Into the North Wind: A thousand-mile bicycle adventure across frozen Alaska by Jill Homer

Author:Jill Homer [Homer, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Arctic Glass Press
Published: 2016-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Somewhere In Innoko

I managed an earlier escape from the Innoko shelter cabin, which is to say it was half past nine. Sugary snow sparkled in the morning sunlight. It was eight degrees, which felt so warm that I removed my jacket. I’d indulged in three long nights of rest, and despite the hard miles behind me, my body felt strong. Actual protein for breakfast — in the form of freeze-dried eggs — put me on an incredible high. I was unstoppable, mashing pedals and singing along to my iPod with slightly modified lyrics from a song by Ace Reporter, “Into Chicago.”

“Carry me into Innoko. Chasing my whiskey with Skittles. Losing it all just a minute from the hotel. I think this biker’s been drinking. The heat is on and I’m roasting. Maybe the ice is affecting my head. And I’m alive, but I’m quite surprised! I thought we would die, somewhere in Innoko.”

North of Innoko, the landscape became much hillier. Sam warned of this, and I confirmed the topography with my truth-telling GPS. The previous section featured steep but short climbs in and out of drainages. Now we needed to make our way out of the river valley over a series of progressively larger hills, with crests over a thousand feet high. On an eighty-pound fat bike, crawling over a virtual rock garden, just one or two hundred feet of elevation gain becomes Everest.

The forest in these hills had been ravaged by beetle kill, and many of the trees were an electric shade of reddish orange. I found this unsettling but beautiful — a kind of inauspicious cheeriness that reflected my mood. By midday, signs of civilization began to reappear: more rusting barrels, dilapidated cabins, and the three-story remnants of a massive gold dredge on Poorman Creek. This was the ghost town where Tim Hewitt holed up the previous year during the deep snow fiasco. He pushed his bike to the site of an old airstrip and stayed put for nearly two days before he turned around and encountered Beat. As a spectator, I watched his GPS tracker’s lack of movement and fretted that Tim had crawled up the hill to die.

Now that I knew the outcome of that story, it was entertaining to stand at the base of that hill and imagine what Tim saw and felt at the time — hoisting his bike over chest-deep drifts, shivering in his thin sleeping bag, waking up to somebody screaming about the cold, only to realize it was his own voice. Poorman is sixty miles from Ruby, a distance that took Tim, Beat, Steve, and Loreen six days to travel last year. I was in disbelief how painless our passage was this year. The only descriptions I’d heard of this region emphasized frigid weather and remoteness, along with a sinister solitude that could drive a weak-willed person mad. This year brought sunshine and warmth, difficult but rideable trail, and enjoyable company. I was even the unlikely early riser in the group.

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