The Classic Report

1988 Roman Dial Article

2012-01-10T21:51:00.000-09:00

Here's a newspaper article from August of 1988 by Craig Medred about Roman Dial. Craig is a Classic veteran himself and his weekly articles about the outdoors were always amusing. This one is no exception. He is also an author. Here's a link to his book on Amazon. Graveyard of Dreams I had to cut this article down quite a bit to make sure I was within fair use copyright limitations but what I've posted will give you the gist of what it says. If you want to read the whole thing you can read it by accessing Daily News Archives through your library. Here's a blog post I wrote a little while ago that tells you how to do it. Daily News Archive Access

Alaska Wilderness Has a Million Ways to Teach Humility
Craig Medred, August 1988

Roman Dial is a trim and slouchy sort of guy whodoesn't look like any of the things he is. A rich intellect hides behind the toofriendly face of the proverbial boy next door. His jeans and opencollared shirthide the lean, muscular frame of a wild animal. He sprawls into chairs in a very relaxed, very open, very undignifiedway that is certain to disarm anyone who might, by chance, recognize him as analmost mythical creature of the Alaska backcountry.

Nothing about his dress, behavior or movementoffer a clue to this unique fellow with the strange name.

There is certainly nothing that identifies Dialas the guy who twice won the 155mile, Hope to Homer footrace through the wilderness.

And there is even less to mark Dial as ascientist who has been given a grant to pursue a doctorate in biology atStanford this fall. Here is a man whoblends the worlds of physical and intellectual fitness without being affectedby either. Dial feels no need to impress anyone with his conditioning or hisintelligence.

In a world that hinges on packaging, it isrefreshing to meet someone so distinctly unpackaged. This is an Alaska goldnugget in a plain, brown wrapper.

Dial doesn't prance around in muscle shirts ortights to show off his body or babble on about his times in this sport or that.His conversation doesn't slide into scientific technobull in an attempt toillustrate his education.

Dial doesn't seem to care that he knows thingsyou don't or can do things you can't. Whyhe is this way, I don't know, but I'd like to think the mountains and the wilderness had something to do with it.

Alaska's wild country has a million ways to teachhumility. It is particularly good at beating up braggarts, loudmouths and hotdogs.Sometimes it spits out decent people when it's done. Other times it just sendsthem packing.

Take a good man, send him into this wilderness , and he only comes out better. There's somethingeducational in being forced to recognize how stupidity, accident or even fatecan kill you in the blink of an eye. It alters your perspective. It takes yourperfectly normal, highfalutin, overinflated self-opinion and makes a joke ofit.

We talked last week, me getting ready to go sheephunting and he preparing for this year's running of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic,a 160mile footrace through the WrangellSt. Elias National Park and Preservefrom Nabesna to McCarthy. What we talkedabout in some detail was plain, old brush.

Dial swore he'd found a route through themountains and canyons between Nabesna and McCarthy that only required bustingthrough 100 yards of brush. I shared some secrets about a bear trail throughone of the brushy sections of country between the Russian River Trail and the SkilakRiver valley on the Kenai Peninsula.

If you've ever spent days in the wilderness fighting your way through alders, willows anddevil's club on the road to exhaustion and madness, you will know what we weretalking about. For there in the tangles,when the going just goes to hell, it becomes obvious that there's nothingparticularly important about humans. We're not much different than all theother animals grunting and sweating to stay alive as long as possible. And thebest thing we can do for ourselves is to never forget it.

2011-12-29T22:17:00.000-09:00

Happy Holidays everyone! I hope this post finds you happy and healthy and training for the next Classic race. It looks like the results of the poll are surprisingly evenly matched. Who knew so many people wanted to experience the torture of the Hope to Homer race. I've only heard rumors of it and have vowed never to do it. Despite the poll, the course has already been set. In true Classic form, a completely new route in the Wrangells are the new venue and it looks to be a challenging race.

I hope you spend a few moments near the turning of the new year reflecting on your accomplishments in 2011 and your goals in 2012. If you completed a Classic in 2011, then congratulations! If your goal is to complete the Classic in 2012, then I wish you godspeed and may your feet be swift and sure.

New route and 2012 race dates.

2011-11-28T06:28:00.001-09:00

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving weekend! I know I did and sometime in the next week or so I'll be going on an all day run on the slopes of Haleakala to run it all off.

Thanks for voting on the new poll. It looks like the results are fairly evenly distributed. Someone requested that I add the Eureka to Talkeetna route so I added that in a separate poll below - Blogger in its infinite wisdom won't let me change the original poll after voting has started.

The poll is informative and fun but what I didn't realize when I posted it was that the route and dates for the race have already been chosen. Luc Mehl has generously taken over organizing (thank you again to Michael Martin for many years of service). The route chosen is a completely new one and looks to be challenging.

July 8-15, 2012

Thompson Pass to McCarthy

For more info on the race and to sign up for an email list go to

http://thingstolucat.com/2012amwc/

Luc has a great website chronicling many of his amazing adventures so after you're done reading about the race, browse around. Have a great cyber-Monday!

New poll

2011-11-20T22:22:00.001-09:00

I added a poll to the right side of the page about where the next three years of the race should be. Usually the race venue is held in the same place for three years in a row. The race just finished three years in the Alaska Range and now it's time for another route.

Most routes have been done more than once because they prove to be so popular. The Eureka to Talkeetna route was an exception. That route has only been done once because it was just introduced a few years ago. Ultimately the decision is up to the race director but the poll is a fun way gauge opinion.

Personally, my preference would be Nabesna to McCarthy. I have fond memories of it because I cut my Classic teeth on it but I've heard rumors that the next route could very well be in the Brooks Range. Select your choice and vote on the poll. If you have some place specific in mind, let me know and I'll see if I can add it.

Nutrition Book

2011-10-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

I'm a huge fan of proper nutrition before and during a race. With the right nutrients you can drive your body farther and faster than if you just eat garbage. To put it succinctly, your body will take more abuse. And let's be honest with ourselves, the Classic is all about abusing your body. Not in a masochistic manner - more along the lines of drawing on all possible physical reserves to reach a certain goal. Classic racers are known for their ability to force their bodies into extreme endurance. Many a Classic race has been finished or won based purely on strength of will alone while ignoring pain and fatigue. Your body will hold up to this abuse much better if you give it the nutrients it needs.

You will travel farther, longer and faster. You'll live longer and your mind and body will be more balanced if you eat right. So, having extolled the virtues of proper nutrition enough I'll get to the point. I came across a great book about sports nutrition the other day. It has some really good information about endurance nutrition. Some of it is a bit basic but even that is all a good review. Here's a link. Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes

Speaking of sports nutrition, here's another book that is based on endurance alpine climbing but has an excellent section on nutrition. The cross-over between the Classic and endurance climbing is obvious and the nutrition fundamentals are very similar. I'm not sure it's worth it to buy the book just for the nutrition section because it's fairly short but if you like climbing books anyway you should take a look. I refer to this book more for the nutrition section than anything else. Extreme Alpinism

Waihee Ridge Run

2011-10-15T18:08:00.000-08:00

I did a great trail run the other day on the Waihee Ridge trail. I'm currently living on the North Shore of Maui and Waihee Ridge is about an hour away over in the West Maui mountains. I was pleasantly surprised to find some decent trail running here in the islands and this one is one of the best trails I've come across. Running in the West Maui mountains often means coping with clouds, rain and cooler temperatures. At the car in the sun at 1500 feet elevation, the temperature was about 75°. I climbed up into the clouds and gained 2000+ feet and the temperature dropped rapidly and it was about 60° by the time I reached the top.

The trail passes through thick forest of kukui, guava, ohi'a and ferns.

Amazing views of some valleys and waterfalls of West Maui a couple thousand feet below.

The sun rising over Haleakala.

The trail winds along a 20 foot wide ridge and drops off steeply on each side.

Some of the terrain looked positively Alaskan. This damp section was foggy, had evergreen trees and standing water on the trail. It was like something out of Southeast Alaska.

The top of the trail was a dead end with steep drop-offs on all sides. Thick fog prevented me from seeing how steep it really was but I've been up some of the valleys before and seen that much of the terrain is close to vertical. Great run up in the mountains with surfing just a few miles away.

1997 Race Info and Race History

2011-09-14T07:43:00.002-08:00

I got the following article from Roman Dial's archives. After scanning it and doing some digital gymnastics, it cleans up nicely. Claire Holland penned it after completing the 1997 Wilderness Classic. It has some great history of some of the earlier races that I haven't seen anywhere else. Thank you again to Roman Dial for saving all this great material.

Claire Holland - 1997
I saw the dimpled river current straight ahead, but I misjudged-I thought we could clear it. By the time I'd realized my mistake it was too late. We hit the rock squarely and the 3 pound inflatable raft flipped, spilling its contents, including Angelicka and me, into the Fox River. Now Angelicka was wrapped inside my sleeping bag and a blazing fire of logjam wood warmed us both. As veteran wilderness racer Roman Dial once quipped "ln the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic it only takes seconds to switch from race mode to survival mode."

Indeed, Angelicka and I had managed to stay in race mode for most of the 1997 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic (AMWC) which traversed the Kenai Peninsula from north to south, starting in Hope and finishing in Homer. Only four days before our Fox River dunking we had joined 25 other racers at the starting line on Hope's main street. After flipping the raft, Angelicka and I emerged from the frigid Fox River in the initial stages of hypothermia. Once warmed we would return to race mode, running the Fox in my Sherpa pack raft, and angling towards the race's finish line at the end of the Homer Spit.

Each year since 1981 participants in the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic (AMWC) have met in end of the road places like Nabesna, Hope and Mentasta Lake to compete in this obscure wilderness race. Every three years the start and finish points change in order to prevent race veterans from monopolizing on their extensive knowledge of the course. Racers may connect the start and finish points in any manner they choose as long as they use only foot or paddle power and they stay off of Alaska's road system. Total distance of the race varies from route to route but averages around 150 miles. The AMWC is a loosely organized event and has only a few simple rules. Racers must carryall the food and gear they will need for the entire race. They may accept food and aid along the way from only their fellow racers. As the most current race information packet explains: "There will be no people to check up on anybody. There will be no trail sweep. This is a wilderness race. Come prepared for the wilderness on its terms."

The AMWC is so challenging and remote that the pool of competitors tends to simply self select. Would-be racers must evaluate both their repertoire of backcountry skills and their ability to deal with the inherent dangers of the AMWC: wildlife encounters, fording glacial streams and rivers and floating the same in tiny inflatable pack-rafts, changing weather conditions and the vastness and wildness of the country through which the racers travel. To race safe, participants must also know when to switch between race mode and survival mode. In its 17-year history the AMWC has seen many close calls, few serious injuries and no fatalities. As Adrian Crane, the first non-Alaskan to take first place in the AMWC said after the 1990 race, "It's a challenge at whatever pace you do it."

The AMWC's starting line has never been crowded. The 1984 race, which attracted 35 to the starting line, holds the record for the highest turnout while, with only eleven starters, the 1986 race hosted the smallest turnout to date. Over the race's 17-year history, the average ratio of starters to finishers is around 10 to 6.

Some race observers have concluded that AMWC participants are slightly unhinged. As a veteran of six Classics, however, I take exception to that theory. What I've learned my fellow racers and I share in common is not lunacy but an unyielding desire to test our mettle via the challenge of lean, efficient wilderness travel. The achievement in doing the race is simply to finish it. And for some of us, the race becomes a yearly ritual, another event to add to the family calendar along with salmon runs, hunting trips and springtime skiing.

For some racers, like three-time winner Hank Timm, the AMwe is just a sped-up version of their lifestyle. Timm, who with his wife and family settled on 22 acres of remote land near the Robertson River in 1981, was the first of only two finishers in the 1985 AMWC. The 1985 race marked the first year the race moved from its inaugural Hope to Homer route; racers traced their own line between Mentasta Lake and McKinley Park and at 235 miles the route is the longest ever undertaken in the race's history. Timm meticulously studied the route, sorted and selected gear and relied on the skills and strength he'd gained from trapping, hunting, log-building and exploring his home territory in the Robertson River country. Though 14 competitors lined up at Mentasta in 1985 only Timm and second place finisher Tim Cory completed the course.

The 1986 race marked the first time that accomplished endurance athletes from the lower 48 participated. They were Tom Possert, who at the time held the country's record for travelling the most miles by foot in 24 hours and Adrian Crane who once ran across the entire Himalaya Mountain Range. Though both Possert and Crane lacked the bush savvy and wilderness skills of the Alaskan racers, they managed to finish their first Classic in third place. Timm, meanwhile, easily won his second race, knocking two days from his 1985 time.

Timm logged his third race victory in 1987, when his presence at the start was an incongruous sight. He and partner Randy Pitney straddled mountain bikes, each carrying half of a 16-foot folding canoe on their backs. Timm's totally unorthodox plan was to bike the old Tok Trail (which is not part of the state's highway system) to the Tok River, then paddle the Tok River to the Tanana River and take out 450 miles downstream in Nenana. From Nenana, Timm and Pitney planned to switch back to their bikes and follow the railroad bed into McKinley Park. Though this route more than doubled the total mileage of the standard 235-mile route, Timm and Pitney not only won the race, but finished in just over four and a half days. After the 1987 race, rules were changed to prohibit the use of mountain bikes.

In 1988 the race route switched again, this time from Nabesna to McCarthy. The 1988 race yielded the Classic's second three-time winner when Roman Dial, who won in 1982 and 1983, handily beat an extremely competitive field that included Timm. Possert, Crane and Dave Manzer, the perennial second-place finisher who still holds the course record of 3 % days for the Hope to Homer race. Dial, a biology professor at Alaska Pacific University, has been called "Alaska's best all¬terrain vehicle." He's travelled Alaska's most remote and rugged terrain in a fashion similar to the AMWC: quick and lean. Recently Dial completed a mountain bike traverse of the entire Alaska Range, a distance of over 700 miles.

The next three-time winner cut his wilderness racing teeth in the 1988 race, when he put in one of the best showings by a rookie racer. Alaskan born and bred Brant McGee exhibits a race style toughened by his stint as a front-line medic in the Vietnam War as well as by a lifetime of travelling Alaska's backcountry on hunting trips and expeditions. McGee won the 1990 Nabesna to McCarthy race and the 1991 and 1992 Classics, when the course was moved to the Brooks Range. For McGee, who's been at the starting line for seven races, part of the race's ongoing appeal is that it is a challenge few people can or choose to do.

Though he's never won a Wilderness Classic, Dick Griffith is no less a legend than any of these multiple winners. White-haired and sporting the best pair of calf muscles this side of the Himalayas, the 72-year old Griffith has completed 14 Classics. He is universally recognized as the father of the pack raft strategy. At the Skilak River crossing between Hope and Homer in 1982, Roman Dial, race founder George Ripley and Dave Manzer were pacing up and down the riverbank like nervous dogs, looking for a safe place to cross when Griffith arrived and calmly extracted a small nylon bundle from his pack. He blew up his 3 lb. Sherpa pack raft and left the other three racers to ponder their chilly swim. Later in the race the raft allowed Griffith to avoid a nasty bushwhack along the Fox River. He instead floated the logjam-choked river, giving his feet a much-needed break, and arrived at the finish only 4 hours behind Dial.

Griffith, whose tough exterior only partially conceals a genuinely kind and thoughtful nature usually ends up unofficially sweeping the race route. Utilizing a steady, strong pace he eventually catches up with the walking wounded and sometimes disoriented stragglers. He is most proud of the number of women racers he has accompanied, starting with Kathy Sarns and Diane Catsam, who traveled with him from Hope and Homer in 1984 and were the first two women to successfully compete in the AMWC. One year Griffith loudly complained that race rules concerning outside help were too restrictive. He had been forced to forego bush etiquette by turning down a cup of coffee offered by a miner along the race route. Race rules were thus amended and now read: "No racer under 60 years old may receive anything from non-race participants."

One more racer has managed to log a trio of victories in the AMWC. As Griffith wrote in his summary of the 1993 Brooks Range race: "Gordy Vernon was delirious, disoriented and last in the 1991 race. Gordy was delirious, disoriented and last in the 1992. And Gordy was delirious, disoriented and FIRST in the 1993 race. How do you explain that?" Vernon did, in fact, spend most of the 1991 and 1992 races lost in the Brooks Range. His route-finding obviously improved, however, since besides his 1993 Brooks Range win he went on to win the 1997 Hope to Homer race with rookie Thai Verzone and completed a solo win on the same course in 1998. Vernon penned the best first hand account of the race in his 1991 essay titled "Crazed Souls, Raw Feet" in which he described his first AMWC experience, when he followed Dick Griffith from Nabesna to McCarthy. Goaded by Dick and Dick's son Barney, Vernon ran the last eight miles into McCarthy in order to take third place by passing Rich Irvin and Will Sherman just a few feet from the finish line at the McCarthy lodge. This is one of the closest finishes ever in the race's history.

I entered the 1997 AMWC alongside my friend Angelicka Castaneda, a 53-year old triathlete from southern California. Our Fox River swim was the closest to survival mode we knowingly came the whole race. We covered nearly a third of the course in the first day, following the well-maintained Resurrection trail from Hope to the Sterling Highway. Once we left the ease of the trail at Russian Lakes. however, our pace slowed abruptly. We made our way south through Confusion Hills, along the Skilak glacier and overland to the 2000-foot Killey River canyon. We crawled out of the canyon and up to the alpine country at the headwaters of the Funny River and then down to Tustemena Lake. From Tustemena we navigated through a beetle-killed spruce forest and came out on the Fox River where we blew up my raft and floated to the head of Kachemak Bay. The final portion of our route followed the Kachemak Bay shoreline for 25 miles. When we finished at the Road's End Resort in third place at 2:00AM, five and a half days after we left Hope, the only person in sight was the resort's night clerk. We signed a finish log we found hanging on a bulletin board and crawled into the back of Dick Griffith's pickup truck. While Angelicka fell asleep immediately I sipped one of Dick's beers and contemplated the after effects I knew were forthcoming. By morning my feet would be tender and swollen and my joints numb. Scratches and bruises I'd sustained bushwhacking through alder thickets would color my body in shades of purple, blue and yellow. Though my body will always bear accurate witness to the abuse of wilderness racing, I know from experience that it will take more than pain and discomfort to keep me from the starting line of another Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic.
As Gordy Vernon so aptly said at the end of the 1997 race: "The first year you do it for your ego. The second year you do it because you know you can do better. By the third, it's just that time of year."

2002 Pictures Part Five

2011-08-19T10:27:00.001-08:00

Part Five of the picture montage from 2002 Nabesna to McCarthy race.

Upper Goat Trail.

We finally reached the bottom of the valley. Getting ready to float the Chitistone.

Still alive and walking in McCarthy.

More 2011 Race Info

2011-08-13T10:35:00.002-08:00

You can read Dave Chenault's blog post about this year's race HERE. Dave and Paige Brady came in second place with great speed and style. Dave's blog report is well written and his blog is always a great read. Thanks Dave and congratulations on a nice race!

Also, Tyler Johnson has some excellent photos of this year's race that he took enroute to winning the race with Luc Mehl, Todd Kasteler and John Sykes. Check out Tyler's pictures on his Picasa album HERE.

2011 Race Guest Posts

2011-08-08T14:42:00.001-08:00

It sounds like there are a lot of great stories from this year's race. If anyone would like to write a guest post about their race experience or about the race in general feel free to email me at tradingupnorth at yahoo.com.

I hope everyone is recovering well.

2011 Final Race Results

2011-07-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

Here is a report from race director Michael Martin who has volunteered as race director for many years. Thank you to Michael who finished the race this year with a torn meniscus! Congratulations to John Lapkass who now holds the record for the most finishes at eighteen. John finished the race this year with a broken arm! Congratulations to everyone who ran the race this year.

Race Report

The 30^th annual Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, in a slight break from tradition for the third year of this 3-year cycle changed the route somewhat more than usual, with a new start. Rather than the Gerstle River crossing of Hwy 2, the start took place as it did in the ’94-’96 series at the Black Rapid Lodge on the Richardson Highway. This change eliminated the Granite Mountains crossing from the Gerstle River crossing to the Donnelly Wayside, and resulted in a route of approximately 150 miles for the majority of racers using routes which connected the Delta, Wood and Yanert rivers.

This change was made due to popular request from the majority of racers from the first 2 years and suggestions from other “stakeholders” to make the route more “accomplishable”, but still challenging. In addition, the segment from the Gerstle River crossing to the Donnelly wayside was deemed “pretty much done”, and the really exciting and beautiful sections are predominately in the segment from Black Rapids to McKinley Village anyway.

Nineteen racers assembled at the Black Rapids Lodge on the morning of Sunday, July 17^th at 9:30 for a final pre-race information session by race director (and veteran of 14 Classics) Michael Martin. Racers were treated to a pre-race dinner the night before at the beautiful Black Rapids Lodge where AMWC veterans shared stories with the many rookies, and everyone compared strategies and racing tips.

The morning of the 17^th was somewhat overcast, but warm, and provided ideal weather conditions for wilderness racing. Most groups and individuals headed out for the “standard” route, starting with a float on the Delta downstream to McGuiness Creek where racers left the river and headed cross-country for a crossing of the Trident Glacier and on to crossings of the Hayes and Gillam glaciers, a walk or float of the Wood River and a final float of the Yanert River to a Moose Creek takeout near McKinley Village and the finish.

Unfortunately, by Sunday night, the weather had deteriorated significantly, and some serious rain and snow were blowing through the several high pass crossings needed to travel between rivers. The weather did improve starting Wednesday, allowing people to dry out.

Michael Martin and John Lapkass ran into each other on the third day (Wednesday) and traveled together from then on. This is remarkable for several reasons. One is that this is the 3^rd time that they have run into each other in the middle of absolutely nowhere during an AMWC days into a race, and then traveled together.

Another is this:

I was honored to have walked across the finish line to the 30^th AMWC with John as he eclipsed the record of most finishes of an AMWC previously held by wilderness travel and AMWC legend Dick Griffith. Griffith had completed 17 AMWC’s, and John has now completed 18. I, on the other hand, although holding the record for having been race director or co-director for most races, also hold the record for most DNF’s (did not finish). So, the record holders for both Most Finishes and Most Did-Not-Finishes crossed the line together this year.

John and I both used the “standard” route, although we did not come across each other until the third day.

I was the oldest racer at 58 (Michael). John Sykes was the youngest at 22.

Lapkass and Martin finished the race despite seemingly insurmountable odds including a severe forearm injury in Lapkass on day two and a torn knee meniscus on the third day in Martin.

We talked a lot over our 3 days together about how pain is all in your mind, and if you can just ignore it, you can go on. (more difficult to ignore that your knee keeps making crunching sounds or that you can’t hold a paddle very well with a forearm that’s twice it’s usual size.)

OFFICIAL RACE RESULTS:

Place Name(s) Time (days, hours, minutes)

1 Tyler Johnson 2d, 15h, 46m

Todd Kasteler

Luc Mehl

John Sykes

2 Paige Brady 3d, 12h, 20m

Dave Chenault

3 Don Moden 4d, 5h, 43m

Chris Wood

4 Rob Kehrer 4d, 11h, 50m

Greg Mills

5 Mark Carr 4d, 21h, 50m

Ken Seavey

6 Bill Cenna 5d, 0h, 5m

7 Jason Ruiz 5d, 21h, 55m

2011 Race Report from Winner Luc Mehl

2011-07-24T10:43:00.000-08:00

Check out this race write-up from Luc Mehl who won this year's race with three other guys. Luc has some great pictures on his blog of this year's race and a lot of other adventures too. Here's a link. Luc Mehl's blog.

2011 Race Write-up - Copied with permission from Luc's blog:

The 2011 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic didn’t fail to deliver. I partnered with John Sykes, my companion on spring trips to Sanford and Carpathian. We went as ‘independent nations’ with Tyler Johnson and Todd Kasteler, meaning that both pairs were self-sufficient in case anything went wrong or our paces didn’t match. Our team was well-suited for this semi-technical route; John and I were on Denali this May/June, Todd and Tyler were on Dhaulagiri (8167m, Nepal) in April/May.

Several old friends attended the race this year, including fan-favorite ‘ultra-heavy’ Rob Kehrer, who is basically my nemesis, and John Lapkis, who would hold the record for most finished courses upon reaching McKinley Village. Rob teamed up with Greg from Sleeping Lady Brewing Company, who tried to convince everyone that the first beer or two hydrates better than water.

It was also fun to start with friends nervous and excited for their first classic. Besides John Sykes, Dave Chenault from Kalispell and Paige Brady from Anchorage were ready for the suffer-fest. Notably missing from the race where Chris and Bobby, which meant that a victory was possible. Traveling the shortest route and teaming up with Tyler and Todd, both previous winners, made me more optimistic about winning than I’d dared before.

John and I practiced ‘Kama Sutra Packrafting’ in Goose Lake to see if we could share one boat and reduce the weight in our packs. I’d paddled some miles with a 120-pounder sitting up front, but John’s 6’4″ frame didn’t fit quite as well. We used the ‘beast with two backs’ position to get across the Delta River, but switched to ‘Luge’ for the Yanert. Todd and Tyler swam instantly in the Delta, tried a second time, and then Tyler ran back to the start to grab his boat and paddle.

We started with 25 pound packs that included a 30m rope, crampons, ice screw, limited hardware, and 7 lbs of food.

We had an incredible team dynamic. Everyone stepped up to take lead and set the pace at different stages of the course. I was very confident about John’s crevasse navigation skills after we skied down Sanford in the dark, so I let him know we were expecting him to be on lead through the crux field of crevasses. Despite having slept 20 minutes in ~48 hours, John stayed alert and led us through hundreds of crevasses hidden by blowing snow and a fresh foot on the ground. Cumulatively we had 36 crevasse breaches, but never anything that we couldn’t pull ourselves out of.

It was too cold to sleep for more than a few minutes; no one got more than 30 minutes of sleep during the 64 hours on the course. I had a really strong sense of deja vu while navigating the Yanert Glacier and moraine. I kept thinking, “I’ve done this before… we just need to keep moving down glacier, it doesn’t help to stop and evaluate each route option… where did I do this? Was I with Tyler? John? When did I pick through a moraine and then packraft?” I replayed all the glacier trips I’ve done and couldn’t find a match. I told Todd about it and he said, “Weird. Tyler just told me the same thing.”

Floating the Yanert was really cold for John and I. We flipped the raft 3 times despite the stability of the luge position. We stopped three times and Tyler and Todd had a fires roaring to warm us up. On the 8 mile ATV trail exit we were moving fast, but even so I wasn’t able to generate enough heat to warm up. I didn’t get warm until we got to Anne Beaulaurier’s empty cabin conveniently located 1/4 mile from the finish. We cranked up the electric and wood stoves, and found Missy Smith’s chili waiting for us in a slow cooker. Unbelievable!

The victory was really meaningful for all of us: the third victory on three different courses for Tyler, consecutive wins for Todd, youngest winner for John (22 years old), and winter-summer victories in the same year for me. We were so thrilled! And a bit loopy…

Thanks to Black Rapids Lodge, Anne, and Missy for the hospitality, and especially Michael Martin for organizing the race!

2011 Race News Article

2011-07-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

The Fairbanks Daily New-Miner put out an article yesterday about this year's race.

Check it out here. News-Miner Article

More 2011 Winners

2011-07-21T14:11:00.000-08:00

Slight correction to the last post. The winning group included Tyler Johnson and Todd Kasteler as I mentioned before but also Luc Mehl and Jon Sykes. The group of four finished in 2 days 15 hours and took a route that included a lot of glacier travel and a 6700 foot pass. The four roped together for safety on the Yanert glacier and broke-through snow bridges on more than thirty crevasses. Hypothermia, flipped rafts and lots of close calls added up to a great race. Hopefully I'll get more information for you soon. Also,there should be an article coming out in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner in the next day or two.

2011 Winners

2011-07-20T20:57:00.000-08:00

Tyler Johnson and Todd Kasteler came across the finish line earlier today and won the 2011 Wilderness Classic. The journey sounds epic with lots of snow and abysmal weather. That's all the information I have now but I'll have more details soon.

No news yet.

2011-07-19T23:23:00.000-08:00

Well, the 2011 Wilderness Classic racers have been underway for three days now. There is no news yet on anyone finishing or dropping out but you'll be the first to know once I do. The course is a bit shorter this year so it's possible someone could come in within the next day or so to the finish line. I'll keep you posted.

Good luck 2011 Racers!

2011-07-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

Good luck to everyone running the race this year. Make wise decisions and enjoy the experience.

FYI: The course has changed a bit from last year. The race will start at the Black Rapids Lodge instead of at the Gerstle River.

Here are some last minute updates from the race director Michael Martin.

Alpacka Rafts has donated an Alpacka raft as a prize. All the entrants to the race are eligible and the winner will be drawn after the race. Just a note, Alpacka is the go-to place if you do any packrafting at all. Here is a link to there website. http://alpackaraft.com/

If you need a ride to the starting line, contact Michael Martin. He has room to take 10 or 12 people. Also, don't forget about the pre-race party at Dick Griffith's house Friday evening. This party is a great place to meet other racers and check out the competition. A lot of newbies find this gathering intimidating because the collection of raw talent that shows up is amazing. Most experienced racers are understated but then you start talking with them and realize they've done endurance training in the last month that would put Ironman triathletes to shame. Combined with a Grizzly Adams knowledge of the wilderness makes for some very interesting people.

There will be a pasta dinner at the Black Rapids Lodge on Saturday the 16th for all racers and others. Racers will be paid for, others will need to pay for themselves. Dinner starts at 7 p.m. at the Lodge.

Race Tips - Inflammation

2011-07-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

I think I responded to everyone who asked me for information or an application for this year's race but if you did not get a return email, please email again. There were a lot this year so I may have overlooked someone.

Inflammation plays a key role in the race. Ankles and feet always take the worst of the race and you’ll need to reduce the inflammation if you want to finish the race. I strongly advise against using NSAID anti-inflammatories. These are the non-steroidal over the counter type of pharmacy products like ibuprofen and Motrin that you should avoid like the plague. NSAID’s place an extra load on your kidneys and liver at a time when your body is already going to be extremely stressed. Combining NSAID’s and exercise is always a bad idea but this is particularly true on the Classic where you will be constantly dehydrated for several days in a row. You can cause serious and permanent organ damage if you take too many NSAID’s while dehydrated.

You will need some sort of anti-inflammatory agent to help you through to the finish line. Some people resort to prescription anti-inflammatories or a prescription steroid to reduce the inflammation. You can also try herbals such as Cat’s Claw but herbal remedies take a lot of personal testing to see what works for you specifically. Vitamin C and Vitamin D have anti-inflammatory properties and also function as anti-oxidants so you should take both of these but they may not be strong enough for the purposes of the Classic.

What you shouldn’t do is start the race without any anti-inflammatory in your pack. If you don’t have anything else, take enough ibuprofen so you can take two every four hours of the race. After you calculate how many that will be, add another two full day’s worth of doses. So if you think you can finish the race in four days, you should pack enough ibuprofen so you can to two every four hours for six full days. There’s nothing worse than having too few and besides it can be dangerous if your ankles are so swollen that you can’t walk.

One of the best things you can do during the race to reduce inflammation is to drink water. This will reduce the edema and flush your kidneys. You’ll also feel better overall and stay warmer. Speaking of water, drink it where you can find it. Moving, silty, glacial water is probably the best because harmful bacteria don’t grow very well in it. This is handy because you can just dip your water bottle into the river as you float down it in your packraft. Drink enough so that your pee is clear and so you have to pee about once every hour or so. You won’t waste time stopping to pee because you should master the art of walking while you pee. All these tips should be second nature to you if you’re running the Classic but they are still good reminders. Be proactive with inflammation to keep it under control.

Handicapping 2011

2011-07-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

Attempting to handicap the Wilderness Classic is probably a futile exercise because there are so many variables but it's always fun to gauge what the field is shaping up to be like. It appears that Chris Robertson and Bobby Schnell will not be running the race this year. This is huge news because they have dominated the Classic for the last decade or so. Usually running as a team, Chris and Bobby have racked up an impressive number of wins and consistently high placed finishes over three different routes.

Todd Kasteler is a favorite to do great things this year. Todd finished strong last year in first place along with Chris, Bobby and Dan Powers.

Over the years, applicants numbers for the Classic have waxed and waned. This year the numbers seem to be waxing. Given the interest from newcomers in the race this year, there is bound to be a significant number of newcomers to the race.

With a strong previous winner who is familiar with the course, two past winners not running this year and a potentially large number of rookies, this year's race is adding up to be an interesting one. There are so many uncertainties in the Classic though, anything could happen. More than once a "rookie" has burst onto the scene and obliterated the field. Or a past winner come out of the woodwork and decide it's time to brush off the ol' packraft again. Potentials for this are Roman Dial, Andrew Skurka, or Gordy Vernon.

The Classic is never boring and this year is shaping up to have plenty of excitement. If you're running the race this year, good luck and be safe. Stay tuned for updates as I get them.

2011 Race Prep

2011-06-24T23:45:00.000-08:00

With the Classic just a few weeks away, if you are planning to do the race, you should be mostly prepared by now. Your physical training should be done and you should rest as much as possible the last couple weeks. Short runs and hikes and very mild exercise should be your goal. Aim for as little stress as possible.

I’m not the race director so I don’t know the exact number of entries but based on the number of requests for information I’ve received, it looks there are an unprecedented number of rookies that are interested.

Use the remaining couple of weeks before the race to prepare yourself mentally. The anticipation is bound to be intense but you can use and direct the nervous anxiety to prepare yourself. Accept who you are and where you are at this point in your life. Center yourself. This may sound a little dramatic and new age-ish but if you don’t think about it now, you will in the middle of the race as doubts fill your mind and you question why you started. There’s nothing like a hundred or so miles of true wilderness to amplify your personality flaws.

Anyway, back to centering yourself. Meditation, yoga and tai chi are all excellent ways to center your mind and keep your body limber. Spend part of your meditation time clearing and slowing your mind by focusing only on your breathing. The rest of the time visualize yourself in the race overcoming difficulties. It’s most helpful to imagine the feelings and emotions you will encounter. For example: imagine how cold and tired you will be and the despair that comes along with it. Then spend several minutes feeling how satisfied, competent and proud you are when you continue hiking through the cold, exhaustion and feelings of hopelessness.

Most of all visualize yourself as confident, competent and making intelligent, safe choices. You don't have anything to prove, just enjoy the experience and the journey.

2011 Hot Springs Race

2011-06-11T10:00:00.003-08:00

Thank you to spruceboy who originally posted the results of the Hot Springs 100 in a comment. Here are the results again along with a couple links to some news articles about the race. Congratulations to everyone who did the race!

News Miner Article 1

News Miner Article 2

Traveling entirely overland from Chena Hot Springs to Circle Hot Springs,

Gerry Hovda's time of 21hours and 13 minutes broke the old record of 23:35.

The river was very low, the paddlers couldn't catch him.

21 hours: 13 minutes Gerry Hovda “Wildermeister”

23:30 James Binkley, Jeff Levison, Peter Calvin

24:23 Andrew Harrington, Bob Gillis

28:16 Mark Ross

28:28 Tom Moran, Jay Cable

31:30 Mike Roylance, Jeff Garrder

32:18 Scott Jerome, Joel Pierson

34:15 Ed Plumb, Mark Plumb

35:07 Joe Meyer, Jason Reppert

40:26 Ryan Clairmont, Matt Rogers

41:08 Riley Troyer

41:41 Eric Troyer

51:45 Andrew Bishop, Zachary Keskinen

51:53 Dan Bishop, Wayne Livingston

2002 Pictures Part Four

2011-06-05T10:16:00.000-08:00

Hiking difficult moraine past dark.

Early morning after a couple hours of sleep on the ground. Removable blow-up seats from Alpacka rafts make great pillows.

The joy of navigating unstable moraine on brutalized ankles is difficult to describe.

Hiking along a glacial lake near Skolai Pass.

This picture shows the rest of the lake we need to circumvent. To get an idea of the scale of the place, notice the person standing next to the water on a small outcrop of rock. The mountain pass in the middle of the picture, just to the lower left of the snow, is the beginning of the Goat Trail. The pass is several miles away, about 2000 feet higher in elevation, and across a good sized, waist deep glacial river.

Crossing the river.

On top of the pass with the lake and river in the background.

The origins of the Chitistone River and the beginning of the Goat Trail.

2011 Hot Springs Race

2011-05-21T23:43:00.000-08:00

For those of you looking for a great pre-Classic race here is a great one near Fairbanks. The pre-race meeting is in just a few days so hopefully your schedule is flexible and can accommodate a last minute race.

Here is the press-release:

Hot Springs--AlaskAcross MEETING, May 24, 7pm at beaver sports

please attend

Cost:

--the price you pay is out there in the country

Rules:

-- a code of conduct is understood:

no pack animals(except yourself), no caches of gear,

carry all gear from start to finish, no sabotage

AlaskAcross is for those experienced with raw wilderness travel.

There are no marked trails or directional markers. This is wild country. The event is difficult and hazardous even when conditions are best. You will be entirely on your own in a remote region of Alaska .

No help will be available. No rescue can be anticipated. The appropriate knowledge of wilderness orienteering, bears and other animal hazards, crossing and paddling rivers, illness, injury, gear failure or loss, self- rescue, bad weather, hypothermia, frostbite, extremely difficult terrain, and the like must have been acquired before entering this event.

2011 Race

2011-05-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

The 2011 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic applications are out and available. The race this year will start on July 17th. After two years of starting the race at Gerstle River, it's possible that the race this year will start from Black Rapids. Severe weather last year as well as the lengthy route made for a potentially dangerous situation. Starting the race at Black Rapids would make the race shorter and people would be more likely to finish. If you need an application send me an email and I'll make sure you get one.

2002 Pictures Part Three

2011-04-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

Finally getting close to the Solo Mountain cabin.

Taking a quick break on the warm, summer tundra about 100 miles into the race.

Traveling over moraine with glacial ice in the background.

A brief minute of late day sunshine after crossing Flood Creek.

2002 Pictures Part Two

2011-03-13T16:58:00.000-08:00

Continuing up into the Cooper Creek drainage with a heavy snowstorm poised to hit.

We made it to the pass in a whiteout blizzard. Wearing enough clothes for a day hike and light trail running shoes, the three feet of snow was a challenge. After a brief evaluation of our situation, we vowed that we were not going to stop moving until we were below the snow line. Given our lack of shelter and winter clothes, if we did stop, we would have been in a fairly serious situation. This picture is near the top of the pass next to a frozen lake.

We made it below the snow line but still 5 miles short of Chisana the first night. The next day we spent a little time drying our gear out on the Chisana airstrip. About half of the people in the race, including the majority of the front-runners dropped out of the race in Chisana.

More ankle busting terrain while ascending up into the Geohenda drainage.

Feeling the hurt.

Pictures from 2002

2011-02-10T09:03:00.000-09:00

2002 was the year of the legendary July snowstorm. You can read the details in earlier posts. Check out some more pictures from that year that I haven't posted before.

The obligatory pre-race photo in Nabesna just a couple minutes before the race began. The temperature was in the low 40's and it was raining steadily. The first section of running water to float is just five miles down the trail from the start so several people have saved time by blowing up their packrafts in advance.

The racers taking off down the initial trail from the starting line. Everything was soaking wet after pouring rain all night and the trail was boggy. The first five miles was relatively easy going though compared to terrain later in the race.

Floating the Nabesna River. The weather hadn't improved much at all by the time we started floating. The low light made it difficult to find the Cooper Creek takeout on the opposite bank. If you look carefully, you can see someone floating in the distance in the center of the picture.

After the hypothermic float in the Nabesna River, we set a strong pace up Cooper Creek to warm up. This picture is taken a good distance up the Cooper Creek drainage. The temperature is dropping steadily, the rain is turning into sleet and we can see the snow in the background on the hills. Adrenaline is still running extremely high even several hours into the race. Typical strategy is to walk through the stream in a straight line up the drainage to save time and distance. Getting wet doesn't matter because you're already soaked anyway.

Political Tangles

2010-12-28T05:36:00.000-09:00

Here's a taste of some of the political wrangling that happened between race directors and bureaucrats when the race was very young. Ultimately, like any good Wilderness Classic race, perseverance paid off and the race survived.

Navigation

2010-12-01T12:10:00.001-09:00

Superb navigation expertise is critical for the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. Some people take along a GPS but if you do, you shouldn't rely on it too heavily. If you're stopping all the time to see how many feet you traveled in the last twelve minutes then you probably need to put it in your pack for a while and stop looking at it. A GPS can actually slow you down if you get mired in the minutia of the coordinates and routes.

Whether or not you take a GPS you definitely need a compass and a map. Most racers spend the months before the race poring over maps and figuring out which route is the fastest. By the time you start the race you should have studied the terrain and the vegetation of your route and considered what it will look like when you're there in person. Everything in Alaska is big so imagine the landmarks looking much larger in person than they seem to be on a map.

I have used a combination wrist altimeter and compass for past races and it's worked very well for me. Suunto makes great altimeters and it's the brand that most serious mountain climbers use. Read some reviews and buy what you think will work best for you. Here's the one I use.

1981 Original Race Info Packet from George Ripley

2010-11-27T07:52:00.000-09:00

Here's the original race packet sent out to people interested in the Classic. It's interesting to see that a lot of well known Alaskan names were in on this race from the beginning. Vern Tejas, Brian Okonak, Steve Hackett, Harry Johnson and others were all involved.

1982 Race Info Sheet

2010-10-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

Check out this original race information sheet from way back in The Day. The sheet was written by George Ripley who conceived the Wilderness Classic Race some thirty years ago. Part of the sheet mentions the first annual Pioneer Classic but it also says it's the 2nd annual race on the first page. I assume this is probably from the second race in 1982 and George included the information sheet from the previous year for reference.

Look at the suggested gear checklist which includes a .22 pistol and fishing hook to help gather food along the way.

1989 Race Report - Nabesna to McCarthy

2010-09-25T20:34:00.000-08:00

This is the official post-race write-up of the 1989 Wilderness Classic. Even though this race report covers some of the same information that I've already posted before in slightly different forms, this is the first time I've posted the actual race report.

It's worth overlapping some of the same information anyway for 1988 and 1989 because these two races have it all. The strategy, persistence, and flat out audacity in these two years are what the Classic is all about. Combine all of this with one of the best race courses ever run and survival through wit, strength and pure luck and you've got a true world class adventure. The images might come up small but you should be able to click on them to zoom in. Enjoy.

Caffeine

2010-09-17T18:47:00.000-08:00

Most Wilderness Classic racers use caffeine in one form or another during the race. Even though it's widely used, you can still get an advantage with caffeine with a little planning. The results of studies vary on whether short term athletic performance is enhanced by caffeine but most of them point to caffeine helping the body burn fat during endurance events. Burning fat is key in the classic and other ultra-endurance races. It's also very useful for staying awake and can enhance moral as well.

A few weeks before the race, taper off your daily dose of caffeine and don't use it again until the race. The effects will last longer and be stronger if you haven't been using it every day. Wait until you think there's no chance you can walk another step in the race before you take your first dose. This is where caffeine will give you the greatest advantage. You'll be so hopped up on adrenaline the first twelve hours of the race, caffeine won't give you much more help.

When everyone else is laying down on the ground for a doze and you're still staggering along making distance, you can several miles on your competitors. An average pace of two miles an hour is decent in the Wilderness Classic so if you can keep going for an extra hour, that's two miles farther ahead you'll be.

Another important point to note is that caffeine is not the same in every form. That latte you buy every morning from the local drive-through stand is chock full of high-octane garbage caffeine that will give you a headache and just make you feel tired in a couple hours. It's also full of pesticides and fertilizers which won't do your body any favors. Caffeine pills are also made of cheap grade caffeine. They'll give you a good initial boost but the aftermath isn't pretty.

Buy some quality organic coffee and you'll feel much better and when it comes time to cut back or even stop drinking coffee altogether, the withdrawal symptoms will be much less painful. Kaladi Brothers in Anchorage has some great organic coffee that tastes great also. While I'm on the topic of healthy caffeine, typical drip coffee makers not only ruin the taste of good coffee but they also dump plastic into your coffee pot from the hot water and acidic coffee coming in contact with the plastic coffee maker. Use a stainless steel percolator or better yet, a fully stainless steel french press. You'll be amazed at the difference in taste and you'll avoid the pthalates and other estrogen mimicing chemical compounds that come from plastic that you really don't want to accumulate in your body.

Back to the topic at hand: boosting performance with caffeine. Here it is in a nutshell. Don't use caffeine for a month before your race. Use caffeine as late in the race as you can hold out. This will probably be about fifteen hours into the first day. Use a small amount and wait for it to start wearing off before you have some more. Overlapping caffeine doses just wastes good stimulant affect. A good way to use caffeine in a race is coffee beans. One small bean goes a long way. Hold it in your mouth and suck on it for a little while.

Caffeine is a much more mild diuretic than most people think. However, it's still good to drink a little extra water to make sure it doesn't acidify your body too much when you're using it.

Remember it's the small advantages that make a successful race.

Pictures from 2001.

2010-09-08T08:42:00.000-08:00

Here are a few pictures from the 2001 Wilderness Classic. This race route started in Nabesna and finished in McCarthy.

The first picture is on the second section of boating on the Nabesna to McCarthy route on the Nabesna River. Check out the raft pictured here. It's likely a Curtis Designs raft which were the lightest and smallest rafts among several different types that racers used. At about 1.5 lbs, these rafts embodied the true spirit of light and fast travel through the wilderness. They were also dangerous for inexperienced rafters. These rafts were very durable but were also so small that most racers had to raft with their legs hanging over the edges in the water. This was great to chill and sooth swollen, abused ankles in the glacial water but also led to hypothermia and extreme anxiety in big water. Adding to the adventure, this was a time when almost nobody used life jackets. Sturdy Alpacka rafts are required gear now and most racers use some sort of life jacket.

This picture is approximately an hour into the Nabesna River float, about 10-15 miles into the race. The racer taking this picture is probably headed toward the bottom of the mountain in the background. This is where Cooper Creek enters the Nabesna River and where the next section of hiking begins. The cloudy, low light weather is typical. This is about where most racers begin questioning whether they should have started the race at all.

Donna Klecka and and the legendary Dick Griffith drying out their gear about 50 miles into the race at Chisana. The fastest racers try to make it to Chisana in one day of travel. Most racers arrive there on the second day. Chisana is one of those little Alaskan gold rush towns that time forgot. Only a handful of people live there in log cabins and the residents are more interesting than characters out of a pulp fiction novel. There is an airstrip here and this is the most common place for people to drop out of the race. After Chisana, opportunities for dropping out and getting a plane to fly you out are extremely limited. From Chisana to the finish line is about one hundred miles of rough, wild Alaskan terrain with some serious rafting required. Novices, neophytes and greenhorns need not apply.

Dick Griffith, the legend himself, finishing the race in McCarthy.

Life Analogies

2010-08-29T22:23:00.001-08:00

The Wilderness Classic is an amazing race not only for it's ability to challenge the human spirit and break the will of some of very strong people but also for it's never ending analogies to life. The last couple months has brought some astounding changes to my life. I feel like I've changed courses in the middle of the race and I'm digging in my pack for a new set of maps. Undoubtedly, I'll look back on this time period as pivotal. In a strange way, the timing is probably appropriate since I also just celebrated my 40th birthday a few days ago. Change is always difficult, however, change also brings opportunities.

Well enough introspection for now. What this all means for you is that this blog is going to change course just slightly. I think you'll like it. The main focus will still be the Wilderness Classic and all it's wonderful intricacies. However, instead of the occasional hike, climb and run in Alaska that I sometimes include, I'll be adding random adventures from Maui. I'll be spending a good portion of my time in the islands from here on out and it didn't take me long to find lots of adventures on the Valley Isle. With a little investigation I'm finding that Maui has at least as many opportunities for adrenaline junkies as Alaska. Feel free to email me if you need any information about adventures or anything else on Maui.

One thing I've learned writing this blog is to respect my readers so my apologies for the month long hiatus in posting. The reasons for this are varied and have to do with a missing laptop and the fact that getting internet service in Maui takes quite a bit longer than you might think. Chalk it up to "island time". The point is I should be able to post more regularly now. Stay tuned.

A few pictures from the 2001 race.

2010-07-30T22:25:00.001-08:00

I'm still traveling but I should be able to post more regularly soon. Here's a few pictures for you while you're waiting. These are from the 2001 Wilderness Classic which ran the Nabesna to McCarthy route.

This picture is of racers inflating their boats to float Jack Creek about five miles into the race. Jack Creek is slow and winding and has some small willow branches as sweepers. After a little ways, Jack Creek joins the Nabesna River which is fast and angry. The transition from Jack Creek to the Nabesna is sudden and severe and some people have ended their race at the sight of the tumolt.

Several racers near the start of the race. Probably just a couple miles from the start. Doug Woody on the left, Kevin Armstrong next and Gail Koepf on the far right. Apologies to the racers I don't recognize.

A sweet, ultralight camp setup for a good two hour night's sleep. Note the use of the raft as a sleeping platform/tent.

Traveling

2010-07-13T15:50:00.000-08:00

I'm traveling now so I can't post much but I'll have some great stuff in the near future. I still have all sorts of great material from past Wilderness Classics and I'll keep writing some training tips too. In the meantime, train hard and enjoy the fleeting Alaskan summer. Peace out.

Fairbanks Daily News Miner Article

2010-07-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

Here's an article about the 2010 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic race in the Fairbanks newspaper.

Rookie Racer from Fairbanks . . .

Also, take a look at this video by Luc Mehl about his Classic experience in this year's race.

Biking the Classic

2010 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic Race Report

2010-06-30T14:31:00.000-08:00

I'm posting the official 2010 race report below. It sounds like this year was a doozy. Really nasty hypothermia inducing weather forced the majority of the entrants to drop out. Eighteen people started the race and six people finished.

If you survived the race, congratulations on finishing or on making a wise choice to drop out. If you didn't do the race this year, you should probably be glad you didn't. Happy reading.

2010 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic Race Report

The problems began early for this year’s trouble-plagued Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. This year’s race, the 29th annual event, ran from the Gerstle river crossing of Highway 2 to McKinley Village, which is something like 120 miles away across the Alaska Range as the crow flies, and up to 180 miles depending on the route chosen. Even before the starting cry of “OK, let’s go!” on Sunday morning June 20th, problems began for race coordinator and racer Michael Martin when his partner (and son) awoke with fever and nausea, forcing a scratch only hours before the race. This left Martin scrambling to re-pack for a solo approach.

19 racers registered for this year’s event, including a higher than usual percentage of racers from outside. Racers came from Washington, Colorado, Utah and Florida. With one scratch at the start, 18 set out Sunday morning to navigate over or around the Granite Mountains between Highway 2 and the Donnelly Creek campground checkpoint on Highway 4. From there they would choose between any number of routes to reach McKinley Village.

As usual in the Classic, racers showed real creativity in routes and methods of travel chosen. The rules state that all travel must be self-contained and self-propelled. Racers are not allowed to add or leave anything once the race has begun. No help from non-racers. Luc Mehl and Eric Parsons had perhaps the most unusual approach, showing up with custom “tundra bikes” outfitted with a series of frame and other bags designed by pro-designer Eric (Revelate Designs®) which held their pack rafts, skis and other gear. They planned to ride the ATV trails around the Granite mountains, then ski (towing their gear and bikes in their inflated pack rafts), boat, ride and hike to the finish.

“Chunk” Bernard and partner Tyler Johnson planned a southerly route following the checkpoint at the Donnelley campground. They would walk south to Black Rapids, cross the Delta, ski up the Black Rapids glacier and follow a glacier route to the Nenana. They would then packraft the Nenana to the finish.

Most others chose to race along the north side of the range, crossing the Trident, Hayes and Gillam glaciers in various combinations and at various points. Most would float or walk the Wood river and float the Yannert, getting off before the Yannert enters a gorge near Denali Park, and walking into the finish near McKinley Village.

A team composed of 2009 Classic winners, Bobby Schnell and Chris Robertson was joined by Todd Kasteler. They planned to jog the first section to the checkpoint, and were accompanied by newcomer Danny Powers and the team of Chunk Bernard and Tyler Johnson, reaching the checkpoint in just over 13 hours. But the weather was not going to cooperate this year, and by the time even the fastest racers had reached the Donnelley checkpoint, most racers were hypothermic from sleet and rain, and many had been significantly slowed by fog and extremely wet conditions making travel across even good tundra “mushy”.

The “G Force” team of Jeff and Greg Gedney, joined by Floridian Jason Speigel found themselves overwhelmed by freezing rain and fog in the Granite mountains, not finding the Richardson Highway (and Donnelly checkpoint) for 36 hours. Speigel had a badly hurt knee by that time, and that combined with hypothermia caused the team to scratch at the checkpoint. Peter Calvin and partner Susannah Pratt originally made the checkpoint in good shape and crossed the Delta only to find that the weather was even further deteriorating in the high ground between the Delta and the Trident glacier, and returned to the Donnelley checkpoint where they left the race. In fact, by Monday evening 10 of the 18 starters had abandoned the race at or near the Donnelly Campground because of hypothermia, weather and/or injury. This included rookie Travis Carbough, who had made good time over the Granite mountains, but succumbed to the same weather challenges as many others.

Chunk Bernard and Tyler Johnson, having made it as far as Black Rapids on Monday, spent several hours evaluating the weather and making tough decisions about going on over the long glaciated route. They report that the peaks and glacier were completely socked in, and with regret, they also decided to drop out.

From the point of view of race director Martin, the language expressed in the AMWC application “Responsible racers will make timely decisions about whether to drop out or attempt to finish when difficulties present themselves….there is always another race.” is key at times like this. The Classic is perhaps the toughest cross-country race around, but it is meant to provide a challenge, not irreversible consequences. And in the 29 years of the race there has never been such a problem, largely due to the intelligent decisions of the participants at times like this.

The team of Rob Kehrer and Matt Reardon and solo racers John Lapkass and Michael Martin all eventually found their way to the Donnelley campground at various times on Monday, and began to consider whether to drop out or go on.

Each made a decision to spend the night at the checkpoint, assay the weather in the morning, and decide whether to continue. Because the weather seemed to be improving, all continued, crossing the Delta in the morning and heading for the high ground to cross the Trident. By this time, Martin’s original partner, Michael Peñuelas, was feeling better, and joined him for the second section.

In the meantime, the weather, although seemingly locally improving, continued to deteriorate, with thunderstorms, hail and sleet dogging the racers all along the route. The group of Bobby Schnell, Chris Robertson, Todd Kastener and Danny Powers, leading the remaining racers by a huge margin, themselves ended up hypothermic and needing an 11 hour layover in the mid-section of the second part of the course to warm up and regroup. Nevertheless, their finish time of 4 days and 48 minutes indicates that had the weather cooperated, they would have handily beat the record of 3 days, 17 hours and 54 minutes.

Martin and (at that point non-competitor) partner Peñuelas had the astonishing luck to film a wolverine crossing the center of the Trident moraine. They later scratched from a tiny airstrip on the Little Delta, realizing they would not make another exit point in a reasonable time, but were awed by the beauty and challenge of the route, and left the race in good shape. The same could not be said of veteran Classic racer John Lapkass of Anchorage, who suffered a medical emergency and was extracted by helicopter from the last-third section of the route, proving definitively the value of the required satellite phones for all racers. From his hospital bed, Lapkass expressed deep regret because he had been in great shape at that point, and poised for a satisfying finish at McKinley Village.

The only other finishers, sharing second place this year were Rob Kehrer and Matt Reardon, finishing in great shape (except for Matt’s impressively damaged feet) in a time of 6 days, 9 hours and 22 minutes.

According to Martin, who has participated in Classics since 1993, and served as race director for 5 of those years, this Classic was as “classic” as the race gets…a widely varied group of competitors, wildly imaginative routes, weather of every variety, and challenges at every step. This year also boasts the lowest finish ratio in memory, and emphasizes that this race is extremely tough and unpredictable, and that the objective hazard of the weather can make all the difference. According to Dick Griffith, holder of the record for the most Classic finishes, in reference to this years race, “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

2010 - No more info yet.

2010-06-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

I don't have any more recent race finishing info yet other than the comment someone posted this morning about Rob Kehrer and Matt Reardon finishing on Saturday night at 7:40 p.m.

By my count, that's six people who have finished the race and six people who have dropped out. That leaves potentially five people who are still on the course.

More info as soon as I get it.

2010 Preliminary Race Results

2010-06-25T08:43:00.000-08:00

Here's a quick update on The Race.

17 people started the race this year.

Chris Robertson, Bobby Schnell, Todd ?? and Dan Powers won the race.

Pete Calvin and Suzanne dropped out at Donnelly.

Luc Mehl and his travel partner dropped out at Donnelly with a broken bicycle.

Craig (Chunk) and his travel partner dropped out at Black Rapids.

As far as I know, Michael Martin and John Lapkass were still in the race.

That's all the info I have now. Updates as soon as I find out more.

No news of a winner yet and guest blog post.

2010-06-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

I haven't heard of a winner yet on the 2010 Wilderness Classic but it's probably about time someone came across the finish line. I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything.

On another note, I was recently invited to write a guest blog post about Alaska eBooks and Western Chugach Alpine Guide for 49 Writers - which is a well known blog for Alaskan authors. My guest post is being published today. Here's a link if you would like to check it out. Guest blog post.

2010 Race and Paddle to Seattle

2010-06-18T08:42:00.000-08:00

If you are doing the Classic this year, hopefully you are ready because it starts in just a couple days! Here are a couple of links to webcams and weather info at different places along the typical route.

Black Rapids
Maclaren Lodge
Cantwell

Also, you can now order your DVD of the Alaskan adventure film Paddle to Seattle on AlaskaeBooks.

Hot Springs 100 Race Results

2010-06-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

Here are the results from the 2010 Hot Springs 100 Race. You can also check out this article from the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. Clouds and Fog.

Mark Ross -- 25:50 (hr : min)

Gerry Hovda-- 26:20

Danny Powers/Eli Sturm-- 29:58

Drew Harrington/Steve Taylor/Brian Young-- 31:23

Jeff Wells/Jason Reppert-- 31:23

Steve Masterman/Sarah Masterman/Chip Vaughan--37:40

Ian Lleshi--- 40:30

Jeff Gaarder/Michael Roylance-- 41:06

Rourke Williams/Storm Williams-- 61:50

Training Tip - Alkalize

2010-06-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

Journey with me for a moment - it's 4:00 a.m. at some random Alaskan trailhead. Your car is the only one in the parking lot and there is a slight drizzle coming down out of the steel gray sky. It's 50° and it doesn't look like it going to get any warmer during the day. Despite the early hour and weather conditions that most people would consider miserable, you're amped up and ready to start down the trail for an eight hour run/hike.

If you're the type of person who gets excited about a morning like this then this training tip is for you.

The human body tries to maintain a specific pH. Everyone's pH is slightly different but most people's blood pH level hovers around 7.4. Many things throughout a typical day can cause your body to become more acidic. Fried food, air pollution, the PCB's you ate in that salmon you just caught out of Ship Creek, stress and anger can all make your body more acidic. If your body is too acidic, healing is delayed, carcinogens take their toll more readily and you age faster. Most importantly, you won't be able to run your ultramarathon as fast as could.

The good news is that you can do a number of things to alkalize your body and bring your pH levels back toward normal. Moderate exercise will alkalize but if you're reading this blog you're probably not into moderate exercise, which is probably considered something like a light twenty to thirty minute jog. Heavy exercise takes a toll on the human body and makes it more acidic.

This all brings me to my original point which is what you can do to recover from your eight hour high intensity run that you started at 4:00 a.m. At the end of the day, when you're dehydrated, completely spent and even laying down on the couch won't bring your heartrate back down to pre-run levels, alkalize your body. Meditate, do some yoga or tai chi, or watch a funny movie. Deep breathing, laughter and relaxation will all help offset acidosis in your body.

Another powerful remedy is to drink a full glass of water mixed with a teaspoon or two of apple cider vinegar. Even though most vinegar is very acidic, apple cider vinegar is made by burning apples and some of the ash is left over in the vinegar. Ash is alkalizing and will bring your pH back in the right direction. A couple notes: regular white vinegar won't work because it doesn't have any ash. To kickstart the ash/alkalizing process you can take a couple of magnesium supplements because minerals are required for the body to convert the vinegar. If you don't give your body a mineral to use, it will use minerals in your body such as bone. This is ok but for longer term use, it's probably better to provide extra minerals.

You can offset the potential toll of heavy exercise by alkalizing your body. Maintain a strong, positive mental attitude when training hard. Derive joy from your runs and hikes, take a bit of apple cider vinegar and you'll heal faster, be stronger and feel better.

Happy training.

Alaska At Its Finest - Barefoot Flattop

2010-05-30T19:08:00.000-08:00

I tested out the Five Fingers on Flattop today for the second time. I ran up the backside on the "runner's trail" and posted a decent early season time. The weather was stellar and the temperature was warm enough to run only in shorts. The Five Fingers made the minimalist style complete. Feeling the warm rock and soaking up the sun's energy like a sponge - this has got to be barefoot mountain running in Alaska at its finest.

Without intending to sound like a Five Fingers apostle, I must say that if you're at all inclined to try out barefoot running or some sort of minimalist shoe style, I really like Five Fingers. The backside of Flattop is no problem at all and although I haven't tried the Five Fingers on Peak 3 I'm sure it would be fine since I made it up and down that peak last summer completely barefoot. Peak 3 has even less gravel and rock than Flattop.

I hope you're out enjoying the weather.

Packrafts

2010-05-28T06:54:00.001-08:00

If you're adventuring in or near Fairbanks check out this website. Northern Packrafts

Hot Springs 100

2010-05-14T08:09:00.001-08:00

The Hot Springs 100, is a 100km++ overland wilderness event from Chena Hot Springs to Circle Hot Springs, Alaska.

In a straight line as the raven flies the distance on map is about 65 miles.

Afoot on terrain it may be 75 to 80 actual miles.

The terrain is primarily wilderness: unglaciated alpine domes and ridges.

Possible foot trails include animal(~73%), atv(~12%), gravel/tailing road(~15%),

Also a wilderness river float (as much as 40%).

This is a wilderness event. The routes are mainly alpine with boreal forest approaches and a possible 30mi+ river section. Bears, black and grizzly, are common all throughout the country.

Participants must be fit and equipped with wilderness experience; ready to cope with wilderness hardships. It is essential a person feels comfortable orienteering from map to landscape and from landscape to map with a compass.

The event has occurred four times.

61 total participants. 55 finished.

The solo record time is 23hr. 50min. (2009) The team record time is 23hr. 38min. (2009) The solo all-overland record time is 24hr. 56min. (2007)

Information 457-6376 or mdr65n@yahoo.com

be free,

-mdr

1983 Race Summary

2010-05-14T07:53:00.000-08:00

Race summary from the 1983 Hope to Homer race.

More Barefoot Running

2010-04-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

After suffering last summer running completely barefoot on sharp gravel, I decided to order a pair of Five Fingers KSO and try them out. I'm pleased to report that they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Running in these things gives almost all the benefits of running completely barefoot without much of the pain.

I tried them out on the Turnagain Arm Trail a week or so ago before all the snow had melted. I found out quickly that they are not waterproof at all and running over snow and ice turned my toes numb in about a half mile.

Overall they worked great though and I've used them quite a few times since then. The Turnagain Arm Trail has a lot of roots and ankle twisting terrain so take it slow if you run here barefoot until your calves and ankles become stronger.

There are several models of Five Fingers and I went with the KSO which stands for Keep Stuff Out. Not exactly an original name but they do work fairly well keeping stuff out. I put a link below for the most popular model of Five Fingers but if you're in Alaska and you're running trails or doing some peak running you should consider the KSO.

If you do order some Five Fingers don't get them from Amazon. For some reason, probably because of the barefoot running popularity explosion they really jacked up the price. REI still has them for a reasonable price.

Vibram FiveFingers Classic Multisport Shoes - Men's

1982 - The First Race

2010-04-22T06:46:00.000-08:00

Here are a few pictures straight out of the "Way Back Machine". I'm pretty sure these are from the very first Wilderness Classic race. The route was Hope to Homer, the year was 1982 and the I believe the person in the photos is George Ripley - the original race organizer.

George, jogging down the Homer Spit toward the finish line and ending in style.

The Best Training Technique Ever - Visualization

2010-04-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

If you've seriously participated in any sport for a little while, you've surely come across visualization techniques. Even though visualization is becoming more common, most people still don't utilize it's full potential.

Visualization has been around for a long time. People all over the world have successfully used it for thousands of years in everything from martial arts to business to medicine. The power of the mind is extraordinary and you can also tap into it for any type of distance running or adventure racing. Any veteran of the Wilderness Classic can tell you that the most important thing to finishing the Classic intact is mental strength. You can and should use visualization to not only survive the Classic but excel at it. You can also apply these techniques to anything else in life.

This post is just scratching the surface of visualization. There are numerous books about the subject but many people still think it's only for Olympians or professional athletes. It's more simple and more effective than you might think. For more reading, take a look at Think and Grow Rich which, despite the title, is very applicable to sports visualization and was one of the original books about visualization. You can also do a basic Google search and you'll find more than enough books to keep you busy.

Here are the basics: the power of the mind resides in focus and you can increase your concentration through regular practice. (Slightly off the topic - fish oil and other supplements that are high in antioxidants like gingko biloba will also help.) Since your mind has control over your physical body, your body will respond to visual images in your brain. The goal is to convince your physical body, through visual imagery, that it is capable of doing something.

Start by maintaining a positive mindset about your racing and training. Take some time and figure out exactly what your goal is. This could be anything from a specific race finishing time to a specific mental state after a hard 20 mile training run. Write down your goal. When writing your goal, be specific and use the words "I will . . ." instead of "I want to . . . ". Here's an example: "I will run the Wilderness Classic in 3 days, 15 hours and 12 minutes".

Memorize your goal word for word. Read and recite it in the morning when you wake up and in the evening before you drift off to sleep. If possible, say the words out loud. See yourself completing your goal. Think about how it feels to have already accomplished your task. Take your time and feel every aspect of your accomplishment. Put some emotion into it. Be proud of yourself and revel in the wonderful feeling of completing a goal. Convince yourself of it.

Play a video in your brain of yourself completing your goal. Play this video over and over, particularly when you start the day and also just before you go to sleep. Keep visualizing every day until it's time for your race and you will have the confidence you need to complete it. Come back to it again and again and don't be discouraged if you don't meet your goal exactly or if you have doubts. Simply refocus and bring your mind back to visualizing your completed goal.

If you're new to visualization, all this may seem silly but this is what successful professional athletes do all the time. Try it out. You'll like it. Your confidence will grow and you'll be more successful in life.

Update

2010-04-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update to let you know that I haven't forgotten about my readers. I'm writing another training post that I'll be posting soon about a great training technique and I also have some more pictures of one of the original Wilderness Classic races, so check back soon.

In the meantime if you want to watch some hiking and climbing entertainment, I posted a video slideshow trailer of the Western Chugach Alpine Guide.

Another Year. Some training tips.

2010-04-04T17:08:00.000-08:00

By now, you should have received your Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic race application in your email inbox. If you aren't on the Classic email list and want an application, email me and I'll forward your email address to the race organizer.

The race is the same course as last year and by all accounts, the Gerstle River to McKinley Village route is living up to all the expectations that a good Wilderness Classic must meet. It's too long, too dangerous and just plain too brutal for most people.

Here are some random thoughts about training for the race:

If you plan to do the race this year, you should already be logging some serious mileage. Hopefully, you won't just be starting your training now - ideally you should have been putting in long days all winter long. The Classic is the type of race that needs a lifestyle of fitness. By this I mean that you need to make endurance a part of your life. Most people who do this race like to go on all day hikes, climbs or bike trips and for them a two or three hour run is considered short.

Long, slow workouts will train your body to burn fat which is a necessary physical adaptation for endurance. A workout needs to be at least thirty minutes long before your body starts burning fat and you should go slowly enough so that you can easily carry on a conversation. If you're training by yourself (which I recommend) you can gauge proper speed by breathing through your nose. If you can breathe through your nose without getting out of breath for a couple minutes at a time, then you're going slow enough.

The key is to always keep moving. Learn to get into your pack without stopping, eat while you're moving and resist the urge to sit down. The only time you're traveling backwards is when you're stopped. Aim for at least twelve hours of movement and try to do several eighteen hour days. If you beat your body up now, you'll be much stronger during the race when an eighteen hour day is mandatory. Even if you train hard now, fifty miles into the race, you will wish you would have trained harder and longer.

Similar to training for an ultramarathon, you should peak in your training about a month before the race to give your body as much chance to recover and strengthen as possible. Don't be a couch potato the last month but do taper off and don't push your body too much. Don't injure yourself or destroy your muscles by overdoing it. When the race arrives, you should feel like a caged tiger - your body should ache to get out on the trail.

Proper sleep and diet are extremely important in the final few weeks before the race. Eat whole foods and pay attention to what your body wants. Think about your meals before you eat them and what is appetizing to you. Think about how bloated and slow you feel after a greasy burger and opt for the steamed vegetables, rice and skinless chicken instead. If your body craves fat, add some olive oil, coconut oil or nuts to a salad. These oils are high in Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids and have myriad other benefits also. Coconut oil is brimming with antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral properties. Olive oil has lots of antioxidants and is an anti-inflammatory also. Reducing inflammation is key in distance training.

I'll sign off for now but I'll continue with some more training and nutrition tips in another post soon. Based on Google Analytics analysis of this blog a lot of people tune in here to read the training and nutrition tips so if you have a specific training or nutrition topic relating to the race you would like me to cover, shoot me an email and let me know. Happy training!

1990 Race Article

2010-03-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

This article is another Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic gem, plucked straight from the annals of history. Enjoy.

New Guidebook and Alaska eBooks Website

2010-03-20T07:43:00.002-08:00

I recently finished writing the first guidebook in a series that focuses on hiking and climbing in the Western Chugach Mountains. The first book focuses on the Eklutna Lake area near Anchorage and includes eleven routes on seven peaks. The guide is available exclusively as a downloadable ebook in PDF format.

You can check out my publishing website here at alaskaebooks.com. Visit the site often because I'll be listing ebooks from other authors soon also.

If you have any questions about the book, ebooks in general or potential publishing, feel free to email me.

The Winter Wilderness Classic

2010-03-16T10:23:00.001-08:00

The 23rd Annual Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic starts in just a few weeks but you might still have time to sign up if you want to compete. Contact Dave Cramer who is the event coordinator at summitctok@aol.com. You can get an application and find out more about the race at this link.

The race this year is from Galbraith to Anaktuvuk to Wiseman.

More pictures from 2004

2010-03-12T06:41:00.000-09:00

I found a few more pictures from the start of the 2004, Eureka to Talkeetna. These were taken just a few minutes before the racers took off from a gravel pit near the Eureka Lodge. I've labeled the people I recognize. My apologies to those I haven't labeled.

Thai Verzone - in purple, facing the camera. Roman Dial - head visible just over the shoulder of the guy in gray. Ben Summit - in blue, second from the right. Dave Looney - far right.

Ben Summit - on the left in blue. Dave Looney - gray shirt and yellow hat. Hans Neidig - wearing black behind the racer in the yellow jacket. Chris Robertson - blue shirt, just right of the yellow jacketed racer. Jeff Bannish - red shirt, center of picture. Rob Kehrer - blue shirt, just right of Jeff. Jim McDonough - in black clothes and blue hat. Butch Allen - blue vest, holding papers in left hand. John Lapkass - wearing black pack, facing away from the camera.

Roman Dial giving the racers final instructions and guidelines just before the race start. Roman is on the left wearing black with orange bike helmet.

1988 Magazine Article

2010-03-02T07:19:00.000-09:00

1988 was the year of legends for the Classic. Chuck Comstock flew off a cliff with his parapente, the race was held for the first time at the favorite Nabesna to McCarthy venue and strategy played a key role for the winner. This article for Ultrarunning magazine details all of it. Enjoy!

Pictures from 2004 - Eureka to Talkeetna

2010-02-25T10:33:00.003-09:00

Here are some random pictures from the beginning and end of the 2004 Eureka to Talkeetna race. This was the year Gordy Vernon and Thai Verzone reminded us that subterfuge, strategy and innovation will often beat pure endurance in the Classic. These two veterans schooled everyone by coming from behind and winning the race. They carried a huge raft but eventually used it to float the entire Talkeetna Canyon while everyone else had to portage around it through thick brush.

Gordy and Thai told nobody about their plans and also brought a large cooler of free beer to the starting line for other people to take. After months of shaving 1/100th's of an ounce off their packs, several people opted to calm their nerves with some brew and actually carried some of the beer in their packs. Whether the cost/benefit ratio favored this decision is anyone's guess. What we do know is that Gordy and Thai knew exactly what they were doing.

Erin McKittrick on the left in purple with Bret Higman just behind her. Bob Schnell just to the right of them in the blue hat. Jason Geck in the center, Butch Allen, Jim McDonough and Dick Griffith on the right.

Thai Verzone on the left, Jim Lapkass just to the right and Michael Martin in the red coat.

Thai and Gordy bringing out the cooler of beer to the starting line.

And they're off! Roman and Cody Roman Dial on bicycles. At 17 years old, Cody Roman was and still is the youngest person to finish the Classic.

Gordy and Thai carry their raft to the finish line in Talkeetna as they win the race.

John Pepe and Rob Kehrer happy to be in Talkeetna.

Hans and Anna Neidig greet John with a nice cold beer.

1983 Hope to Homer

2010-02-18T06:44:00.000-09:00

1982 - The First Race

2010-02-11T06:48:00.000-09:00

This is such great stuff! Take a look at this article from 1982 - the first year the Wilderness Classic was run.

As with the last one, you may have to do a bit of electronic manipulating and jumping from image to image to read the whole thing, but it's all there - except for the minor bits along the edges that have been worn away by time. Thanks once again to Roman Dial for providing the goods. If for some reason, you can't t zoom in to read all of it, let me know.

Running Barefoot

2010-02-02T07:54:00.000-09:00

This last summer I was inspired to try something a little different. After witnessing someone running down Flattop with only a pair of Vibram Five Fingers I decided to try the barefoot running thing myself. There's a dearth of information about it on the internet and apparantly nobody in Alaska sells "shoes" for running barefoot so I decided to take the plunge and try it comepletly barefoot. Besides, why bother to pay $85 for a pair of running "shoes" that just defeat the real purpose.

I started out on Turnagain Arm trail and within about 100 yards I broke out into a cold sweat. Aside from the sensory overload, the first thing I noticed was the connection with the ground. I felt the trail like never before. My traction was better and I felt more stable. I ended up going only about three miles total but the next day muscles in my legs were as sore as if I had never run before.

I've eased into the whole idea and have only done the occasional run to adjust slowly. After about a dozen barefoot runs last summer I did one final run outside at Glen Alps in October just after a snowfall but when the trail was still bare. Switching to a treadmill inside this winter has been difficult because the surface is like sandpaper. This is where some sort of aquasocks or the Vibram Five Fingers might come in handy.

While it may seem a bit overboard at first, the benefits of running barefoot are endless. The human body was made to run without shoes. Most people have found that they are faster, stronger and have more endurance without shoes. People claim it has cured back problems, fixed their posture as well as taken away bunions, severe callousing and other foot problems.

It'll definitely slow your pace a bit until your feet adjust but mud, sticks and large rocks are generally not a problem. Pavement takes some getting used to and sharp gravel doesn't feel good at all, as you might imagine. At first, the shock value of seeing people's faces along the trail is amusing but after a couple times it's just annoying. Gasping tourists ruin the mood so now I try to avoid people as much as possible.

As soon as the snow melts, I'll be exploring different places and I'll post updates here about good trails. This is a great way to strengthen ankles, feet and lower legs for the Classic, so give it a try if you feel like something a bit different.

The book Born to Run is not only a great read but also has some great arguments for running barefoot. It's in the Amazon sidebar on the right side of this blog if you want to take a look. I haven't yet found anyone else who runs barefoot in Alaska but if you do, I'd love to hear from you.

1987 Race

2010-01-22T14:51:00.001-09:00

Check out this article from August 18, 1987 in the Fairbanks paper about the Black Rapids to McKinley Village route. I had to do some electronic gymnastics when I was scanning in this older stuff but I made sure the whole article is there. Some of these older articles I'll be posting as JPEG's and some as PDF's because if I just cut and pasted the text, you wouldn't get as much of the flavor of the physical article and you would miss out on the maps.

Many thank you's to Roman Dial for access to this stuff!

It's Coming.

2010-01-19T07:04:00.000-09:00

Fear not, avid Wilderness Classic readers. I'm still plowing through this rich pile of Classic report goodies from the earlier days of the race and I'll be posting some stuff pretty soon. I think you'll be more than pleased (or at least somewhat amused) when I start posting some of this stuff.

Upcoming race posts and a climbing boot sale.

2010-01-13T07:37:00.000-09:00

I recently came into a jackpot of older Wilderness Classic stuff. There's a large amount of articles and information so I'm in the process of scanning and digitizing them now. I should be able to post some great stuff from the early days of the race pretty soon.

In the meantime, if you're looking for some climbing or hiking boots, Endless.com is having a decent sale on some Scarpa. It's rare to find a rigid sole ice climbing or mountaineering boot for under $250 so if you're in the market for some, check it out. Many of their other Scarpas are on sale too.

Packrafting by Roman Dial

2010-01-08T08:28:00.001-09:00

For those of you who haven't checked out Roman Dial's packrafting book yet, you should. Packrafting is an essential skill for surviving the Wilderness Classic and even if you're not adventure racing, it's fun to do.

A packraft is the Supercub of hiking. It opens up lots of backcountry terrain that wasn't possible before.

1990 Anchorage Daily News Article with 1989 Race Info

2009-12-30T07:26:00.000-09:00

This is an article from the Anchorage Daily News that was published a couple months before the 1990 race. It has a great summary of the 1989 race which involved some Wilderness Classic's legends: Dial, Manzer, Crane, Possert and Comstock. 1989 was an interesting race year that made for some great stories.

Manzer was in the lead trying to beat Dial's record time and then lost his packraft and almost drowned in the Chitistone River. Crane and Possert found him extremely hypothermic and gave up their quest to beat Dial's record to help warm him up. Chuck Comstock flew his parasail off a high point in the Wrangell's and narrowly avoided disaster. This was also the first year that someone from outside of Alaska won the race.

I've posted only a part of the article due to copyright considerations but I tried to give you a good rundown of what's in it. You can pay to read the whole article on the ADN website or you can read the whole article by accessing ADN archives through your local library. Here's a blog entry that tells you how to do it. http://classicreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/accessing-anchorage-daily-news-archives.html

RACE TESTS TALENT, GUTS, SAVVY DANGER TEMPERS

COMPETITION IN ALASKA MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS CLASSIC

Anchorage Daily News (AK) - Sunday, July 15, 1990
Author: CRAIG MEDRED Daily News outdoor editor ; Staff

As the tiny, nylon raft hit the rock and bounced back toward the brown, swirling waters of the Chitistone River, wilderness racer Dave Manzer realized that his plan to win the 1989 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The rock was to have been Manzer's salvation. He had reached for it in the way he had reached for so many others over the years, only this time he missed. Now, stuck in a waterlogged, oneman raft, he found himself hurtling into a watery abyss, and in the timeless milliseconds that come with fear in the most dangerous of situations, Manzer knew he had pushed too far.

Every terrified bone in his body warned him the turbulent Chitistone was on the verge of swallowing his little toy of a boat and making him the first fatality in the seven years of Alaska's wildest footrace. Always there had been the fear someone would die in this race. Danger was part of the game. The wilderness classic was more than an ultramarathon across the most primitive terrain left in North America. It was a test of bushcraft, a fastfading skill in the 20th century, and a test of judgment.

Few Alaskans had the skill, endurance and gumption to tackle the race. Fewer still were those from the Lower 48 the Outsiders with the unique but necessary mix of talents, spirit and guts. Here was a race so demanding that most people were afraid to run it.

"I've talked to a lot of people, and I've had a lot of people who are interested," said classic veteran Adrian Crane of Modesto, Calif. "But they're scared off. It's too tough." Up to 50 people consider or, more properly, talk about the classic in any given year. No more than a couple dozen ever show up.

Always they are a weird bunch guys like 61 year old wilderness adventurer Dick Griffith, who'd been on more crazy trips than most people could dream about; Roman Dial, a doctoral candidate in biology who'd spent his life careening between civilized universities and wilderness areas; Tom Possert, an ultrarunner who made his reputation by trotting from Death Valley to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in California; and Brant McGee, a fellow seen most often in suit and tie directing the state Office of Public Advocacy. Why bother? "It appeals to my ego," McGee said. "It's a challenge not all that many people can do."

Nobody ever shortchanged the challenge no matter what route the race ran. And the course kept shifting, from bad to worse to not so bad. But always tough. Racers wanted the classic moved around the state every few years to keep any route from becoming standardized. That would prevent the fastest runners from gaining an edge on those best at orienteering and wilderness survival.

So, for a time, the race crossed the length of the Kenai Peninsula. Then it moved to the flanks of the Alaska Range, where the remoteness terrain and the thickness of the brush humbled everyone. And then it found the Wrangell Mountains. Experienced racers such as Dial, holder of the course record for the Wrangell route, liked that area because there was little brush to battle. A man could travel quickly through the boulders and scree. And there was exhilaration in floating the many whitewater rivers in a tiny, one-man, nylon boat or jogging through the Chitistone Canyon on the so called Goat Trail.

Trail, at least as applied to the Goat Trail, "was an euphemism for a faint shadow across a distant hillside that could be used to glean a route," observed Crane from his postrace vantage point at home in California. Racers debated if it was possible to slip off the Goat Trail and escape without serious injury. Such discussions scared off potential competitors and kept the race from becoming anything more than a curiosity.

Possert knew something about that. He would show slides of the classic at ultrarunning clinics around the country and talk about the exhilaration of wilderness competition. People would ooh and ahh at the slides, but nobody would step forward to sign up. "They'd say, "Those were nice slides,' " Possert said. "I think people are missing out on a lot."

What they were missing was America's toughest crosscountry competition. Of the 13 starters last year, 8 finished. Two of them Manzer from Anchorage and Chuck Comstock from Valdez could easily have wound up dead, if not for tenacity and a little luck.

A halfdead Manzer dragged his battered and hypothermic body out of the Chitistone River and onto a beach after his raft sank. Mumbling and incoherent from the freezing water, he was trying to make a fire when Crane and Possert stumbled upon him.

Comstock tried to climb 12,000 feet over the Wrangell Mountains and then fly to McCarthy with a parasail. The first leg of his flight ended in a glacial crevasse. Comstock crawled out to find himself on a ledge from which there was no way down. He rigged a pair of skis to hold his parasail open and jumped. Luckily, the sail flew. Eventually, Comstock made it to the finish line.

Backpacker - Google Books

2009-12-24T16:40:00.000-09:00

Check out yet another quick article on the 1989 Wilderness Classic. Here's an article in Backpacker magazine I dug up out of the deep recesses of the internet. The article switched around the dates of the races but it's still an interesting read and gives a bit more information on Chuck Comstock's audacious paraglider strategy. The article says that the race summary is of the 1988 Classic. It's actually a summary of the 1989 Classic.

Backpacker - Google Books

Have a great Christmas everyone.

Another Adventure Racing Book

2009-12-22T05:53:00.000-09:00

If you're looking for last minute Christmas shopping ideas for yourself, here's another adventure racing book I just came across that you can add to your collection. This one is a little more basic than other books I've listed and is meant mostly for beginning adventure racers but it's still a worthwhile read. Besides, it's fairly inexpensive if you buy a used copy off of Amazon.

1989 Anchorage Daily News Article

2009-12-21T05:44:00.000-09:00

This is an article about the1989 Wilderness Classic. The article was written before some of the racers had finished, so it doesn't post the final results. Because of copyright considerations, I can't post the whole article but I've posted part of it here. If you would like to read the whole article you can go to the Anchorage Daily News archives and pay for it or you can read it through your library's online archives for free. Here's a blog post that shows you how to do it. Library Access

"DUMB MISTAKE' ALMOST FATAL

MANZER SURVIVESWILDERNESS CLASSIC

Anchorage Daily News (AK) - Sunday, August 20, 1989
Author: MICHAEL VANAUSDELN Daily News reporter ; Staff

Dave Manzer was in reach of Roman Dial's Alaska Wilderness Classic course record when he screwed up.

Manzer, a fivetime veteran, instead nearly drowned and ended in a threeway tie.

Tuesday, though, he was flying through the 160mile race from Nabesna to McCarthy until he reached the Chitistone River.

For most of the dozen people entered, the river is something to cross with caution. For Manzer, it is something to speed down. He rode his inflatable raft down the wild river, a vein of white water he had mastered many times before, confident that Dial's record was in danger.

Then, pulling over to the side to dump water out of his raft, the Anchorage athlete and his raft smacked into a rock, sending Manzer into a swirl of water and thoughts of dying.

. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .

1. Dave Manzer, Adrian Crane and Tom Posser: 3 days 6 hours 9 minutes
2. Jeff Gedney of Fairbanks: 3 days 14 hours 15 minutes

Scratch: Ralf Cuba, Harold Markham, Tim Gillis, Brandt McGee
Still on the trail when article was written: Dick Griffith, Kathy SarnesHickok, Kathy Lambert, Klaus Oberle

1988 Anchorage Daily News Article

2009-12-16T07:06:00.000-09:00

This Anchorage Daily News article is about the 1988 Nabesna to McCarthy route. This particular race had a number of savvy outdoor experts competing in it including Dave Manzer, Adrian Crane, Roman Dial and Brant McGee. This is probably also the most talked-about races of all time because it was the year legendary Chuck Comstock climbed solo up into the Wrangell Mountains and parasailed down thousands of feet to the finish.

Due to copyright considerations, I'm only posting part of the article. You can read the full article by accessing the Anchorage Daily News archives and entering the date and title of the article as search terms. You can either go to the ADN website or access archives through your library. Here's a short guide how to find the archives through your online library website. Library access.

Dial Puts Best Foot Forward To Win 160 Mile Race

Anchorage Daily News - Tuesday, August 23, 1988
Author: Craig Medred Daily News outdoors editor; Staff

His size 81 2 feet swollen to fit into size 10 boots, Roman Dial of Fairbanks led 23 other wilderness runners 150 to 160 miles through the Wrangell Mountains to win the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic last week.

It took Dial 2 days, 16 hours and 28 minutes to complete the unmarked course along animal trails, over mountains, down rivers and across gravel bars.

He claims oversize boots were but one of his secret weapons for the race.

. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .

Final Race Results:
Roman Dial: 2 days, 16 hours, 28 minutes.
Dave Manzer: 3 days, 4 hours, 19 minutes.
Crane and Possert: 3 days, 11 hours, 44 minutes.
Hank Timm, Claire Holland and Mark Stoppel: 4 days, 11 hours, 44 minutes.
Brant McGee: 4 days, 12 hours, 5 minutes.
Bob Kaufman: 4 days, 14 hours, 5 minutes.
Bob Groseclose, Rourke Williams and Harlow Akins: 5 days, 3 hours, 20 minutes.
Dick Griffith, Dave Poppe and Hollis French: 5 days, 7 hours, 10 minutes.
Chuck Comstock: 5 days, 13 hours.
(Comstock might have had the most unique strategy in the race. He went 13,000 feet straight up into the mountains on a beeline from Nabesna to McCarthy, and then tried to beat everyone by flying to the finish line with a parasail.)

Accessing Anchorage Daily News Archives

2009-12-14T08:00:00.001-09:00

Since the Wilderness Classic started in the early 1980's the Anchorage Daily News has occasionally printed articles with race results and a summary of the race. Most of the articles were written by outdoors reporter Craig Medred, an experienced outdoorsman and veteran of the Classic.

If you go to the Anchorage Daily News website, you can search for past articles in archives but you can't read them unless you pay a fee. However, it's easy to access the archives for free through your local library. With a library card and an online library account you can access the entire set of archives online without charge. You probably need to get a library card in person but once you have a card, you can usually set up an online account within a day or so by emailing or calling the library.

Luckily for people who live out of Alaska, most local libraries connect into Newsbank or similar online services that archives newspapers from around the country.

Go to your library's website and find the database page. The newspaper section of the database is usually easy to find. Sign in with your library card number and PIN.

Since I've already posted as many full articles as Anchorage Daily News will allow me to, I'll be posting the title of past articles along with the date it was published and a summary so you can easily find the archived full text version. If you have any problems finding a specific article, feel free to email me and I'll see if I can help.

If you live in Anchorage you find newspaper archives by signing in here at the library website. Loussac Library Database Page.

If you live in Fairbanks you can go to the Fairbanks Library Databases here. Fairbanks Public Library Database Page.

If you're a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks you can access Anchorage Daily News archives here. UAF Database Page.

If you're a student at University of Alaska Anchorage or APU, you can access the Newsbank database here. UAA and APU Database Page.

If you're in Seattle, you can access the library database page here. Your link will be called Newslink instead of Newsbank. Seattle Public Library Database Page.

Alaska Adventure Racing

2009-12-11T08:25:00.001-09:00

Here's a link to another adventure race in Alaska. It looks like they have a race coming up in the middle of January somewhere in the Chugach mountains. I don't know much about it other than looking at the website but if it's in Alaska in January, it's bound to be cold, dark and fun.

Alaska Adventure Racing Website

1995 Anchorage Daily News Article

2009-12-09T07:55:00.001-09:00

This article was first printed in the Anchorage Daily News on August 15, 1995. It's about the Black Rapids to Mckinley Village route. Reprinted in full with explicit permission from the Anchorage Daily News.

TORTOISE OUTRUNS HARES - SAUNDERS CAPTURES

WILDERNESS CLASSIC

Anchorage Daily News (AK) - Tuesday, August 15, 1995
Author: CRAIG MEDRED Daily News outdoors editor ; Staff
After a 21/2-day-long game of cat and mouse through the wilds on the north side of the Alaska Range, Clark Saunders of Girdwood emerged at McKinley Village last week to claim victory in the 14th running of the 130-mile Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic.

Only two hours back, having encountered problems with a recalcitrant brown bear, were runners-up Kevin Donley and Marten Martensen, both of Anchorage. Martensen, a threetime winner of the Seward Mount Marathon, and Donley, a 35-minute 10-K road runner and seasoned mountain runner, stalked Saunders for 130 miles but failed to catch him.

The 36-year-old Saunders credited his past experience on the route along with rafting skills for his narrow victory over the two men in their mid-20s.

''It was sort of the tortoise and the hares,'' Saunders said.

Donley and Martensen were faster hikers, particularly on the uphills, Saunders said, but they lost some time trying to find the fastest routes into and out of several mountain passes. They also had to walk around rapids on the Yanert River. Martensen and Donley also had a little run-in with a grizzly bear in the dark, and that turned to Saunders advantage. The incident, Saunders said, came just after he was passed in the night about halfway through the race.

Saunders was by then sitting next to a fire, exhausted and hoping to lure the younger men into taking a break with the promise of warmth on a cold night. They resisted the trap, but went only a little farther before running into the grizzly bear in a creek bottom.

That brought them back seeking advice. Saunders said he didn't know what to do and didn't really care because all he wanted to do was sleep. ''They ended up going about 300 yards away and camping and building a big fire and drying out,'' Saunders said.

The bear stayed, too, however. '

'Somewhere around 1:30 or so, I hear some rustle, rustle, crack, crack,'' Saunders said. ''I see this large, hairy mass. I could see it was a bear, but it wasn't a huge bear. But I could see by its head it was a grizzly.

''It was on all fours sniffing under the tree-slash-bush where my food was. I was just thinking, 'I'm too tired for this."''

Saunders thought about yelling at the bear but decided that might scare it into charging. He wasn't, however, going to let it have his food. So, he said, he decided to run his fingers over the nylon on his 2-foot-high, one-man tent to produce a subtle but totally unnatural sound.

The bear heard it, got visibly nervous, ''and swayed on out of there,'' Saunders said.

He went back to sleep in seconds -- only to oversleep. When he woke at 4:45 a.m., Martensen and Donley were gone.

They didn't have much of a lead, however, and Saunders caught them when they struggled in thick brush he knew to avoid. He briefly gave the lead up one more time, but led the race down the Yanert River and sealed the victory there.

An experienced paddler, Saunders ran the Yanert River rapids in his tiny, one-man inflatable raft. Most other competitors decided to portage, and one of the handful of others who ran the big water ended up complaining this year's race was too easy.

For the first time in the history of the race, everyone who started finished. Twenty-six men and women entered.

''We need to move the course,'' former champ Brant McGee of Anchorage said. Traditionally, the classic has lasted no more than three years on any one course. The idea from the beginning was to move the race periodically to keep the route-finding aspect challenging, said organizer Roman Dial.

The race began as a 150-mile Hope to Homer race across the Andy Simons Wilderness Area of the Kenai Peninsula in 1982. It moved to a 245-mile course on the north side of the Alaska Range from Mentasta to McKinley in 1985.

From there it was on to the Wrangell Mountains and a 145-mile route from Nabesna to McCarthy in 1988 through 1990. In 1991, with McGee organizing the always informal competition, the race went north to the Brooks Range.

Last year, for the first time, it settled into the 130-mile, largely brush-free route across the north side of the Alaska Range from Donnelly to McKinley.

The route requires competitors to cross two glaciers, climb over a 6,000 foot pass, and float about 25 miles of river in little rubber rafts, and 26 people this year proved they could do that.

''It's not a wilderness race if everybody finishes,'' McGee said. ''It should be damn difficult to finish. The achievement should be in finishing. If everybody finishes, that diminishes the achievement.''

McGee finished third this year about two hours behind Martensen and Donley. As usual, Alaskans dominated the competition, but for the first time people from Outside the state faired well.Racers from Seattle; Boise; Reno, Nev.; Hanover, N.H.; and San Diego all managed to follow the unmarked, wilderness route from start to finish.

ALASKA MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS CLASSIC
1) Clark Saunders, Girdwood, 2 days, 12 hours, 20 minutes
2 & 3) Kevin Donley and Marten Martensen, Anchorage, 2:14:21
4) Brant McGee, Anchorage, 2:16:10
5 & 6) Roman and Peggy Dial, Anchorage, 3:09:03
7) Michael Martin, Seattle, 3:09:49
8) Dave Lucey, Anchorage, 3:10:15
9) Jeff Mailloux, Boise, Idaho
10,11,12,13,14) Skip Kula, Steve Daigle, Mike Wayt, Brent Widenhouse and Shane Metcalf of Anchorage, 3:15:43
15) John Lapkass, Anchorage, 3:19:15
16 & 17) Greg Tibbetts and Eric Sachs, Anchorage, 3:23:05
18) Mark Ross, Fairbanks, 4:02:10
19 & 20) Jeff Gedney, Reno, Nev., and John Sisson, Hanover, N.H., 4:04:37
21,22,23,24,25,26) Dick, Barney and Bobbie Sue Griffith of Anchorage, Brian Hall of Anchorage, Sue Ellen Christiansen of Fritz Creek and Tim Gillis of San Diego, 5:09:25.

Full Disclosure

2009-12-04T07:32:00.000-09:00

As some of you may have noticed, I recently added some advertising to this blog. This is mostly because The Classic is product intensive and if you run it both you and your bank account will be exhausted before you even start the race, running around town buying various things. Despite the motto of "No Gear, No Fear", gear is important for the race and directed advertising is handy for those who don't know what to buy or even where to start.

Some FTC guidelines recently went into effect regarding bloggers and kickbacks. Since nobody can actually understand what the guidelines mean and how they apply, I'm giving you the full disclosure about my relationship with my advertisers and any products I have endorsed. I'm not going to be the poor shmuck test case that gets sued for not disclosing something.

Nobody actually has yet, but if anyone were to actually click on some of the google ads I might get a few cents. In reality, I'll probably never see any actually coin because you have to reach a certain dollar amount ( I think $50) before they send you a check. The chances of me making $50 from ads on this site are extremely remote. If you were to buy something off amazon, REI or Endless.com within a certain amount of time after clicking on the ads on this blog then I would get a very small percentage of that sale. I don't have complete control of the advertising but I've tried to only list cool stuff relevant to adventure racing and training.

No company has ever sent me products and all of the stuff I have reviewed was bought by me. Except for that cool Sherpa Adventure Gear jacket that I gave a link to once. My brother-in-law gave me that and I would buy it anyway even if I didn't already have one.

Yes, believe it or not, I'm not getting rich off this blog and the time I put into researching and posting is my small contribution to making the race better and developing the community of extreme adventure racers in Alaska. The adventure racing community in Alaska is so small, we're almost family and I think contributing to community is important.

And since we're talking about complying with the law here, I spent the last four months negotiating, goading prodding, and cajoling the Anchorage Daily News into letting me post the full text of their older Wilderness Classic articles. They hemmed and hawed and finally decided that their copyrighted, archived articles of the Classic are so valuable, they will only let me post the full text of three articles. Theoretically, I could post links to the other articles but they are older, they're in archives and the Daily News can't (or won't) spend the 60 minutes they said it would take to pull them out of archives.

I'm not going to get dinged for posting copyrighted material but what I can do is post race results from each year and under "fair use" rules write a summary of each article. I'll give you the specific date it was published and search terms so you can look it up in the ADN archives. I'll even tell you how to legally avoid paying ADN for accessing archives.

So in true Alaskan form, this post is my one finger salute to the FTC. I intend for this blog to be a good resource for Classic racers and adventure racers in general so stay tuned and I'll keep posting useful information.

Alaska Adventure Race 2002 Article from Anchorage Daily News

2009-12-02T07:33:00.000-09:00

Here's a newspaper article from the Anchorage Daily News about the 2002, Nabesna to McCarthy race. The 2002 race was one of the more notorious years when the weather could only be described as "biblical" in proportion.

Veteran racers are still amazed at the severity and swiftness of the July snowstorm. At the top of Cooper Pass, about 25 miles into the race, the snow was hip deep and previously running streams were completely frozen. In the small canyon just below Coooper Pass, there was so much snow that my race partner and I witnessed avalanches.

After making it through Cooper Pass, we tried for 30 minutes to start a fire but it was too cold and wet for even military style chemical fire starter. We dug a shallow hole under a spruce tree and went to sleep. I was so cold, I was wondering if I shouldn't fall asleep for fear that I wouldn't wake up. I did and we finished the race in respectable time a couple days later.

Anyway, you don't have to take my word for it, I posted the article here so you can read it. I got the text from archives and I included a picture that I had scanned and saved from the original newspaper.

Reprinted in full with the express permission from the Anchorage Daily News.

Wilderness Classic racers court death in July blizzard

'BRUTAL': Roman Dial sets new race record 20 years after his first win.

Anchorage Daily News (AK) - Sunday, August 18, 2002
Author: Craig Medred Anchorage Daily News ; Staff

At the start, the cold rain came down October-ugly. Only one of the 27 hardy souls gathered for the start of the Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Classic race through Wrangell-St. Elias National Park read the meaning of the snow line creeping down the mountains above and showed the sense to go home.

Twenty-six others set off across the Nabesna River toward 6,000-foot Cooper Pass, some 20 miles to the southeast. They never imagined the late-July weather could get any worse.

And then it did.

By the time people started bailing out of the state's most notorious wilderness race, huddling in the safety of a cabin in the remote outpost of Chisana instead of risking more snow in the Wrangell Mountain passes, the 150-mile classic had gone from adventure race to survival challenge.

''Brutal'' is the word racer Mel Strauch uses to describe it.

When the rain turned to wet, heavy snow, it was bad. When the wet, heavy snow started falling so hard that Strauch and partner Greg Tibbetts of Anchorage got turned around in whiteout conditions, it was worse. When the snow piled up a foot and a half deep, then started avalanching off the mountains, it was simply dangerous.

A veteran of winter races along the Iditarod Trail, Strauch, a salesman at the local REI, remembers looking repeatedly at his watch, reading the July 28 date, and wondering, ''How can this be?''

He and Tibbetts, another veteran ski racer , would end up spending a night huddled beneath a pair of inflated one-man rafts, shivering over a tiny stove, and worrying about what the next day might bring.

And even as those two Anchorage men were thinking about making that uncomfortable forced bivouac high in the Wrangells on July 28, two others -- orthopedic surgeon John Lapkass from Anchorage and medical professor Michael Martin from Seattle -- wandered around in near-whiteout conditions, hoping they wouldn't lose the route through the pass and have to spend a night in the open.

Howling wind piled snow in drifts three to four feet deep. Martin's feet were cold, soaked and losing feeling. More than a week later, he would still be limping on them.

Lapkass was in better shape, but he was rattled, too. A veteran of wilderness races all over Alaska, including previous Wilderness Classics through the Brooks Range of the far north, Lapkass had never seen anything like this.

''It was good, solid knee-deep,'' he said. ''There was one place I went into a drift up to my waist. It was a mid-winter blizzard-type thing. It got a little desperate.''

Lapkass does not use the word ''desperate'' lightly. Like others who enter this wilderness race, he is a man who has seen plenty of snow and lived with wet and discomfort. He has felt the uneasiness of being lost. He has faced down grizzly bears and swum bone-numbing glacial rivers.

But this time Lapkass worried he was near his limit.

''No one could have anticipated a true blizzard at the end of July,'' Martin said. ''In the 21 years of the race, no one could remember anything like this happening before.

''We all go extremely light. I, for example, was wearing running tights, very light boots, two light polypro tops and light rain gear. I had light polypro gloves, which were soaked or frozen 100 percent of the time. I had a tiny tent and light (sleeping) bag, but the idea of bivvying in two feet of still-accumulating snow with my level of hypothermia seemed like certain death.

''Our only chance was to keep moving, hoping to get below the snow line and . . . make a fire.''

To keep up their spirits, Lapkass and Martin struggled to find some humor.

''When we first started hitting the snow,'' Lapkass said, ''I made a comment to Michael, 'Wouldn't it be funny if there was a foot of snow on the top.'

''As we went on, Michael said, 'Well, you got your foot.' ''

From then on, it only got worse.

''It was pretty much put your head down and put one foot in front of the other,'' Lapkass said.

Martin, a race veteran, admitted he was scared, particularly after Lapkass pulled away in the storm. At first, Martin followed the tracks of his faster companion, but then Lapkass' tracks started disappearing under blowing snow.

When Lapkass started downhill out of the pass, he noticed Martin missing. He waited 20 minutes, shivering in the wind before deciding he should go back to look for Martin. Luckily, Lapkass said, Martin appeared out of the blowing snow just then.

''By about midnight,'' Martin said, ''we had managed to wade out of the snow and down onto Notch Creek. It was another three or so miles to any spruce. By about 1:30 we had a fire going and felt that we might live after all.''

Neither could relax until they had sparked that warming smudge into a full-fledged bonfire.

''I wasn't happy until the flames went as high as my head,'' Lapkass said.

Ahead of them, meanwhile, the race leaders faced a grim situation.

Defending Wilderness Classic champs Rocky and Steve Reifenstuhl -- along with arch-rival Roman Dial -- had struggled through snow all day toward the Chisana River with Steve in bad shape.

The Sitka-based racer had started despite a cold. Weakened by illness, he struggled to withstand the beating the weather dished out.

Dial wasn't in great shape, either, in part because he'd cut his gear to the bone to save weight and travel faster. He carried neither cap nor gloves, wore a wind shell of fabric the weight of parachute cloth and had soaked himself in the raft crossing of the Nabesna River that starts the adventure.

''When I got out of the boat,'' Dial said, ''I was so hypothermic I couldn't talk.''

He knew he had to get moving to warm up. He knew he lacked adequate insulation. To supplement his meager clothing, he stuffed a small piece of foam pad down his shirt as a makeshift vest.

''That helped,'' he said. ''I managed to fight over this hypothermia,'' only to march into the snow.

''It was ankle-deep at 4,000 feet,'' Dial said. ''Shin-deep at 4,500 feet. Knee-deep at 5,000 feet.

''It was a total whiteout at the (6,000-foot) pass.''

Thoughts of racing started giving way to thoughts of surviving -- even as Dial caught the Reifenstuhls wallowing in snow about a mile high in the Wrangells.

An Eco-Challenge veteran and a professor at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, Dial had entered the race feeling dissed by comments the Reifenstuhls made about his second-place showing in the 2001 Classic. There was no love lost here, but Dial thought the Reifenstuhls would be happy to see anyone in the storm.

''I was so glad to see those guys,'' Dial said. ''And then they wouldn't even talk to me . . . . I felt like a stray dog.''

He didn't realize the Reifenstuhls were in big trouble -- but didn't want to admit it. Steve's problem, however, would crystalize in the hours ahead as another group of racers caught the lead pack.

Nora Tobin of Anchorage was in that group with Kristian Sieling and Jason Geck of Anchorage. When they found the tracks of the leaders near the top of the pass, Tobin was elated.

''I was thinking, 'Yeah baby,' '' she said. ''I told those guys, 'If we catch them, that'll make my race.' ''

And catch them they did.

Only to discover a strange scene. The Reifenstuhl brothers were hiking arm in arm. Tobin thought at first that maybe they were even closer than she had imagined. Then she noticed Steve was stumbling a lot.

''That was weird,'' she said. ''Initially, we thought he was drunk.''

When Rocky -- a Fairbanks cyclist known for his many victories in the Iditasport races along the frozen Iditarod Trail -- asked if anyone had a spare hat to loan his brother, Tobin started to put things together. Under any normal circumstances, the Reifenstuhls are not the type to seek help.

They didn't have any choice here. Steve was seriously hypothermic, though with huge ego in play Dial was reluctant to accept this at first.

''You know, it was funny,'' Tobin said. ''Roman and Rocky have never liked each other, and at first Roman wouldn't believe (Steve was in trouble).

'' 'They're just faking,' he said.''

Tobin shuttled between Dial and the Reifenstuhls, trying to open a line of communication. But when a still-stumbling Steve picked up his pace, Tobin said, ''Roman bolted.

''Can you say 'major testosterone?' ''

With everyone wallowing in deep snow, however, there wasn't much chance of anyone pulling away. The group was soon back together, and Dial said he began to get concerned when he noticed Steve was babbling incoherently.

''And Rocky was asking the other people for clothes to take care of his brother,'' Dial said.

That was so far out of character that Dial accepted the situation as dangerous. In such circumstances, the code of the trail dictates that even the most dysfunctional groups are duty-bound to pull together.

Helping Steve make it over the remaining 20 miles of trail to Chisana became a team goal. At Chisana, everyone knew, a cabin with a wood stove waited.

''That's what motivated everyone,'' Tobin said. ''Steve was incredible.''

''The Reifenstuhls are the grittiest guys out there,'' Dial said. ''They're tough, tough, tough. They're not really wilderness people, but they're great endurance athletes.''

''It was grim for me,'' Steve said. ''I literally shivered for seven hours.

''I had to wrap a couple space blankets around myself inside my jacket. I could not warm up. I was so depleted. It was just a matter of grind it out to where you could get to a place to make a fire.''

The strongest members of the group took turns breaking trail through the snow. At times, Tobin said, they waded down creeks because the going was easier in the shallow snow there.

Below 4,000 feet, Dial said, the snow finally turned to rain. Night began settling in, and it was cold. But there was no stopping now.

''This was probably as desperate as I can ever remember,'' Steve said. ''Probably the warmest temperature was 40. It was 32 and slush at the snow line. Probably 22-23 degrees in the pass with horizontal snow.''

When the group finally made it down to the banks of the Chisana -- a wide braided, glacial river -- there was a debate about what to do.

Some suggested stopping to make a fire.

''(Steve) was shaking,'' Tobin said. ''He was just ashen white.''

Dial was among those lobbying for a fire. Steve Reifenstuhl looked so bad, Dial feared the cold water of the Chisana would push his hypothermia to a potentially deadly state. Steve, however, was coherent enough to demand that everyone keep going.

''To me,'' he said, ''there was no choice.''

He couldn't imagine getting warm by a fire and then having to force himself to cross the Chisana the next day to get to the air strip by the cabin. Better, he said, to keep on going and put all the worst behind.

With others helping, Steve Reifenstuhl struggled through river channel after river channel -- some chest-deep.

But they made it across and within minutes were at the cabin. Everyone pitched in to take care of Steve there. A couple people got the fire going. One went for water.

''I got to hug Steve,'' Tobin said.

''A lot of people say stuff about Roman,'' Martin said later. ''A lot of people say stuff about the Reifenstuhls. But I think they're all heroes.''

For hours, Tobin said, everyone at Chisana sat around the fire talking. Steve was still shaking, but he was coming out of it now. The others, though exhausted, were so charged with excitement they couldn't sleep, despite being on their feet for a hard 14 or 15 hours.

''More than anything,'' Tobin said, ''we were concerned about the people behind us, because this was the year everyone went really ultralight.''

Many had little more than the clothes on their backs, and the light-weight inflatable boats necessary for crossing and floating rivers. Those boats would become improvised shelters.

''It was snowing the whole time,'' said 40-year-old Anchorage teacher Jeffrey Bannish. ''The only time it wasn't snowing was when it was raining. . . Many people dropped out (after that first day) -- not because they couldn't dry out but because their energy was spent, or they didn't have enough food because they'd burned up too much time.''

People survived by steadily moving to keep their bodies pumping out heat and gobbling food to keep the internal furnaces burning as hot as possible.

''I'm glad no one perished up there,'' Steve Reifenstuhl said. ''We sure worried a lot. We worried who was going to get stuck in the snow.''

Fortunately, bowing to the judgment of wilderness veterans like former Nordic ski racer Jim Renkert and legendary 76-year-old backcountry rambler Dick Griffith, both from Anchorage, many racers elected to bivouac on the north side of the pass and wait for the light of a new day before crossing. That saved them from the worst of the blizzard.

By the time those people hit the pass, the storm was abating, though they still had to slog through a snow-slickened route.

The Alaska-born Renkert, 42, had never seen anything like this.

''Now that everything's done, people are tending to downplay it,'' Renkert said. ''(But) the one word that comes to my mind is 'horrific.'

''There were even avalanches. That would have been embarrassing, to have been killed by an avalanche in July.''

Renkert, Griffith and a bunch of others waited until July 29 -- the day after the start -- to make their way through Cooper Pass. At Chisana on the other side, they joined 11 others catching chartered flights out of the race.

Martin, his foot aching from a bone broken earlier in the year, was among the dropouts. Griffith left with an injured foot. Steve Reifenstuhl with his hypothermia, Rocky Reifenstuhl with a swollen knee, Strauch with a sprained ankle all quit. Tobin, her enthusiasm for the race gone, went home to breast-feed an 11-month-old baby.

Only 11 racers kept going -- chief among them Dial. He left Chisana with Sieling and Geck. He remembers Geck mentioning how the Reifenstuhls would probably hold onto the course-record time because of what happened.

''That sort of lit a fire under me,'' Dial said. ''I started running. They couldn't keep up. So I took off and just kept accelerating.''

By nightfall, he was at Chitistone Pass. Armed only with a thumb-

size LED light, he kept going, working his way down the notorious ''Goat Trail'' toward the Chitistone River. He scared himself when he stumbled and stopped for a half-hour nap in the middle of the trail. He woke up and kept going until he stumbled again.

Then he grabbed a full hour of sleep. By morning, he was at the Chitistone River.

''I had a secret weapon,'' he added. ''My wife's dry suit.''

He pulled it on, put together the kayak paddle he'd been carrying, blew up a one-man raft, and launched into the river. No Wilderness Classic racer had ever before tried to float this stretch of fast, shallow and rocky white-water in a 6-foot raft.

In ''Fast & Cold -- Alaska Whitewater,'' author Andy Embick rates it Class II-plus. Others would peg it Class III. Martin thinks it could be Class IV.

Dial admits paddling was a gamble, but he contends special rafts now being made by Sherri Tingey of Eagle River make such gambles feasible, particularly for a paddler in a dry suit.

''I had light coming over my back instead of in my face,'' Dial added. ''So I could see well, too. I rafted the whole Chitistone.''

That cut two to four hours off the travel time from the end of the Goat Trail to Glacier Creek, where racers usually put in for the float to McCarthy Road. By then, Dial knew he was in position to set a new record for the Wrangell version of a Wilderness Classic course that bounces between different Alaska venues every few years.

He started paddling down the Chitistone to the Nizina River and took a short nap in the boat. By the time he hit the the ruins of the Nizina River bridge, he packed up his gear and started the run for McCarthy.

From there in his only stop was to strip off his polypropylene tights and stuff them in his pack when the chafing on his legs became too painful.

''I broke the Reifenstuhls' time by an hour and 45 minutes,'' he said. ''So, I've got the new record. It feels pretty good to do it 20 years after the first time I won it. If I can follow the Reifenstuhls' lead, I can do this up into my 50s.''

Martin, the unofficial race organizer, was in McCarthy by the time Dial arrived, having flown over the mountains from Chisana.

''Roman Dial finished first, running naked -- other than a tiny loincloth -- from the waist down up the main street of McCarthy to the finish line on the porch of Wrangell Mountain Air.''

The official winning time for the 150 miles was 2 days, 4 hours and 24 minutes. The second-place finishers, Kevin Armstrong from Healy and Doug Woody from Colorado, were more than a day behind.

''In some ways, it was (all) pretty unbelievable,'' Tobin said, ''but the one thing about the Wilderness Classic is that it makes you do things you'd never do.''

Here are the 11 finishers, in order:

1.) Dial; 2.) Armstrong and Woody; 3.) Jeffrey Bannish of Anchorage; 4.) Kristian Sieling, Hans Neidig and Ben Summit, all of Anchorage; 5.) Kyle Joly and Martin Robards of Anchorage; 6.) Butch Allan and Jason Geck of Anchorage.

Daily News sports editor Beth Bragg contributed to this story.
Caption: Photo Courtesy Of John Lapkass Photo By Jim Renkert Anchorage physician John Lapkass is shown in the snow on his way up Cooper Pass. Conditions would get far worse as entrants in the Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Classic climbed toward the 6,000-foot pass on the north side of the Wrangell Mountains in late July. Dave Peters, Donna Klecka and Dick Griffith make their way through 13 inches of snow that fell the first day and night of the Wilderness Classic in late July.

Juneau Empire Article about 2000 Race

2009-11-30T06:03:00.001-09:00

Here's another article from the archives of the Juneau Empire about the 2000 race from Nabesna to McCarthy.

Sitka man, brother, win mountain classic.

2004 Anchorage Daily News Article

2009-11-28T07:00:00.000-09:00

Here's a newspaper article from the Anchorage Daily News about the 2004, Eureka to Talkeetna race. Reprinted in full with the express permission from the Anchorage Daily News.

Vernon , Verzone brave miles of Class V white water to claim victory

WILDERNESS CLASSIC: Pair fights through "Entrance Exam," "Toilet Bowl" rapids.

Anchorage Daily News (AK) - Thursday, July 29, 2004

Author: CRAIG MEDRED Anchorage Daily News ; Staff

Far from civilization in the backcountry north of the Glenn Highway early this week, Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic racers Gordy Vernon and Thai Verzone stumbled upon a group of trekkers who'd accidentally crossed the path of the state's craziest endurance race.

Better hurry up, the young hikers told 48-year-old Vernon and his 29-year-old sidekick, the other competitors who'd left Eureka Summit on Sunday were far, far ahead in the 100-to-150-mile race to Talkeetna. Vernon told the youngsters he wasn't concerned.

"You don't worry about handguns when you have an atomic bomb,'' said Vernon , the veteran wilderness racer, who now lives in Cordova.

The "atomic bomb,'' in this case, turned out to be a 16-foot-long, frameless cataraft that Vernon and Verzone used to dominate the race. While other competitors made difficult, alder-bashing portages around the Talkeetna River canyon, Vernon and Verzone were riding their secret weapon through 14 miles of boiling Class V white water to victory.

Not that it was easy.

"Never again,'' Vernon said when reached by telephone in Talkeetna Wednesday. "We swam twice.''

"We failed the Entrance Exam,'' added Talkeetna's own Verzone.

Entrance Exam is a notorious hole at the start of the Talkeetna River canyon.

In his book "Fast and Cold -- A Guide to Alaska Whitewater," the late Andy Embick warns that Entrance Exam "has flipped rafts and thrashed kayakers. 'Swimmers' escaping this hole inevitably go into several more holes downstream.''

Verzone said he and Vernon avoided that fate only because they crawled onto the bottom of their overturned raft.

"The boat was upside down and going backward,'' Verzone said. "But we paddled it to the next beach before 'Toilet Bowl,' '' a second dangerous rapid.

On the beach, he said, they righted the boat and "got our composure back.''

Then they put back into the river, made it safely past Toilet Bowl and on downstream until they hit a massive, river-wide hole that almost swallowed the raft. Verzone saw the trouble coming.

"I'm yelling at Gordy, 'Paddle, paddle, paddle!' he said. "Just screaming at him.''

It wasn't enough. Vernon 's frantic stroking with a kayak paddle powered the front of the long, skinny cataraft through the hole, but the back stuck. Verzone felt himself being sucked down to shoulder depth in the river.

"Then the boat disappears and everything turns white,'' he said. "I'm in the hole.''

He eventually pops up. Sees Vernon still paddling crazily. Then goes back down again.

"I wonder, in this chaos, if Gordy knows I'm not on the boat,'' Verzone said.

Not that it mattered all that much. Vernon had no choice but to try to paddle the boat out of the hole, which he finally did. Verzone, meanwhile, managed to kick to one side and break free of the current.

He rode a wave train down to the raft, climbed back aboard, and the two were off to their first Wilderness Classic win since the course went from Hope to Homer on the Kenai Peninsula in 1997.

"It was a good adventure,'' Verzone said. "You never know what's going to happen.''

Second-place finishers Bobbie Schnell and Chris Robertson, a pair of para-rescue jumpers from the 210th Rescue Squadron in Anchorage, can attest to that. They thought they had the race won until they rolled into Talkeetna.

"We didn't sleep during the race,'' Robertson said, "and the first two days we were flying.

"We came down the (Talkeetna) river. We hadn't seen anyone from the start. We'd crossed the creek nobody could cross last year.''

They thought they had the race in the bag, but what they didn't know was that while they had deflated their packrafts and begun an alder-bashing portage around the worst of the canyon, Vernon and Verzone were riding the river to victory.

"We had no idea of Thai and Gordy's secret weapon,'' Robertson said.

But then neither did anyone else.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 16 of the 35 racers who started the race had finished. Here are the early results and times:

ALASKA WILDERNESS CLASSIC

Eureka Summit to Talkeetna - Finishers

Vernon and Verzone, 2 days, 7 hours; Schnell and Robertson, 2 days, 9 hours; Jim McDonough and Butch Allen, 2 days, 11 hours, 13 minutes; Bjorn Flora, Jason Geck and Jeff Bannish, 2 days, 12 hours, 30 minutes; Ben Summit, Tyler Johnson, Hans Neidig and Paul Hanis, 2 days, 12 hours, 51 minutes; Roman Dial and Roman Jr., 3 days, 4 hours, 20 minutes; and Bill Collins, 3 days, 4 hours, 50 minutes.

Juneau Empire Article about the Winter Wilderness Classic

2009-11-23T14:41:00.005-09:00

Here's a link to a 2007 article I found in the Juneau Empire archives about the Winter Wilderness Classic. It covers the Nabesna to McCarthy route.

Juneau Empire Story

2008 Race Report

2009-10-14T06:00:00.001-08:00

27th Annual Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic Race Report
June 15, 2008 - Chicken to Central

The running of the 27th Annual Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic race was the third and final installment of the grueling Chicken to Central course. The course will long be remembered as one of extreme difficulty and attrition, with success rates for the three year period hovering below 60%. The fact that this may well be the first ever Classic where the winning time in successive races became longer rather than shorter speaks volumes about the course. This winning time this year was 5 hours longer than the winning time last year, and 12 hours longer than the winning time in 2006.

A Showdown at Circle Hot Springs
The four winners of the 2008 Classic represented the merging of two teams: Tyler Johnson & Craig “Chunk” Barnard, and Butch Allen & Jim McDonough. How these two teams came to cross the finish line together is a story that will pass into Classic legend.

After traveling separately along slightly different routes over the previous 4+ days, the two teams arrived at Circle Hot Springs at almost exactly the same time, with only 8 miles of gravel road separating them from the finish line in Central. After the initial shock of seeing other racers this late in the game wore off, an old-fashioned, Wild West standoff ensued.

The two teams, although tired and battered, squared up, face to face, to size each other up. The tension was palpable. You could smell the testosterone and body odor. Who would blink first? Who would make the first move towards the road to Central? Nobody wanted to back down. As one racer had remarked at the start of the race, “There will be blood.”

McDonough spoke first. “Well, gentlemen, we have two choices: we can take off running and run until the last man is standing, or we can all shake hands and walk into Central as winners.”

After a few seconds, Chunk broke the silence. “If we walk in, does that mean that I would still be exempt from having to pay future race entry fees?” Race director Butch Allen replied, “Yes. Once you win a Classic you are exempt for life.” “Then that sounds good to me!” Chunk replied.

With the tension finally broken, and Chunk dreaming of a lifetime of free races, the four racers shook hands and congratulated each other and began the victory march to Central. After several miles on the hard-packed gravel, the racers all agreed that the decision to not take part in an all-out sprint was a wise one. All four of the racers began to experience the phenomena that the previous race winner Bobby Schnell has dubbed “exploding feet.” Exploding feet often occurs after hours or days of walking on soft, wet trails, followed by a rapid transition to hard gravel or pavement.

Feet swelled and blisters oozed. Walking the last eight miles was challenging, and by the last mile the pace of the group had slowed to 1.5 miles per hour. Fortunately, cold swamp water in the roadside ditches allowed for periodic soakings. Finally, the group hobbled into the finish like a bunch of old men. It was agreed by all that attempting to run the last eight miles would have done some serious and lasting foot damage.

A Tale of Two Routes
The Johnson/Barnard team (293 total miles) and Allen/McDonough team (284 total miles) followed similar routes. Concerned about possible low water in the Charley basin, both teams floated the 40-Mile River from Chicken towards the border. With travel in Canada strictly prohibited, the Johnson/Barnard team took out at the border and headed due north, following the border cut (a.k.a. the “Swath”) directly. They stayed on the Swath for about 20 miles before traversing inland and taking the high country to the Yukon to avoid the last two burned-out canyons and the dreaded “Valley of 10,000 Sticks.”

The Allen/McDonough team arrived a few hours later and took out at Sam Patch Creek, about a quarter-mile before the border. Having experienced the pain and misery of the Swath in 2006, the boys immediately headed for the high ridges just west of the border. By connecting the ridges and high points, they avoided traveling in the burned out valleys where the trees resembled a giant’s game of “Pick-Up-Sticks”. The ridges were fairly easy traveling since the burned up trees at elevation were smaller diameter and had not started falling over yet. Higher yet, the traveling was even easier on the treeless tundra. Their new route was 9 miles longer (34 miles versus 25) than taking the border cut directly, but they were able to shave almost 7 full hours off their time from 2006 (29 hours versus 36 hours). Having avoiding the dreaded "Valley of 10,000 Sticks", they were literally giddy with laughter when they reached the Yukon and inflated their rafts.

The 110-mile float down the Yukon to Woodchopper Creek that followed was fairly smooth for both teams, with Allen/McDonough making only two brief stops to allow storm squalls to pass. It was also a great opportunity to rest the feet and take some cat-naps in the warm sun. McDonough had purchased a larger packraft specifically for this purpose, and with his 5’5” frame nestled fully inside the raft, it was like having a fully enclosed cabin-cruiser.

Allen/McDonough arrived at Slaven's Cabin just as Johnson/Barnard were leaving. Johnson said they had overslept, taking a total of six hours rest. They told Allen/McDonough exactly where they were going - all the way up Woodchopper and into the high country to avoid the swamps and bushwhacking. There are very few people in Alaska that are stronger in the high country than Tyler and Chunk, and they were certainly playing to their strengths. Tyler recently summitted Cho Oyu without bottled oxygen and Chunk, a Cooper Landing carpenter, arguably spends more days backcountry skiing than anyone else in Alaska. Both are mountain goats for sure. After drying out their gear, Allen & McDonough slept for only three hours to make up some lost time. They gorged on sausage fried in bacon grease before hitting the trail.

The Ghost of Joe Vogler
Allen/McDonough initially planed to head all the way up the valley to the head of Woodchopper Creek, traverse the pass, and then drop down in the Yukon Fork of Birch Creek to float from there. However, the possibility of low water in Birch Creek had cast serious doubts on their plan. As they headed up the valley and started to climb, they crossed what later turned out to be the infamous Joe Vogler (a.k.a. Bielenberg) Cat Trail. They had heard rumors that the trail went all the way to Woodchopper, but nobody associated with the race had yet found the missing link. The Park Service claimed that they had stopped Vogler and his D-8 Caterpillar at Webber Creek, miles short of his intended destination: his mining claim at Woodchopper. The news reports said that Vogler’s dozer was left in its tracks. The July 14, 1984 armed standoff between Vogler’s crew and the Park Service was later dubbed the "Battle of Webber Creek" by the media.

Having a passable trail in front of them, Allen/McDonough abandoned their plans to head into the high country and followed the trail. It seemed to be the only possible way they could keep pace with Johnson/Barnard who, at this point, were several hours ahead of them.

Apparently, Old Joe Vogler must have snuck back in a few weeks later and fired up the cat to finish the job. The dozer track does indeed go all the way from Vogler's claim (now owned by Stan Gelvin) at Woodchopper, past Webber Creek, to the east shore of Birch Creek, and finally on to Circle Hot Springs. Allen/McDonough stayed on the track the whole way in, almost 40 miles from Woodchopper to Circle Hot Springs. Although the track is overgrown in spots and under water for at least half of its length, it was still manageable. By staying in one of the two depressions left by the dozer tracks, they avoided having to walk on top of the wobbly tussocks. The muddy sections presented the greatest challenge, where the depths would range from a few inches to over a foot deep. They had to be careful not to let the deep mud suck the shoes off of their feet.

It took Allen/McDonough about 36 hours to make the 40-mile run from Woodchopper to Circle Hot Springs. Several sections of trail forced them to wade through thigh-deep swamp, but by staying in the dozer ruts they could still manage at least a half-a-mile per hour through the worst of it. They slept on the trail for only one hour during the heat of the day, knowing full well that Johnson/Barnard may still have the advantage in the high country above them. Allen/McDonough could see the ridges and peaks to the south the whole time, and could only speculate on what kind of progress the other team was making.

The Amazing Taco Bell Traverse
As Allen/McDonough slogged through the swamp trail below, Johnson/Barnard were busy working on their masterpiece in the high country. The dynamic duo climbed to the head of Woodchopper, and stayed in the high country for close to 42 miles. Their route to Circle Hot Springs took them up and down no less than ten different peaks, with a total elevation gain of over 15,000 vertical feet (per TOPO route data). Johnson said they had no other choice than to tackle each peak directly. Slippery and unstable slopes of slag would not allow for any side-hilling whatsoever. Additionally, large, unstable boulder fields also had to be navigated, and on more than one occasion, the boys had to react quickly to avoid being crushed by an unstable boulder.

Their traverse should go down as one of the more noteworthy efforts in recent memory, especially when considering how late in the race it took place. At a time when most racers begin to fall apart, Tyler and Craig seemed to get stronger. Also noteworthy is the food the boys were carrying – mostly burritos from Taco Bell.

Into Circle Hot Springs
When Allen/McDonough hit the final stretch of the trail after crossing Birch Creek, they saw no human footprints in the mud ahead of them. Filled with adrenaline at the prospect of their first Classic victory, they pushed hard for the last 11 miles through the muddy trail.

McDonough was pumped up for what looked to be their first Classic victory in six attempts. Allen refused to acknowledge him, repeating the phrase "It's the Classic - anything can happen. Somebody could pop out of the brush at any moment." And Allen was absolutely right. The team was only about a third of a mile from Circle Hot Springs Resort when Johnson/Barnard simply “appeared from nowhere” from the high country and descended onto the trail. It took a few seconds to realize that the two men approaching them were not a hallucination.

McDonough summarized his thoughts: “All along the course, we kept waiting for the wheels to fall off like they typically do. But it just never happened. The food was plentiful. No major navigational mistakes. The route seemed to lie down in front of us. We slept for a total of eight hours which was just enough to avoid hallucinations. As the race went on, we became more and more aware of what was happening, as unbelievable as it was. It's not something that happens often during these races. Sharing the victory with Craig and Tyler was also special, after witnessing what they had done up in the high country. To watch those guys pull off such a huge traverse, especially so deep into a long race, was nothing short of spectacular.”

The Jedi of Pain
This year’s 2nd Place finisher was none other than the “Jedi of Pain” himself, Dr. John Lapkass. As most of you know, John typically makes it a point to race solo and goes to great lengths to keep his whereabouts and his route top secret. John also enjoys longer routes versus shorter ones, assuring that he will enter the “higher plane of enlightenment” that he seeks year after year. The 2008 race represents John’s 16th Classic.

John followed a similar route as the winners, but skipped past Woodchopper Creek and opted for Thanksgiving Creek instead. After battling up Thanksgiving Creek (which is a straight-up bushwhack with no trails whatsoever), he hooked up with the Vogler/Bielenberg trail and followed the swampy track to the finish. His time of 5 days, 15 hours and 57 minutes was almost a full day faster than his time from 2007. John’s 2nd place effort represents what is believed to be his best finish ever. Congratulations, John!

Those racers who stayed up into the wee hours of Friday morning to see John finish were able to witness his euphoric state firsthand. While standing around the fire, John pointed out many of the vivid hallucinations he was experiencing, most notably the Tin Man (from the Wizard of Oz) and the Talking Squirrel in the Fire. John also described the “rock radio” he encountered on the trail last year and again this year. He said the boulder was in the exact same location as last year, only this year it was playing Spanish music rather than Top 40 pop. The particular hallucination was so real that he actually inspected the rock to see if any wires were attached.

7 Days of Bliss
This year’s 3rd place finishers consisted of “Iron” Mike Sullivan and Leo Claunan, both professional pararescuemen (or “PJ’s”) with the Air National Guard in Anchorage. Mike and Leo were the only racers to complete the Charley route this year, and they deserve special mention for grinding out the route despite the low water conditions. They suffered through low water, dwindling food supplies, a few navigational errors, a huge hole in Mike’s raft and Leo’s blown-out shoe. As was the case last year, the Yukon Fork of Birch Creek had very little water in it, and the duo was forced to walk many miles of creek bed before they could float in their rafts. Mike, having scratched the two previous years, was bound and determined to finish the course this year. Their perseverance paid off with a finish time of 7 days, 8 hours and 44 minutes. Way to stay with it, fellas!

The Indomitable Dick Griffith
The 2008 Classic marked the first and only time that the race has had a Master’s Division. Race director Butch Allen created a special rule that allowed all racers over the age of 80 to both enter Canada and use the Steese Highway from Circle to Central.

We only had one official entrant in the Master’s Division – The amazing Dick Griffith, just shy of 81 years old. As most of you know, Dick is truly the Godfather of Alaska adventure racing and the Wilderness Classic. Dick also pioneered the use of the packraft and has floated more rivers since the Classic began in 1982 than most of us can count.

Dick was accompanied by longtime racing companion Jerry Dixon. Some of the duo’s history includes racing together in 4 Wilderness Classics, traversing 7 mountain ranges and skiing 600 miles of the Iditarod Trail. For Jerry, a former smokejumper and Fire Management Officer in the 40-Mile/Eagle area, it was truly an honor to travel with Dick through his old stomping grounds. The pair made several historical stops along the way, including the Long Tom cabin on the 40-Mile River (built in 1910), Jerry’s hand-made log cabin in Eagle, The public use cabin at Nation (built in 1908) and, of course, the amazing Slaven’s Cabin. Dick and Jerry finished the course in the neighborhood of five days.

Jerry described his time with Dick as a magic journey, and likened the experience to “being 20 years old again.” Jerry said one of the highlights of the trip was experiencing the thunderstorms, lighting and rain while on the Yukon.

Dick announced that this, believed to be his 25th race, will be his last Wilderness Classic. He said, “I was already old when this started”, way back in 1982. Dick’s favorite course is still Nabesna to McCarthy, with Eureka to Talkeetna a close second. When Dick introduced the packraft to the Classic in 1982 and nearly beat men that were half his age, he uttered one of his most famous quotes: “Old age and treachery will beat youth and vigor every time.”

We sincerely thank Dick on behalf of all racers, past and present. Dick, your contributions to this race and to human-powered exploration in general will live on for generations to come. Sharing the course with you for one last time has certainly been our privilege. Best wishes on your future journeys.

Return of the Iron Maiden
The 2008 race marked the return of Nora Tobin, whom Dick has dubbed “The Iron Maiden.” As most of you may already know, Nora suffered a severe back injury while skiing back in November of 2007, requiring extensive surgery and rehabilitation. She shattered 3 vertebrae, but luckily did not damage her spinal cord.

To have Nora on the course again was a treat for everyone, as she carries such a positive energy with her wherever she treads. Although low water in the Charley and blistered feet forced her and her partner Brook Kintz to scratch and float the Charley to Circle, it was still a great effort considering, just six months ago, she was hobbling around in a walker with metal rods and screws holding her spine together. She had the body cast removed in March. We all hope to see Nora again in 2009, when she is fully recovered and showing all of the boys how it is supposed to be done. Welcome back, Nora!

Cat Scratch Fever……
As was the case last year, the Charley drainage was low and not kind to racers. The rookie duo of Kyle Amstadter and Ryan Johnson made a noble effort, but eventually scratched at Circle. After dropping into Fish Creek too early (they were lured in by snow that appeared to be water), the duo became separated and lost precious time to bushwhacking and attempting to float the low water in Fish Creek. Their key learning points were: stick to the plan, don’t get separated and never forget that Alaska is Big.

Michael Martin, a professor of Oral Medicine for the University of Washington and a Classic veteran, was fully prepared to lay siege to the Charley route. Knowing it was a long course, he carried a well-stocked pack that weighed 44 pounds at the start. Unfortunately, he succumbed to severe nausea about 30 miles in. After resting and attempting to recover, he decided to slowly head back to Chicken.

Rob “The Yak” Kehrer and Matt Reardon, veterans of the Eureka to Talkeetna races, also fell victim to a similar illness when Rob went down during their traverse from the 40-Mile to the Yukon. The pair had been moving together very well up until the point where Rob’s GI tract literally stopped them in their tracks. By the time Rob had recovered, the duo decided to finish the traverse to the Yukon and float down to Circle where they officially scratched. Knowing how much these guys enjoy racing together certainly guarantees that they will be back in the not too distant future.

Recap and Looking Forward to 2009
2008 was a success in that nobody required outside rescue. All of the people who scratched were able to self-rescue. No planes or helicopters were put into the air. Undeniably, the primary reason for this is the use of satellite phones. Sat phones will continue to be the one and only piece of mandatory gear required by every racer. It is a small price to pay to keep our humble little race off of the front page of the Daily News.

In keeping with Classic tradition, 2009 will mark the start of a new course for three more years. No course decisions have been made yet, but rest assured that the new course will be challenging, unique and will offer many possible route options.

A Special Thanks
Many thanks to the Busby Family and the crew of the Chicken Gold Camp, who once again sent us off in style from Chicken. Your kindness and accommodation will not soon be forgotten.

Thanks also to the Steese Roadhouse in Central, who served many meals to hungry racers and allowed us to use their facility as our command post.

We were fortunate to once again have use of Rourke William’s family homestead at the finish line in Central. Rourke, we are forever in your debt! Many beers were consumed and tales told and retold around the comfort of your fire pit. And we can’t say enough about having real beds to sleep on.

Sherri Tingey has come through once again and agreed to donate a brand new Alpacka Raft. Butch will be coordinating the drawing, which will take place at the post-race party. Stay tuned for times and dates….

And, last but certainly no least, a heartfelt thanks goes out to Ann Marie Sack and Gabriel Goldstein for giving up their time to help the racers at the finish. Ann Marie continues to be our “Angel of Mercy” at the end of a long course. We hope that she still finds us entertaining enough to lend support next year on the new course. And Chef Gabriel is welcome back anytime. That beef stew was to die for, brother!

Respectfully submitted,
Jim McDonough

Official Results – 16 starters, 9 finishers

First Place:
Butch Allen & Jim McDonough

Tyler Johnson & Craig Barnard: 4 days, 22 hrs, 56 minutes

Second Place:
John Lapkass: 5 days, 15 hours, 57 minutes (solo)

Third Place:
Mike Sullivan & Leo Claunan: 7 days, 8 hours, 44 minutes

Master’s Division Winner:
Dick Griffith, age 81 (accompanied by Jerry Dixon): Approx. 5 days.

Scratched:
Matt Reardon & Rob Kehrer (illness – floated out to Circle from above Eagle)
Michael Martin (illness – floated 40-mile back towards Chicken)
Nora Tobin & Brook Kintz (low water in Charley/bad feet – floated out to Circle)
Kyle Amstadter & Ryan Johnson (low water in Charley – floated out to Circle)

Blog update

2009-10-07T13:48:00.002-08:00

Hi everyone, this fall has been a busy one but I hope to start posting more often again pretty soon. Start training now for the 2010 Classic. You'll be glad you did when next summer rolls around.

Quote of the day: "The power to believe in yourself is the power to change fate".

2008 Race Results

2009-09-02T15:02:00.003-08:00

1. Butch Allen
Jim McDonough
Tyler Johnson
Craig Barnard 4 days, 22 hrs, 56 minutes

2. John Lapkass 5 days, 15 hours, 57 minutes (solo)

3. Mike Sullivan
Leo Claunan 7 days, 8 hours, 44 minutes

Master’s Division Winner:
Dick Griffith, age 81 (accompanied by Jerry Dixon): Approx. 5 days.

Scratched:
Matt Reardon, Rob Kehrer, Michael Martin, Nora Tobin, Brook Kintz, Kyle Amstadter, Ryan Johnson

2006 Race Results

2009-08-27T15:18:00.005-08:00

1. Bobby Schnell
Chris Robertson 4 days, 10 hours, 42 minutes

2. Tyler Johsnson
Craig Barnard
Gordy Vernon
Thai Verzone
John Pekar
John Collins 5 days, 13 hours, 10 minutes

3. John Lapkass 6 days, 16 hours, 10 minuets

4. Brad Marden
Merrick Johnston 7 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes

5. Rourke Williams
Bob Groseclose 9 days, 1 hour

Good Motivation

2009-08-26T14:41:00.003-08:00

Watch this video next time you're feeling lazy and don't feel like doing a workout.

2009 Race Results Addendum

2009-08-22T21:25:00.003-08:00

Take a look at the 2009 Race Results again. Luc Mehl came in fourth place but was accidently left out of the original results. Sorry about the ommission Luc, and congratulations on finishing the race. The results should be correct now.