Iditarod Trail Invitational leader Gavin Hennigan at the Nome finish line in 2024; it’s proving a tough journey to get there this year/Facebook
Iditarod Trail Invitational sputtering and stalling
As darkness settled over the vast, desolate, bitterly cold and once-again wild heart of Alaska known to the territory as the “Inland Empire,” a lone Irishman named Gavan Hennigan was settling in at an abandoned mining camp at a place named Ophir.
Behind the 44-year-old from Galway, 90 miles back along the Iditarod Trail in the tiny community of McGrath with the big airstrip, the few competitors left in the Iditarod Trail Invitational (ITI) 1000 race from Knik to Nome were contemplating flying home.
Many of the strong and fit – and no one made it 350 miles from Knik up and over the Alaska Range to the World War II-era, lend-lease airbase along the Kuskokwim River without being strong and fit – had already thrown in the towel and left.
But Hennigan, the first on foot to Nome in the 2024 Invitational 1000, was pressing on in front of a sled loaded with a 10-day supply of food and fuel. The competitor from across the pond is a man more accustomed to water in its liquid state than in its frozen state, but no stranger to extreme endurance events.
He is getting all of the extreme cold anyone could ask for this year, and is lucky to have chosen to attack the trail on foot. That allowed him to press on when the fat-tired cyclists who have come to dominate this race hit a roadblock.
No trail; no way
For most of them, the big problem was logistics. The human-powered Invitational, unlike the bigger and better-known Iditarod powered by dogs, has no real checkpoints north of McGrath.
Racers cache supplies at a remote point on the map more than 100 miles to the north called Cripple, where they can resupply. But they have to carry on the bike enough food and fuel – for melting snow or preferably ice for water – to get them there.
This is pretty easy to do if you’re making 5 to 6 mph on the bike and only need enough food and fuel for a couple of days. It becomes a whole lot more difficult if you have to figure out how to carry two or three times as much food and fuel because of trail conditions that will reduce your speed to 2 or 3 mph or less.
And then there is the little matter of exactly how much food and fuel you’ve sent to Cripple, because if you’ve only sent a couple of days’ worth to supply yourself on the 70-mile leg from Cripple to Ruby on the south bank of the Yukon River, you’re not going to have enough if that leg turns into another push.
Fairbank cyclist Tyson Flaharty, a former winner of both the ITI 1000 to Nome and the ITI 350 to McGrath, and one of the first cyclists to bail out this year, said he wasn’t sure that “I could carry enough food on my bike” and added that “minus-40 degrees at night adds another layer of risk.”
When there is good trail, these problems are manageable; they become less so the colder it gets and the worse the trail.
Not always this way
In another time, the Inland Empire was a land with well-established winter trails. The last of Alaska’s gold rushes in the early 1900s brought thousands of people streaming into the millions of acres of black spruce forest, willow thickets, swamps, lakes, creeks and rivers between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, and they built a winter trail system that took advantage of the ice that formed atop all the frozen water to allow dog teams to haul gold south to the port of Seward.
Those camp and trade center trails remained active for years, but the history is that by 1918 mail carriers were complaining “of the difficulties of travel (because) so little traffic was following the trail from Iditarod to Seward by that time that they were constantly plagued with the hard and time-consuming task of breaking trail for the dogs.”
These days, the trail is it like it was in 1918 or worse, with only a couple exceptions. The go-anywhere snowmachines of the Iron Dog race buzz north through the area in February, and the trail-breaking snowmachines of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race follow in early March to pack a trail for the dog teams.
Other than that, there is often no traffic, and the trail left by the Iron Dog often blows in with snow as fat-tired cyclist Jay Petervary from Wyoming discovered after pedaling his bike the 25 miles from McGrath, population 301, to Takotna, a community home to only 56 people.
“The trail basically disappeared/stopped three miles out of Takotna,” he messaged after pedaling back to McGrath.”I was hoping to get suckered further in, but not only did I not want to push by myself like that. it seemed unreasonable and irresponsible. I didn’t have the supplies it would have taken to get me to my Cripple drop.
This lack of supplies is the logistical problem facing most of the cyclists left on the trail. If you are engaged in the energy-draining work of pushing a 45-pound or heavier bike through unbroken snow, you just can’t cover ground very fast.
The math
At 2 mph, the 100 miles to Cripple would take 50 hours, or two-plus days of pushing. Unfortunately, humans also need rest. So add at least another day for that and then plan on food and fuel for at four or five days just to be safe.
By this point, you’re looking at problems strapping so much food and fuel to a bike already heavy with the survival gear needed for life at temperatures that could drop to 50 degrees below zero.
Not to mention that if you can find a way to load all this on the bike, you’re looking at a heavy monstrosity far harder to push than a stripped-down fat-bike.
On snowshoes and towing a sled with 10 days’ worth of supplies, Hennigan is in a better position to challenge the trail, but it is clearly not easy going. It took him more than a day to cover the 23 miles of trail gently climbing over an 800-foot-high hill that rises between Takotna and Ophir before dropping down the other side.
A satellite-tracking device that all Invitational competitors are required to carry showed him sometimes traveling at less than 1 mph on the climb up and less than 2 mph on the hike down.
“Look at Gavin’s speed,” Petervary said. “That tells you” how bad the trail. “I’ve been through hell on that section before and this seemed worse.”
Petervary is not the only one go through hell on this deserted stretch of trail in ITIs past. Tim Hewitt, the fastest man ever to set foot on the trail in modern times (who knows what might have happened before records were kept) had to be rescued here in 2015.
Already an Iditarod record holder for his speed afoot by then, Hewitt was on his eighth trip up the trail – this time with a fat bike – when he ran into conditions similar to what they are this year. He ended up in an epic war with nature that left him pinned down tens of miles out of Ruby.
Trapper Alan Titus found Loreen and Answell pretty easily, but Tim was farther behind so Titus kept going. It wasn’t easy even with a snowmachine. He got stuck several times, had to dig the machine out and later confessed that he thought about just turning around and going home.
Deadman sleeping
But Titus pressed on until he spotted a bike and a black sleeping bag in the middle of what had once been a state highway to a then-deserted mining camp at a place called Poorman. Titus yelled at bag. Nothing happened.
Titus stopped his snowmachine, got off, and started walking toward the bag yelling some more and fearing the worst. It was then Tim finally popped his head out of the bag into the 40-degree-below zero air.
“He was screaming like crazy,” Hewitt would later remember. “He thought I was dead.”
Hewit was alive, but had suffered some significant frostbite, as had Loreen. They both ended up visiting the Providence Alaska Medical Center after flying back to Anchorage. Tim’s answer to this was to return to the trail the next year to break his old Inivitational record for hiking the length of the Iditarod and become the first person known to have gone from Knik to Nome on foot in under 20 days.
His time of 19 days, 9 hours and 38 minutes was more than 15 hours faster than the time the late Dick Wilmarth posted on his way to winning the first Iditarod dog race. But that Iditarod was a much different race in 1973 than the race today.
Wilmarth and his competition spent some time out in front of their dog on snowshoes breaking trail. They did not have the help of the groomers on snowmachines who now proceed up the trail in front of the dogs.
And a trail, verus making your own trail, makes a world of difference.
Will the bikes roll?
As this was written, a handful of Invitational 1000 cyclists were still sitting in McGrath debating if they should wait for dog-trailbreaking snowmachines to go through, and then follow Hennigan up the trail. The first of those machines are usually a few days out in front of the dog race that starts Saturday.
And a good trail behind them would, without a doubt, change everything.
But some of the toughest Invitational cyclists, people like Flaharty and Fairbanks iron-man Jay Cable, another Invitational winner and veteran of many races, have already called it quits.
“My concern from the start was the McGrath to Ruby segment, which had no traffic since Iron Dog went north two weeks ago,” Flaharty messaged. “And reports of one to two feet of new snow with more up towards Ruby….That has basically been the weather pattern in Fairbanks all winter.
“It snows, goes to minus 40, then snows again,” he said. “People just don’t get out as much, and even less on a trail that has no consistent trail users outside of the big events. Also, Iditarod is starting an extra week behind us, which really limits options for waiting for Iditarod trailbreakers.”
He went on to confess that he wasn’t anxious to walk and push a bike nearly 150 miles from Takota to Ruby, either. And there is that added risk of doing so in extreme cold, especially if you work up a sweat pushing in deep snow, dampen your inner insulating layers, and lack dry clothes to change into.
The mental confusion here coupled to the removal of clothing because of a feeling of heat is a deadly combination. When the cold kills people on the winter trails of Alaska – and the cold still does kill people there – their bodies are reguarly find to be only partially dressed.
As Flaharty noted, cold adds to the risks.
“I think I was the first one in McGrath to decide to bail,” he said. “Now it looks like the bikers are slowly giving up…JP was motivated to give it a shot. (But) he tried twice to leave Takotna and eventually went back to McGrath and scratched.”
Petervary, however, did think Hennigan likely to tough it through to Ruby.
“(He’s an) interesting guy,” the cyclist said. “Gavin is an underwater mechanic and spends a lot of time in air chambers.”
That no doubt provides a lot of time for introspection, and Hennigan was today almost as isolated as if he were in an air chamber.
