Alaska Dispatch

FINGER LAKE -- Around the table the men stared into their mugs and tried to find the words to stir hope in Dave Pramman. An old dog trying to run with the front of the pack in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, Pramann was a beaten man.

He pedaled into the Winterlake Lodge here suffering as much in mind as in body. The physiological handicap of age and the psychological toil of churning slowly through endless miles of soft trail had taken their toll.

"This is the hardest thing I've ever done," he said.

Ahead of the 50-something Minnesota cyclist, 29-year-old Peter Basinger was powering toward the Alaska Range with a struggling Jeff Oatley, 40, trying to hold his wheel. Just behind them came buff Jay Petervary, 37, the last of the three amigos leading the human-powered race over the length of the Iditarod Trail.

All had suffered a long day on the 45 miles of trail from Skwentna that started badly in the swamps behind the community of 150, got worse on the climb up and into the Shell Hills, and then turned into a long, low-speed grind across the interminable muskegs and through the skinny patches of spruce forest between Shell Lake and this checkpoint at Finger Lake.

None had suffered as badly as Pramman, however. Now, as they gathered around the long table in the huge kitchen of this modern and extremely comfortable lodge deep into Alaska, they debated just how bad a day it had been.

It was tough, they agreed, but it could have been worse. It can always be worse, said Basinger, who grew up in Alaska and therefore knows of what he speaks. He's the guy who helped save young mountain biker Petra Davis's life after she was badly mauled by a grizzly during a mountain bike race on the edge of Anchorage. Basinger knows just how bad things can get.

A flatlander from Burnsville, Minn., Pramman was wrestling with the sometimes unreal realities of Alaska. For him, the Iditarod Trail had become something just about as bad as it gets. This kind of thought is a bad thing 125 miles into a 350-mile ultramarathon, and everyone at the table knew it.

All tried to cheer Pramman, but with little success. His mind had gone to that dark place where it searches for reasons to quit. It is something that happens not just in this event. It is something that happens in life.

"This is just defeatist thought," Pramann admitted. "I probably shouldn't be thinking this. (But) I feel like I've just done the Trans Iowa and I'm only here."

The Trans Iowa is a back-road, Midwest, mountain bike race about the length of the Iditarod Trail Invitational. It is regionally famous mainly because conditions got so bad one year that no one finished, Praman noted. Somebody has always finished the Iditarod Invitational, but the snow that buried last year's race made things epic. Some racers thought they might not survive the Alaska Range, but they did. And they went on to finish the race.

"If you go back," Pramann said, "you're such a failure."

The Invitational is a test of perseverance. The only reward is passing the test. There is no prize money at the finish line. Not even a trophy. There is only the smug satisfaction of knowing that you were tougher than the elements, tougher than Alaska, tougher than nature itself. And nature has been plenty tough this year.

For a trail, imagine the fabled Alp de Huez of the Tour de France turned on its side and stretched out seemingly forever. Iditarod volunteers from Shell Lake, who never get enough credit from anybody, had thankfully dragged the trail from Skwentna to Finger to knock down a reported seven inches of new fluff, but left behind were a couple of inches of soft, sand-like snow that grabbed at the four-inch-wide tires of the fat bikes ridden by the cyclists who have come to dominate this strange race that began more than 37 years ago as the Iditaski. It was hard to keep the bike moving, but most did with only minimal walking on some of the steeper hills. Their struggles, though, were recorded in the squiggly, snake-like marks left by their tracks on the trail. Pramann noted that, too.

"Peter's running a straighter line than I am," he said dejectedly.

"He runs a straighter line than anyone," Petervary said. He told Pramann to look on the bright side.

"I've been looking on the bright side all day," the older man said, ticking off the good things. The snow had stopped. The weather was so warm he didn't have to worry about the tube on his CamelBak freezing. The sun wasn't so bright he had to worry about going sunblind. These were the good things of the moment in a race that traces its roots back to Joe Redington, the founder of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Redington envisioned an Iditarod Nation of athletes swarming the trail he loved. Martin Buser from Big Lake, who would go on to win four Iditarod sled dog races, did one of the early Iditaskis.

The Iditarod sled dog race is considered the toughest ultramarathon in the world. It might be worth noting Buser has never come back to do another Iditarod ski race, and the ski race itself has since grown to include classes for snowshoers, runners and, finally, mountain bikers. Over time, and with improvements in snowmachines that brought more traffic to pack in the snow that is the surface of the seasonal and ever-shifting Iditarod Trail, the bikes have come to dominate human-powered travel.

Pramann was there before this happened. He rode the Iditasport, the successor to the Iditaski, in the late 1980s.That was in the days before ultrawide rims and tires, when the cyclists pushed more than pedaled, and the skiers still had a chance. Technology changed everything. Four-inch-wide tires on rims almost as wide can now be ridden on all but the softest snowmobile trails.

Backcountry cyclists, who back at the start of the 20th Century in Alaska were pretty much limited to pedaling the ice of the Yukon River from the Klondike of Canada to the golden sands of Nome, can now pedal the Iditarod Trail, or much of it, all the way from Anchorage to Nome. This bunch, about 30 in all, left the tiny Susitna Bay community of Knik on Sunday on a 350-mile journey over the Alaska Range to McGrath. The leaders are now at the edge of Rainy Pass. The rest are stretched out over a distance of about 100 miles back to Skwentna with more than a dozen runners and a single skier still struggling up the Yentna River toward that checkpoint.

Most are still hanging on. Pramann himself managed to regroup and push himself out of this checkpoint in the dark at about 1 p.m. He had found the positives. He has an airplane reservation in McGrath. But, more importantly, temperatures that had been in the 30s much of the day were falling. The trail was beginning to refreeze. If it got just cold enough, there just might be something like pavement all the way to Rainy Pass.

"There's so much water in the snow, I i think it will set up at 20," said Oatley, a former aerospace engineer. Not quite a rocket scientist, but close.

"It's been demanding riding the whole way," said Petervary. "It's not like it's going to set up."

"I think it will set up," said Basinger, a bike mechanic, a graduate student in teaching, and maybe most significantly, a three-time winner of this race.

By the time Pramann left, hours behind the other three, you could feel the trail icing under foot, and riders straggling into the checkpoint noted conditions seemed to have gotten better by the hour. Some of them were buoyed by the knowledge that their split times in from the Shell Lake lodge, about 20 miles to the south, were faster than those of the race leaders, and it wasn't because they were stronger athletes.

For most of the night, there would be cyclists gathered round the big table in the lodge. Some going, some coming, and all talking about the trail. It is something best not thought about, but something they just can't help thinking about.

"You just can't think about it," said Phil Hofstetter, an audiologist in the Nome hospital who is planning to pedal all the way home. He's spent so much money on this adventure, he added, he can't afford to quit and fly home.

"Use the force," said Colorado cyclist Chris Plesko.

The force be with you.

Contact Craig Medred at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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