat launch at nearly 2am on Monday, Bob and Drew had their shoes off.  According to Drew’s GPS we had gone about 108 miles.

I took the clipboard that Mark had stashed behind the sign board at the boat launch, and wrote my official finishing time down with Bobby and Drew’s: 39 hours and 54 minutes.

The White Mountains Packraft and Hike - Beaver Creek to the Limestone Jags and Back

(July edit - Echo has now made the big time, having been featured in an article that I wrote about this trip for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. It is substantially different from this post, so read it too, eh?) 

I didn't think I'd go on this trip - I thought for sure I would be busy. But work keeps getting postponed, so I figured that I better go, since I didn't have anything else to do. I'm glad I did, since I think it's one of the best trips I've done in the interior. 

The idea was to float Beaver Creek, an officially designated Wild and Scenic River, for about a day an a half. Then get out of the boats and hike back through the most-rugged parts of the White Mountains National Recreation Area. There would be three of us, Tom, Jay, and I. And two dogs.

For the first time ever, this blog is actually a useful source of information, thanks to this map that Jay made. Here is a link to a much more useful version.
The blue is where we packrafted, the red was hiking.

Jay said that he was leaving his dogs behind. However, I was watching my mom's dog Echo, and another dog, Dorsel. I decided that they'd be fine to run along side the boats on the shore. And for the most part Dorse was fine with it. Echo had a hard time understanding that I wasn't just being mean, and often tried to follow me in the boat, as seen here. 

She ran along the shore quite a lot, but it wasn't as photogenically pathetic as when she followed. I worried that she was rapidly tiring herself out.

Floating through the beautiful scenery of the Whites.

In spite of a life-long hatred of swimming, Echo outdid herself.

Here is Dorsel running along the shore. Dorse mostly did a good job of being efficient running along the shore.

Black Spruce and Cottongrass. Cottongrass is a sign of tussocks and wet ground - it's terrible to walk through.

After about 5 hours of running and swimming alongside the boats, things came to a head with Echo. In spite of years of  trips with Echo and the whole-hearted belief that she is invincible, I had to finally admit that she is getting old, and that there was no way she could run along shore the whole way. She was just getting too tired. The last straw was when I saw her start to jump from a lower bank to a higher one, but her legs just didn't fire and she didn't make the jump. The look she gave me was pretty heartbreaking.

So I realized that I either needed to take out there and camp, and hike back to the car the next day (abandoning the trip), or put her in the boat. I put her in the boat. At first, she didn't like it, but she knew she couldn't run anymore. After a moment of getting used to it, I think she started to like it.

Echo has been my buddy on many, many trips over the years, so seeing that she has slowed down was sad for me. 

Dorse ran most of the way, but she occasionally took a ride with Jay. It actually became clear to us after a while that she was being selective - she would look downriver, see what the terrain was like and whether she wanted to run through it, and if she didn't, she would give Jay a plaintive look, and he would pick her up. 

Once she decided she liked the look of things on shore a little better, she would get restless and become and uncooperative passenger.

It's hard to overestimate the extent to which huskies can be princesses.

Tom took my camera for a while since me and Echo were too cute to believe.

Huskies hitch rides.

Once Echo relaxed, she was walloped by fatigue. 

She even slept a little.

Sometime around 10 we arrived at the first night's destination, Borealis Cabin.

The huskies were cold, wet and tired.

Borealis in the 11pm sunlight.

The next day, Dorse was back to charging along the gravel bars. 

Given the potential for injury and being unable to do the remaining hike, I made Echo ride in the boat the next day, which she occasionally seemed sad about. Over the two days of floating, Echo rode on my lap for about 10 hours.

Dorse occasionally made some poor choices, like swimming straight into this log jam. Had she jumped off on the far side she would have been fine, but jumping off onto my side was not okay, as she could have gotten pinned under the jam by the current (however, it was difficult to explain this to her). She appeared to recognize the delicacy of her predicament, however. Jay got out of his boat and walked out onto the log jam to rescue Dorsel from the pickle she had gotten herself into.

Having demonstrated such bad judgement, her privileges were taken away for a while.

Floating around Big Bend.

Echo, as usual, was unsure.

Tom and Big Bend.

I know this is a lot of dog pictures, but it's really hard to cull such cute photos.

Dorse feels entitled to be in charge at all times. 

After about 15 hours of floating spread over two days, me and Echo were ready to be done. Here is where we took out to begin hiking. We hiked up the ridge in the center of the photograph.

Leaving the creek. 

And thus begin the flower photos.

Echo was pretty cheerful and not as tired as this photo makes her look.

The hiking was top notch.

Tom, at about 6'5" and 210lbs, was the lightest person in the group.

In the far distance, at the head of the valley to the right, there is a tree-filled saddle. That was our goal for the day.
(Jay - now don't you see that walking on the crest was worth it?)

We walked alongside this cool limestone crest.

A natural arch in the limestone crest.

Thus began the first major change that we would suggest making. We side-hilled above the unnamed valley to the right. It is opposite Limestone Gulch - ie, the sources of the creeks were opposite sides of the same divide, and flowed in opposite directions. We would recommend just walking in the valley bottom (or near it) instead. We think it was reasonably open down there, the ridge crest (visible as the horizon) is not walkable, and we know based on experimental evidence that the side-hilling near the ridge crest was lame. 

See the arch?

It was pretty, but the sidehilling is not fun, and it kept getting steeper and looser.

The only bad weather we got - it rained that evening.

Unfortunately, it rained right before bed. The huskies got cold and wet, and eagerly crowded into my tent. 

EchoDog, happy in the morning sunshine.

The walking in Limestone Gulch was excellent.

We crossed Fossil Creek, the location of the winter trail, on a log jam like this one.

Climbing the ridge on the opposite side was brushy for a long ways. 

Jay.

Tom.

Echo. It became very windy on the ridge. 

Very very windy, actually. Eventually we bailed off the ridge into a valley so that we could go around the narrow, talus-sloped ridge and around the peak we were heading towards on a shoulder.
Cache Mountain is the peak visible in the distance. The Cache Mountain Divide, which the winter trail passes over, is left of the left-most ridge visible in this photo.

Echo did not like the talus, which there was plenty of. 

An odd tor in the valley bottom. The rock had transitioned from limestone to granite when we crossed Fossil Creek.

Descending towards Cache Mountain Cabin.

Eventually we hit the winter trail that led to Cache Mountain Cabin, which was soggy, tussocky, and lame. Best avoided.

Jay, Tom and others did a similar trip a few years prior that went by Windy Gap Cabin. They said that the hiking past Windy Gap was better that what we did on this day. They suggest following our route from this trip until Fossil Creek, then following their route from that trip after that. Basically, take a roughly parallel route north of our route. 

The winter trail.

Adding insult to discomfort, I had done a bad job of budgeting the dogs' food - half way through the trip 3/4ths of the food was gone, so they were getting reduced rations. Hunger was a major factor for the poor beasts.

Looking out the window of Cache Mountain Cabin.

The dogs wasted no time in conking out. 

The next day was the last - just a traverse across forested hills back to the starting point. 

Dorse's paws had gotten chewed up, so when we hit the winter trail Jay diligently picked up dog booties whenever he saw them. No dog is ever quite happy about booties, but Dorse was a bit relieved. 

Lots of hiking through Black Spruce forests. 

However, much quicker than expected (after about 5 hours of hiking), we were back to the shores of Nome Creek, pretty near the truck. Tom enjoys a tall drink of water. 

All in all, I think this is one of the better summer trips available in the interior (aside from the Alaska Range). Given the difficulty of seeing the White Mountains in the summer, we think this route (or a variation) deserves to be much more popular.

The BLM has expressed in the past that they would like to see more non-motorized summer use of the White Mountains Rec Area, given the enormous amount of trail damage a few ATV users can do on the wet trails. Jay said that he would go rattle cages at BLM to possibly build hiking trails connecting the brushier/muckier parts of this hike to the high-alpine areas; it may even be possible to link it up in such a way that hikers could stay in cabins every night. I think if such a project were undertaken it would be quite worthy and a huge asset to the rec area.

Both dogs happily survived and had fun, in spite of a bit of emotional turmoil. It was a bit bittersweet for me, since I finally had to admit that Echo is becoming old. They were comically sore after the trip, though, and neither dog has gotten more than 15 feet from a bed or couch in the two days I've been back.

Credit for this trip is entirely due to Tom and Jay, who had both the idea and the motivation. Thanks guys for letting me come along, and glad I could make it!