Alaska Dispatch

The last time I saw Phil Hofstetter he was standing outside a tent near the confluence of the Tatina and South Fork Kuskokwim Rivers in the heart of the Alaska Range looking a little like the Pillsbury Doughboy. This is not Hofstetter's normal appearance. A dedicated long-distance cyclist, he isn't quite as hollow-cheeked lean as some top Tour de France riders, but by the big fat standards of our time, he is definitely what most would call skinny.

He looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy there outside an Iditarod Trail checkpoint called Rohn because of something called exercise-induced edema. Many athletes will be familiar with the less drastic form of this; your feet swell a shoe size or two, or your hands balloon after prolonged exercise. In Hofstetter's case, his whole body had expanded.

When he crawled out of the tent there at Rohn, a flat spot in a steep-walled valley about as far from anywhere as you can get in North America, he was so swollen he was barely recognizable. It seemed near impossible he would get back on his fat-tired bike and pedal another 800 miles or so to Nome.

And yet that is exactly what he did. An audiologist at the Nome hospital, Hofstetter claimed to lack the money to fly home, but the truth is that if he'd paid for a flight it would have cut into the funds he was trying to raise for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in the name of Nome friend Nora (Ivanoff) Nagaruk. (To read more about his fundraising efforts or contribute, click here).

Hofstetter made Nome a couple weeks after I last saw him and days before the finish of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which overshadows any and all other activity on the Iditarod trail in March. Officially, it had taken Hofstetter 17 days, 9 hours and 30 minutes to pedal from the Knik Bar, where the Iditarod Invitational human-powered ultramarathon begins each March, to Nome. Most Invitational racers, of course, only pedal or run to McGrath, the intermediary "finish line" for a 350-mile race from the shores of Cook Inlet over the Alaska Range and into the vast Interior. But Hofstetter wasn't the only one who kept going.

The 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail, arguably the most famous trail in the North, doesn't see a lot of end-to-end traffic in any year, but it always sees some. There are invariably a handful of fat-tire bikers and hikers who go all the way to the end in the Invitational, and some odd characters who head up the trail on snowmachines just to be on the trail.

About a day after Hofstetter reached Nome, Idaho's Tracey Petervary and husband Jay pedaled into the city of the golden sands. Tracey got there fast enough to set a new women's record for the Invitational race to Nome -- 18 days, 6 hours. Behind the Petervarys on the trail were hikers Tom Jarding, a 54-year-old mailman, and Tim Hewitt, a 55-year-old attorney. Both live in southwest Pennsylvania, and both have done this 1,000-mile walk multiple times. They say the simply love the wildness of the Iditarod Trail.

I passed Hewitt on the frozen Unalakleet River on the way to the Bering Sea coast. He confessed his feet were in bad shape, but he was happy and pressing on. Hewitt is a short, lean man who looks the part of an ultramarathon runner. Jarding is taller and bigger boned and less obviously an endurance athlete. But he is every bit as fit. He walks a 12-mile mail route five days per week and usually runs around 10 miles per day after work.

I passed Jarding on the sea ice on the way into Golovin, less than 100 miles from the end of the Iditarod Trail. There were still some dog teams behind him at that point, and Jarding was his normal bubbly self. When I somewhat impolitely buzzed off on the snowmachine to chase the sled dog race, he was still talking about how much fun he'd been having along the Iditarod Trail, and how blessed he felt to experience the warm, friendly weather that settled over the Bering Sea coast in late March of this year.

A few days later, Jarding strolled into Nome to demolish the record time for foot travel on the Iditarod Trail. He'd reached the finish in 20 days, 14 hours and 45 minutes. The time was almost 20 minutes faster than that of the 1974 winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Hewitt arrived about a day and a half later. Travel conditions on the trail, he said, were the best he'd ever seen.

Behind Jarding and Hewitt, 70-year-old Bob Cole from Kettle Falls, Wash. -- "Big Bob" to many -- was still working his way north by snowmachine. Cole is a legitimate Iditarod character. He's been coming north for years to follow the dog race, sightsee and pick up litter. We stopped to talk for a while near Farewell Lake Lodge at the edge of what used to be the Farewell Burn, but should now be called the Farewell second-growth forest, or maybe just simply the Farewell Hills.

Cole, who is the guy responsible for a carved steel sign that now marks the top of Rainy Pass, estimates he's collected more than 10,000 dog booties from along the trail over the years. These booties regularly fall off the feet of the dogs as they march north, littering the trail all the way from Anchorage to Nome. When there were more dog mushers in the country, people used to pick them up and reuse them, but there aren't many dog mushers left out there.

Cole doesn't know what to do with all his booties. I suggested he sell them on eBay. He laughed, but who knows. The last I heard of Cole, he was passing through Unalakleet.

A 70-year-old man traveling alone on what many consider an extremely tough trail, he had talked about quitting this year's run at McGrath when temperatures in the Interior fell between 30 and 50 degrees below zero, but he pushed on. I just Googled up a photo his hometown paper had of him standing outside the Old Woman cabin on the Kaltag Portage just short of the coast on March 24.

Cole is one of the few people you will meet on the trail riding a four-cycle snowmachine. Four-cycle engines get great gas mileage, burn clean and are amazingly quiet. But they're almost impossible to start if left outside when the temperatures go colder than 15 or 20 degrees below zero. Cole had solved that problem, however. He has an auto start on his snowmobile that can be set to fire the machine up every few hours in the cold, run until warm, and then shut down again awaiting the next restart.

A onetime railroad engineer, Cole is an enterprising fellow who carries enough pulleys and rope to haul his machine up the side of a mountain if necessary. This is a good idea because the Iditarod trail is rough and almost everybody gets stuck at some time. That's why many people travel with buddies.

By the time Cole was closing on the Bering Sea, 71-year-old Dr. Paul Sayer, from Homer, and 79-year-old buddy Dick Newton from Takotna had already reached Nome in the company of Newton's grandson, Chris. I met Sayers, a sparkplug of an old guy, headed back to Anchorage with Chris. Newton, a mainstay of the community of Takotna and an Iditarod institution, had decided to fly back from Nome. Paul and Chris weren't letting any ice form under the tracks of their sleds as they roared out of Elim at speed.

Sayer and Newton, an Iditarod trailbreaker who has helped rescue more than a few Iditarod mushers over the years, have been following the dog teams north from Takotna by snowmachine since 1992. They hope to keep doing so, but admit the trail gets harder the older one gets. Compared to Cole, Sayer and Newton, I felt like a spring chicken out on the trail even if I did have to take crap from some Iditarod-know-it-alls about traveling alone by snowmachine for 1,000 miles.

They apparently thought this dangerous. For some it would be, but I've been running around alone in the Alaska wilderness for 30-some years without a problem, and for most of that time I carried no form of communication. On this occasion, I had a satellite phone kindly loaned by Iridium to make it possible to Twitter the Iditarod race. It was an amazing piece of technology. I used it on a snowy, warm day atop "Little McKinley" between Elim and Golovin on the coast to call friends in Anchorage just because I could.

One of the friends is a very talented photographer who has become too much a desk rider in his senior years. I could only tell him "wish you were here,'' because no matter how you travel the Iditarod Trail, it is one great adventure.

Probably less so for me, though, than for many. For one thing, I was working -- covering the Iditarod race for Alaska Dispatch and gathering the necessary reportage for an Iditarod book -- and for another, well, technology had made things almost too easy.

Thanks to Dudley Benesch and Steve Hershbach at Alaska Mining & Diving Supply, I was riding a brand spanking new Ski-doo Tundra II LT, and it performed flawlessly. Benesh and Hershbach volunteered the machine to help Dispatch coverage of the Iditarod for no other reason than that they love good Alaska stories.

Personally, I'm an old Polaris rider, but the Tundra was enough to make a convert of me. It went 1,500 miles, first north over the Alaska Range with the Alaska Iditarod Invitational and then back, and then north with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race without a single problem. The machine started with a few twists of a key at 45 degrees below zero. It climbed out of places a guy shouldn't put a snowmachine into. And it did everything I asked every day, then came back for more -- even after a couple bonehead maneuvers I tried to make in the Alaska Range while taking photographs.

Yes, we all do stupid things. I rolled the machine into a gully and had to dig and pack a trail to get out. And, worse yet, I frostbit the hell out of the end of my nose doing 65 mph down the frozen Kuskokwim River on the way to McGrath at 45 degrees below zero. This despite the fact the nose was covered with duct tape to prevent frostbite.

I shouldn't have been driving that fast, but I was because I could -- because the trail was hard and fast as opposed to mogulled and rough like much of the Iditarod -- and because the new Tundras, with their twin-cylinder engines, are not your grandpa's putt-putt Tundras powered by those old one lungers.

These machines would almost make it possible for anyone to take the Iditarod Trail north to Nome, weather permitting. Think about this long and hard if you ever decide to give it a try. Snow on the south side of the Alaska Range can wipe out the Iditarod Trail almost overnight and change everything, as can snow anywhere. The Serum Run, a commemorative dogsled/snowmachine tour from Nenana to Nome at about the same time as the Iditarod, had to be cancelled a few years back because there was so much snow on the Yukon River that not even trail-breaking snowmachines could battle through.

Extreme cold in the Interior can mess things up good, too. Everything mechanical becomes increasingly susceptible to breakage at 40 to 50 degrees below zero, and all things mechanical and electrical are hard to keep running at those temperatures. I had to keep the Iridium phone, along with all cameras, under my parka or the cold would render them become inoperable.

And between a stiff snowmachine track, thick chaincase oil and a sled frozen to the ground in Nikolai, I almost burned up a belt on the Ski-doo getting going one morning. I took my thumb off the throttle when I smelled a lot of burning rubber with nothing moving. After that, I made sure to break everything loose before trying to motor anywhere.

Other than that, the trip was problem-free except for a broken towbar that had to be splinted with an ax on the rough sea ice between Koyuk and Elim. The splint held for more than 100 miles to Nome. The rest of the trip was easy, or it was easy if you grew up on snowmobiles in Minnesota in the days of bogey wheels, when you had to learn to ride pretty well just to avoid being bucked off.

Oh, how times have changed.

Technology is indeed our friend when it works. If I'd done 1,500 miles in three weeks on my old Polaris Indy, I wouldn't have been able to walk upon arrival in Nome. That is not a criticism of my Polaris, but an acknowledgement of the improvements in snowmobile suspension. Things change.

And then again they don't. The Iditarod was every bit as wild, maybe more so, than when I first ventured up the trail in 1983, and that is a good thing. It is fun to get out there where Mother Nature can still test a man's mettle.

If you want to read more on Hofstetter's Iditarod adventure, click here.

For more on the adventures of the Petervarys, click here.

And for a summary of Hewitt's adventure, click here.

Craig Medred's Iditarod coverage for Alaska Dispatch focused on the "back of the pack" mushers trying to reach Nome. His coverage documented the real life struggles of ordinary people when they cash in everything to chase their dream of becoming an Iditarod dog musher. The stories are a prelude to his forthcoming book, "Graveyard of Dreams: Dashed Hopes and Shattered Aspirations along Alaska's Iditarod Trail." Click to pre-order a copy.

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