“You are the result of thousands of years of selection,” said Fran Kohl. “You haven’t scratched the surface of what you can do with those bodies and brains.”
Our biologist friend gave that much-needed pep talk while driving me, Bruno Grunau, and Forest Wagner to Eagle Summit, an alpine high point rising above the boreal forest north of Fairbanks.
The three of us friends traveling together in a van had committed to teaming up for the AlaskaAcross, a 50-mile walking excursion from Eagle Summit to Chena Hot Springs Resort.
AlaskaAcross is like a shorter version of the Wilderness Classic summer race, where competitors carry all their supplies and follow what they believe is the fastest route from A to B.
That recent Saturday morning, nine people showed up at the parking lot of Eagle Summit, a Pinnell Mountain trailhead. Most of them were familiar faces.
After walking us across the road, biologist Mark Ross asked us to keep an eye out for the rare grey-headed chickadee and take a photo if we came across one.
They all walked towards Mastodon Dome with backpacks filled with enough food to reach Chena Hot Springs.
Forest, Bruno and I took our place at the back, a position we would never abandon. We were all happy with that; Our common goal was to spend a lot of time traveling together around the country.
AlaskaAcross is a add-on adventure, where someone else has provided a plan and invited other people whose tracks are fun to follow and interpret. All you have to do is navigate, eat and drink enough to avoid falling, and stay standing long enough to finish.
My partners are long-time friends who have never met. It tickled me listening to Forest and Bruno chat. I let my mind wander to the current topic and loved watching my kids get along like that.
While we had watched other runners start jogging along a burnt four-wheel trail through the Alps at the start, Forest, Bruno and I clicked away with trekking poles, never exceeding 4 miles per hour.
That slow pace was necessary for me, mature enough to be my friends’ uncle. He was also the one who most needed to hear Fran Kohl remind us that we had dusty tools in our boxes waiting to be used.
One of them was the ability to resist the body’s need to sleep, something I try to do once a year, around the summer solstice.
We carried no sleeping bags or tents, committed to traversing the summer twilight. When that time came, we watched the sun set behind the hills to the northwest at 12:27am as we sat under a rock shelter on the top of a hill, our wet sneakers tearing off our wrinkled feet.
With a stove and a small fuel canister, we boiled water and enjoyed coffee there. We were together as friends, in a quiet field shared with hawk owls, golden plovers, grey-cheeked thrushes and ptarmigans. It was hard to imagine a time six months ago, when the same place was devoid of beating hearts, shrouded in darkness, and featuring a frigid wind that would damage flesh in seconds.
The coffee filled us with euphoria.
Then came the next ten hours.
The caffeine disappeared at the same time that the chosen route forced us to navigate the green parts of the map. Those correlated with thick dwarf birch bushes, warm white talons of spruce branches that had been burned 20 years earlier, and a slight tailwind that allowed our entourage of mosquitoes unrestricted access to our faces.
Trying to shine through the thick smoke from the wildfires, the sun was then a cream-colored ball.
That was also the time, from 3:09 a.m. at dawn until about 7 a.m., when our bodies begged us to drop down and huddle around a bush.
Mosquitoes made that option less attractive. Most importantly, we had our shared pact to keep our feet moving until we reached the arch at the entrance to Chena Hot Springs Resort.
That end was far away when we found a section of trail used for the Yukon Quest sled dog race. During that race, which takes place every February, the path is a smooth white road filled with hibernating mosquitoes.
In June, the trail is good in places, but often degrades into puddles of black water that want to suck at your sneakers. It is a path with an earthy smell, rich in yellow swallowtail butterflies that perch on the humidity. And it offers the mental relief of not having to look at the map.
There, with tanned feet waiting to splash in the cold channels spilling onto the trail, I slowed to a pace that felt uncomfortably slow to my companions. They marched ahead, making me happy to be alone so my mind could wander.
I first thought about doing this race with two other friends 17 years ago and how lucky I was to continue doing it. Especially with these unusually kind companions.
As I moved along, I thought once again of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, when he found himself surrounded by sea ice with no apparent way to reach a land mass he was searching for after a failed attempt to reach the North Pole.
“Everything comes to an end, and so does this,” he later wrote.
The older I get, the faster terminations happen.
So I tried to Be Here Now, looking at what was in front of me: a clear stream running between white rocks, a ruby-crowned wren scolding a gray jay that had probably just stolen its nest, the footprints in the mud of a bear cub. who seemed to be traveling without his mother.
All good, as was seeing my friends sitting waiting for me at stream crossings.
Soon, just as Nansen said, at the end of a 60-mile road from Fairbanks was the entrance to Chena Hot Springs Resort. We gently made our way up a rock wall and found Mark Ross’s hidden clipboard.
Bruno signed us in 33 hours and two minutes from when we started walking from Eagle Summit. We had maintained our grip on last place.
Bruno informed us that we had not been a threat to Curtis Henry. Curtis had traveled with only running shorts and a backpack the size of a grapefruit. He had covered 50 miles of mining trails and mud in 13 hours. That was 20 hours faster than us.
Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided this column free of charge in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell ned.rozell@alaska.edu is a science writer at the Geophysical Institute.
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