The good times go so fast

On riding one's bike both uphill and downhill

Fatbiking the Denali Highway

I know I’ve already talked about how bright it is in March in the Alaskan interior, but it’s hard to describe this light. The interior is sunnier than the rest of the state- much sunnier! And so when the light comes back and the snow is still around it creates a feeling of being spotlit from multiple directions at once- light coming up from the ground and down from the sky, like being fully immersed in blinding white. And the air is so fresh! And the world is soft, it’s no longer the scary, walk-in freezer cold of midwinter, when it feels like you’re wearing a space suit stumbling around on a psychedelic, inhospitable planet. You can just… go outside in whatever layers, and do an activity in the boundless daylight, and become warm almost immediately, and stay warm. My chihuahuas are happy too. In deep winter they concede to their daily two-mile enrichment walks, which I insist on so that their brains don’t turn to mush, but they don’t… love it. Now Quito screams and runs in circles around me on the trail, a little wolf freed at last into the wild, and aged, deaf Niknik trots along merrily, a spring in her arthritic step.

Last fall I got my first fatbike and it’s brought me so much joy this winter, and especially now, in this gentle sunshine. I never really understood fatbiking- biking on the snow is much slower, and the bikes are so heavy. Why not just walk? Or ski? But I stuck with it and got a bit stronger so the uphills weren’t as excruciating and then I got to experience downhill, and I was like oooh I get it. You huff and puff but then you get to just… roll down the hills. What fun! I made a handlebar bag for my bike, and pogies (overmitts to keep your gloved hands warm on the handlebars), and a frame bag.

patchwork framebag that I made

I like to fill the bags with snacks and a thermos of hot water and go on rides with my friends through the frozen spruce bog, on good packed snowmachine trails that wind for hundreds of miles around Fairbanks and will disappear in summer, become bog once again.

The Denali Highway is a 136 mile gravel road in the Alaska Range between Cantwell and Paxson that is closed in winter but groomed for snow machines, fatbikes and skis. (Not to be confused with the Denali Park road- that’s a different road, in Denali NP- this is not Denali NP, although they are both in the Alaska Range- Denali NP is west of the Denali Highway.) Twenty-two miles into the Denali Highway from the Paxson side is Tangle Lakes Lodge, and this year they decided to stay open in winter- meaning that if you can fatbike or ski twenty-two miles, you can stay at a lodge at the end. A few weekends ago my boyfriend Jon and I decided we wanted to do this- I’d never fatbiked that far but the road is groomed, meaning it shouldn’t be deep loose snow, so odds were good that I could make it, even if I had to push my bike the whole way.

We got to Paxson, which is, like so many Alaskan towns, a collection of mostly abandoned buildings next to the highway, at 1pm on Saturday. It was a beautiful bluebird day, in the 20s, and the parking area was packed with snowmachine trailers. I had various layering options, three thermoses of hot water, and what I hoped was enough snacks. The snow on the road was a little soft, but not too bad- the real bummer was the immediate three-mile climb- about half the day would be climbing, and I was still learning how different climbing was on a fatbike than when walking- it’s so much harder! I told myself I could get off and walk whenever I wanted but also, we were trying to make it to the lodge by seven, when the restaurant closed- so I didn’t want to walk too much if I could help it. My quads screamed as we crawled up the inclines, the land around us blanketed in perfect snow, the white fondant hills dotted with caribou from the Nelchina herd. Within hours I was starving- cold and going uphill are two things that make a person extra hungry, and I was feeling it. I inhaled my snacks as well as a bunch of Jon’s, who had, as is his nature, brought extra, and with my dietary restrictions in mind- as we ate, making a little mess of crumbs on the snow as things fell from our mittens, we talked about which snacks are best in the cold because they don’t freeze solid (cookies, popcorn, meat sticks) and which snacks become unappetizing because they get too hard (bars, jerky, dark chocolate). In my handlebar bag was a two gallon Ziploc of popcorn with nutritional yeast and dill that I’d made and at first I’d thought it was ridiculous to bring so much popcorn but now I realized, as I hoovered up carbs as fast as I could, that we were going to eat it all, and I was grateful to have such popcorn abundance.

We got back on our bikes and I said “it’s only a thirteen mile ride” because at mile thirteen was when we would finally reach the top of the climb, and it was helpful for me to think of it that way. And at mile thirteen we did finally start to descend, thank god, although there were a few small uphills towards the end, all of which I walked because my legs were cooked.

We reached Tangle Lakes lodge and pushed through the door to the restaurant at 7:05 pm. A half-hour back a snowmachiner had passed us going the other way and the man had said “they were asking at the lodge about you guys, if anyone had seen you” and at first I thought “How did this man know it was us on bikes, how did the lodge know it was us?” because all I’d done was book the room online, I hadn’t said we’d be biking there but then I realized, this is rural Alaska, of course they know we’re out here toiling, were probably waiting to come rescue us on a snowmachine the instant anything went wrong. Now at 7:05 I asked the man at the counter in the restaurant, who turned out to be the kindly owner, if the restaurant was still open and he said

"Of course! We’ll make you food.” And I about fell over with relief because although I’d brought tasty bites just in case, what I really wanted was a hamburger, and I knew from the online menu that they had GF bread. “Did you see the other fatbiker?” The man said, as he handed us menus. “He’s about three miles behind you.” It was so warm inside and presently we had burgers and fries, which we inhaled, and then we walked to our room- the wind had picked up and was biting at us, the temp had dropped below zero- but our room was so cozy, the heater absolutely blasting, and the showers were hot- I was experiencing such pleasure, thinking is this what bikepacking is? You toil all day and then you get to eat at a restaurant and sleep inside?

In the morning I ordered gluten-free French toast!! And as we ate we watched the wind whip the landscape outside the big windows in the restaurant, felt it rattling the building.

“The wind will probably die?” I said, as I looked at the weather forecast on my phone. “Right?” The wind was coming from the NE, which meant it was a sidewind that would sometimes be a headwind. The temp was -14F with the windchill. The ride back had just as much climbing as the way out. “We can push our bikes the whole way if we need to,” I reassured myself, as I shoveled French toast into my mouth. Empty rocking chairs rocked ominously on the covered porch outside. The restaurant let us fill our thermoses with hot water, and then there was nothing to do but get on our bikes.

Weirdly, my legs were not as exhausted as I thought they would be, but the wind was terrifying. It kept biting at my skin- I had my hat pulled low and my buff pulled high so I could only see a tiny slit of the world and I focused on the ground directly in front of my bike, leaning to the side to stay balanced. The wind had blown drifts over the road in spots so we would push our bikes, which felt like a nice break. We probably ended up walking seven miles in that day. It was colder so we didn’t stop very often, kept all our layers on, and even though it felt excruciating slow somehow the miles still rolled by beneath us. In the last five miles, a miracle- the wind stopped, the drifts were gone, and the final three miles was a breathless downhill, we whooped and hollered all the way back to the parkinglot. It was a joy to defrost in the car, to hoover up the rest of our snacks, and on the drive back there was a taco truck in Delta.

I’m so impressed with people who do long fatbike rides, who ride the ITI or the White Mountains 100. I feel a bit stronger after the Tangle Lakes trip but it’s still hard for me to conceptualize anything like that- there’s just so many variables in winter, so many conditions. Wind, drifts, deep snow, overflow, uphills! You have to manage your temperature, your moisture, stay hydrated somehow? And how do you possibly eat enough?

In a few months it’ll be summer in Alaska- brief, psychotic summer- eight weeks to fit it all in- I’ve got my guided Brooks Range trips (which are sold out, although my fall Utah trips still have space if you’re interested in those), and a trip I want to do with friends in June, and then I want to dipnet for salmon, and wouldn’t it be fun to bike somewhere? And then in August the cold returns, and the slow slide back into the stillness of winter. Did the years always go this fast? It used to feel like time stretched out before me, as boundless and untrammeled as the winter snow. Now time marches, breaks into a gallop on occasion. Does loving one’s life make time go faster, the same way the downhills on a bike seem to be over in seconds, while the uphills stretch on into infinity? I guess in that way I’m grateful for the periods in my life when I’m less happy, less fulfilled, when times grinds almost to a halt. It gives us a chance to really wallow in the experience of embodiment, instead of feeling it slip through our fingers like sand…

That’s all for now,

Carrot