Denali NP

Denali National Park is full of tourists just like these and for good reason. The place reeks of amazing wildlife, scenery, and wilderness. I'm so glad it's a conservation area, so glad people like this get a chance to enjoy it.

Sure, they travel in a bus. They don't camp. They stumble over blueberry bushes that untie their leather boot laces on three hour morning walks that exhaust them for the rest of the day. But this park is as much theirs as the dummies who walk its length, twice or more. As much as the guy who dies in a wrecked green bus on the park border, a death by starvation, bad luck, and inexperience on a dream-quest.

They are the ones who get in a small plane and even without landing to face challenges like high winds, frost-bite, cracks and cornices, the depression of a summit un-made, fly toward the mountain and find it the best thing they ever did in their life. They get excited over bear prints in mud and caribou and even moose, if you can believe that!

The park belongs to them as much as to us and when a sow and her teeny blonde cubs walk so near that any closer you'd be scared, when you follow a bitch wuff trottin' sideways down the road at 10 yards for 10 mins, then watch as she dives into the willows to nab a vole -- but misses and cocks her head quizzically, then you know that all the miles and all the scares and all the years under your feet don't make any difference between you and them and that's what this park is meant for.

Adrian Crane: AMWC 1986, Mentasta to McKinley

From November 1986 issue of Ultrarunning:

"In our last issue we carried a report on the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic...200-250 miles through the Alaska backcountry, carry all your food and gear....[a race that] has always struck us as about the toughest race around. Adrian Crane and Tom Possert ran together and finished in a bit over 6 days, barely losing to some equally tough and talented Alaskans.

"After this competitive event was over, Adrian Crane's conclusion was rather surprising:

Is this the longest, toughest, roughest or hardest? The beauty of it is that at the finish no one knew or cared. Every competitor was left with indelible experiences, challenges accepted and honestly won or lost. Each had started with a clean slate and had accomplished every step in the wilderness through their own efforts."

Little has changed in the intervening 20 years but the pace of the racers.

Seven Lessons I learned on This Year’s Classic

The Wilderness Classic is a notorious teacher/taskmaster. It’s possible to learn more about wilderness travel and needed gear during three days of wilderness racing than three weeks of normal wilderness travel. Indeed, if I could, I'd have all my adventure partners do at least one race and take a swiftwater rescue training to get them into the same frame of reference.

This year’s race, my 14th participation in a summertime event, was no exception. Besides determining that I still like packrafts; that straps are more functional than p-cord; that an altimeter watch is good and that 1:250,000 scale maps are best for AMWC races; that a dry-bag-carrying, harness-style pack is best for me; as are big bars of Cadbury chocolate and fun-sized bags of Doritos and potato chips; and that wool hoodies and the lightest weight shell gear I can suffer are the way to go, I learned a few new things:

(1) It was great to have three pairs of socks: one wool pair kept virginal for sleeping only; a second wool pair I wore the first day; and a pair of lined neoprene socks (not Seal Skinz). I also experimented with insoles in and out as I’ve been hiking without insoles for the last 15 years, only recently using them again. Because I was unable to put the scale of distance on my tootsies the month before the race like Skurka could, I was unsure what would blow out. Having the selection of socks and insoles to experiment was helpful to keeping my blister load to two toe ones on my right foot, hot spots that tape can’t help in a wet-footed, fast-paced race.

(2) A single trekking pole with a basket works well for me; basket-free poles do not. Basket-free poles get stab-stuck in tundra and rocks, expending more energy in extraction than in their added swing weight, IMHO.

(3) For me -- long past my vision-quest years and salaried, commercial adventure racing days -- substantial sleep is necessary for flushing dreams from my head and pain from my body. We enjoyed 28 hours of camp time (18 hours of it actual sleep time) spread over 4 nights. Did it cost us the race? No, it gave us a finish. Our 11 hour camp next to the Hayes Glacier toe took a race-quitting turned ankle to a manageable limp. Without rest and long sleeps we’d have limped even slower, longer, and more painfully that we did. Sleep heals and we were hurt. Indeed, if you reading this should ever find yourself in a race wanting to quit: don’t quit until after you’ve given yourself a mandatory twelve-hour lay-over. Then revaluate and decide. You’ll be amazed by what twelve hours will do.

(4) While sleep is necessary (for me), quilts/sleeping bags/tents/tarps/bivy-sacks/space-blankets/foam-pads seem not to be. To sleep well requires warmth and dry feet, which for us meant a fire during our camp and dry socks. At camp we quickly collected a pile of dry wood broken into 1-2 foot long pieces. We started the fire and I’d dry my day clothes over it, slipping into a dry pair of thin long underwear bottoms, and dry socks, then putting back on the day clothes and slipping into my insulated jacket. I then positioned myself between the wood pile and the fire and slept, waking when chilled by the dieing fire which I then fed a stick or two for another hour or two of sleep. Fortunately, it did not rain. If it had…..hmmmm, the sleeps would’ve been colder and wetter under the raft and without a fire, I suppose.

(5) A small titanium pot for warm freeze-dried before sleep and hot coffee afterward made sleep comfortable and got us jumpstarted in the morning. The fire heated water quickly and seemed to cost us little time in the long run. I guess we tried to be hour-wise, not minute-foolish.

(6) For this route, a single two-person boat was a time saver. We may have lost an hour on the Wood River using it, but we saved more than that by nearly halving our raft loads. We used the boat in a variety of ways and each time we got in it, it boosted morale and rested our feet.

(7) The cast of characters in this event offers up a distillation of everything I like about Alaska. I guess this is not a new lesson, but actually my favorite one, learned time and time again.

2009 Classic: More Unofficial Results

By six o’clock on Saturday Rob Kehrer of Anchorage/Eagle River (perhaps?) finished with Steve Taylor and Forrest Karr, both of Fairbanks. Besides the first eight finishers, everyone else but John Lapkass had dropped out, most by the first checkpoint at Donnelly.

I’ve heard from a reliable source that this was considered the hardest course in years, despite the fact that the stretch from Donnelly to McKinley Village was its own course from 1994-1996, with 100% finish rate in 1995, the first and only time in the 27 year history of the race. This year’s prelude of 40 or so miles -- whether covered on ATV trails and roads north of Granite Mountain, over Granite itself, or through the tundra and gravel bars of the Gerstle-St Anthony Pass route – sucked the life out of a dozen starters. The rest, save Andrew Skurka, hobbled to the finish. Skurka finished with feet as good as when he started -- that's what 700 miles of walking in June and July through SC AK will do for you, I guess.

Yesterday, nine full days after the start, John Lapkass limped into McKinley Village on feet he said were the worst they’ve ever been (this after completing 17 Classics), having run out of food, fallen prey to the morass of willows and alders that is the east fork of Dick Creek, inadvertently swum the Wood River, and had the only rain cloud in miles “surgically strike” his drying gear with rain.

It sounds like this was his toughest race in years, too. But something tells me we'll all be back again next year. That's the nature of the event: it hurts so good.

6 Million Words on the Wilderness Classic

My Optio W60 shoots 30 frames per second. If a picture's worth a thousand words, then this 3.5 minute vid of the Wilderness Classic offers up a lot of verbage.

AMWC 2009 Start Photo

There are 28 people here, 29 if you count Britney, held tenderly by Chunk, Bobby, and Forrest.

Alas, she made it no farther than this.

Wilderness Classic Report – unofficial results

There were 28 starters, or maybe 29, hard to say as people showed up within minutes of the start on Sunday morning near the Gerstle River south of Delta Jct. They flew off in all directions, all combinations, all ages.

Forrest McCarthy of Jackson Hole, WY, hot off the couch and on his vacation left with me.

We took a rather straight line (green on the map); others took more circuitous but faster routes (red lines). The winners, PJs Chris Robertson and Bobby Schnell teamed up with pro-hiker Andy Skurka, and finished in 3 days and 18 hours at 4 AM on Thursday.

Forrest and I limped in later that night, 7 PM, for a finish time of 4 days, 9 hours. Our route is about 170-175 miles.

Six hours later (4 days 15 hours) Brad Marden and his Vermont partner Eben Sargent beat Luc Mehl who finished solo, by about 30 minutes. They’d been trading places for days, suffering, like we did, across the soft "sponga" and hard glacial moraines of the north side of the Hayes Range, and enjoying the fast floats on the flooding waters of the Wood and Yanert Rivers.

The weather had been hot and dry, thankfully, as none of these finishers carried sleeping bags, bivy sacks, or shelters of any knd save for some who carried one-use space blankets. We slept around fires ourselves in dry socks and the clothes we'd hiked in

At least a dozen racers dropped out after the initial 40 mile prelude to Donnely. One team, Craig “Chunk” Barnard and his partner Jordan of eastern Oregon, dropped out at the unlikely point of the Denali Hwy’s Susitna River Bridge. The duo had walked up the Black Rapids Glacier, dodging the continuing rock fall of the 2005 earthquake slides there, then crossed over to the East Fork Susitna Glacier, trading crampons for packrafts as they paddled down the ever steepening East Fork. At one point they both piled into a big hole in Class IV waters, Jordan bumping Chunk out of the hole. Unfortunately Jordan, on his second-ever packraftng experience, lost his boat, his paddle, and his right shoe, thirty miles from the road. He said his PFD saved his life in the river and his foot on the tundra, as he made a makeshift shoe from the PFD's foam.

Using his mandatory sat phone Chunk called his girlfriend to say they were OK, but heading out to the highway. Walking downstream Chunk spotted the raft in an eddy, retrieved it and in the process found Jordan’s paddle, too. They floated down to the Denali Hwy and called it quits there.

Just another day of the adventure in the Classic. It will be interesting to hear what else went on out there.

More as I find out.