Day 3: Yukon River to Salcha

176 miles

The fog whispered through the tops of the aspens and spruce trees all around my campsite. Small tendrils of wispy fog made their way through the small openings in my bivvy. It was chilly when I woke up. Just above freezing, however, the air was heavy with moisture and the damp fog cut its way through all my layers, squeezing out any residual heat I had left over from my sleeping bag. By the time I had packed up I was more than ready to get on my way. Luckily, I had a big climb to start the day so I could get nice and warmed up. Today is day three, which is an important mental block for me. I have found in long endurance events that the third day is often the hardest when setting out on long expeditions. The first day is always easy as I am riding out the high of novelty and anticipation for what is to come. The second day is usually pretty easy as well as the legs are not fatigued yet. However, on the third day, the novelty often wears off and the fatigue catches up—especially when you have not been sleeping well. I wasn’t nervous about today, mainly because I know what lies ahead. For years I’ve thought about this journey and how difficult it’s going to be. I have tried to prepare myself as thoroughly as possible for the pain, loneliness, and misery that is in my future. It is impossible to completely prepare for what is to come, but I know of the incomprehensibility of what is to come. I have come prepared to be unprepared—if that makes any sense at all. Immediately upon setting out across the Yukon River I had a 1,500 ft climb. The Yukon has always had a mythical place in my imagination. I read many books and watched many shows about the Yukon as a kid. The final frontier, Alaska, what’s not to love. After crossing the Yukon, I made my way up the aforementioned climb. As I climbed, I ascended into the clouds. I did not know it at the time, but this punchy thousand and a half foot climb wast to be the first of many on the day. Once I was in the clouds, a light mist begin coming down on me. I couldn’t stay dry, but I did manage to stay relatively warm. For the next five hours, I struggled up steep climbs and carefully navigated equally steep descents. Occasionally I would drop into a valley out of the clouds. The aspens are in peak, fall foliage up here, rendering every vantage of the forest, beautiful, no matter the weather conditions. However, after five hours in the fog, I began to grow weary of its constant presence. The past two days I have grown acustom to riding through wide expanses of land, largely devoid of trees and obstacles. The sky seemed so big yesterday, and the land seemed to stretch on forever. Riding in the fog I became almost claustrophobic. After several hours it became disorienting, I had no sense of the time, my average speed, or the distance I had covered. Of course I have my bike computer to tell me all these things, however, on long rides, I make a habit of never checking my computer until late in the day. If I constantly check my distance my speed etc., I find that the day passes much more slowly and I become caught up in the numbers behind my ride instead of the beauty and struggle of the world around me, which makes the ride so special. I love looking at my statistics at the end of the day, however, I often prefer to live in the moment on these long rides. After 5 1/2 hours of riding through the fog on wet, gravel roads, in which my tires sunk in, making for extremely slow progress, I finally began to emerge from the cloud bank. Sunlight on my shoulders, my mood lifted dramatically. I gifted myself a quick glance at my cycle computer, and was shocked by how slow my progress had been through the morning. At five nice hours I had only covered 60 miles. My average speed was under 12 miles an hour on the day. This kind of makes sense as all day I’d been going straight up and straight down. I had over 7 1/2 thousand feet of elevation gain in just 60 miles! Undeterred, I headed on and the fog quickly receded leaving behind clear blue skies with only an occasional cloud here and there. Shortly after the fog cleared, I came across the end of the Dalton Highway! 420 miles down! Woo hoo! I have mixed feelings about leaving the Dalton Highway behind. On one hand it has been the most beautiful ride of my life, and I will never forget it as long as I live. However, it was grueling, challenging, and a struggle almost the entire way. The beauty absolutely made it worth it, but for the sake of speed and in my interest of staying mechanical and crash free, it is best that I am leaving the steel rutted, gravel roads behind. However, the gravel didn’t stop at the end of the Dalton highway. The gravel remand the predominant surface type until just about 30 miles shy of Fairbanks. Through 100 miles I accumulated 13,000 feet of elevation gain. That is nasty work! On my first 500 mile ride last year I only got 17,000 feet of elevation gain on the entire 500 mile route! Generally speaking any route with over 100 feet of elevation gain per mile is straight up and straight down. It’s pretty hard to get 13,000 feet in just 100 miles. my legs were certainly feeling it. Steep climbs had slowed my cadence to a crawl. I was acutely aware of the risk this has for knee pain as the beginnings of pain started to shoot down from my patella on the steeper grades. I wasn’t really worried about it as I knew as soon as I got to the flat sections of road past Fairbanks all my pain would disappear. At mile 120 I reached the first service station on the day. I was incredibly happy about this since I was low on food and almost out of water. When packing for this trip I forgot two things, my buff and iodine water purification tablets. Normally forgetting iodine tablets wouldn’t be a big deal for me. I never filter my water and I’ve gone years and years drinking straight out of lakes, creeks and streams without getting sick. It’s my party trick to take a drink out of a stagnant body of water and not get sick. However, on this trip, when I am already playing on the margins of what my body is capable of, there is simply no reason to mess around with dirty water. For the past three days, I have been drinking out of whatever streams I can find. At times it has been difficult to find water that looks clean and all afternoon today the best water I could find had a distinct swampy taste with somewhat of a metallic aftertaste. At the service station I fueled up on some junk food and filled up my bottles with water and soda and headed on my way to Fairbanks. From the service station on the road was smooth pavement, and it eventually turned into a two-lane divided highway about 5 miles outside of Fairbanks. In Fairbanks I was able to stop at a Walmart for a proper resupply, including iodine water, purification tablets! The Walmart in Fairbanks was absolutely giant. Probably the largest retail store I have ever been in. It took me five minutes to walk across the store! After loading up on some junk food and some somewhat healthier food I made my way south out of Fairbanks. It was beautiful out over 60° and mostly sunny. I was finally feeling great again bolstered by some messages I have had with my friends and family when I stopped at the Walmart. No matter that I had only covered 130 miles and it was already 6 o’clock. I was happy with my progress on the whole and was eager to bump up my average speed from 12 miles an hour on the now smooth and flat roads that lay await for me. As I near the outskirts of Fairbanks, I rolled through a red light, as I am very accustomed to doing. However, the Fairbanks police weren’t super keen on my decision to do so. I was immediately pulled over, but luckily, the cop was having a good day, and decided to just give me a warning. Here it is folks, your reminder not to run red lights on your bike… Unless you check that there isn’t a cop behind you. I’m only joking officer, Thank you for not giving me a ticket. I turned onto what becomes the Alaska highway and started bearing Southeast through the great valley created by the Tanana River. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and as I made my way south east the skies above me slowly grew clearer and clearer until I was treated to a magnificent sunset on my right shoulder. Far in the distance, directly ahead of me, what looked initially to be a large cloud bank soon revealed itself to be Denali and the surrounding mountains. The fading light of the day cast orange and pink hues on the white slopes of the mountain, reflected off by the blanket of snow resting on the peaks. Denali is one of my favorite mountains in the world. I’ve always had a fascination, even an obsession with it. I hope to one day I may ski it. In the meantime I contend myself with constantly checking the weather conditions on the summit as it is widely regarded to be the coldest mountain in the world. Yesterday it was 21° when I was at 5000 feet. I can guess it was about -15 to -25° on Denali if you assume that the -3° per 1000 feet of elevation gain rule applies. It’s not every day that Denali decides to peek her head out from behind the clouds. What a privilege it is for me to be able to see it even if from almost 80 miles away. I hope to get a better view up close in Delta Junction tomorrow morning but one of my big excitements about this trip was the chance to even catch a glimpse of the mountain. If I see it tomorrow, I will be over the moon, but I have low expectations. The weather up there can turn quite rapidly. About 20 miles south east of Fairbanks. I rode through the town of North Pole, however, I didn’t linger as I’m sure Santa is getting busy with only four months until Christmas. I don’t want to disturb his good work, however, after I ran the red light today—and a few more after the cops left—Santa might have one less name to put down on the nice list. Past North Pole the road continued pan flat which was great for me as I slowly began to work out my average speed and get some real miles under my belt. The road eventually shrunk from the two lane divided highway down to one lane road. I’ll be on this road for the next several days as I continue south east towards Calgary. I have decided that for the time being, I am going to ride on 14 hour time intervals. I am going to stop at 9 PM every night and wake up at 6 AM every morning. This gives me more or less an hour in the morning an hour in the evening to get ready and eat and blog. I usually don’t use this entire hour but I have it in case I need it. For the first several thousand miles I want to ensure that I am giving myself the opportunity to sleep at least eight hours a night. To maintain world record pace I don’t need to be riding 16 hours a day at the moment. In fact, now that I’m on smooth flat roads, I can stay ahead of world record pace by only riding about 10 hours a day. Of course I want to build out a buffer and there’s no point in riding only 10 hours a day when I have 24 hours to play with, however, it is helpful to know that I have a little bit of time to mess around with if I use my day wisely. In giving myself 14 elapsed hours every day to ride I can generally hit about 12 1/2 hours of moving time in these 14 hours. An hour and a half or two hours of stoppage sounds like a lot but little stuff here and there adds up and I find that taking longer 20 to 30 minute breaks here and there throughout the day can be helpful for maintaining morale and physical freshness. Just 20 minutes before I was to stop for the night I paused to watch the sun dip below the trees on the far side of the Tenana river. Wispy clouds were illuminated by the suns last light and the far away Denali mountain range slowly sank into the night sky. I can’t help but think that I’m one of the luckiest people in the world right now. Getting to where I am today has required a great amount of sacrifice and suffering, and I know that in the near future there awaits me so much more loneliness, mental anguish and physical challenge. Yet here I am exploring the world by bike, living out my dreams. What more can I ask for? This is the life I’ve always wanted for myself, and here I am with the opportunity to make my dreams a reality. And every time I open my phone, I am reminded of the expansive and loving support network that is cheering me on from back home. Even if they aren’t here provide real support, I can feel them fighting for me in my corner, and that gives me hope and inspires me every day. What an incredible start to this journey I’ve had. Even though today was incredibly hard and defeating at times, the evening ended on an incredible high note which gives me immense excitement for what the future holds!