This Alaska Fat Biking Trip Proved That You Can Have Too Much Adventure
My girlfriend Kim and I were three weeks into a fat bike and packraft expedition in Southeast Alaska, a trip that we had planned would take two to three months, but we’d reached an unexpected dead end.
This was our third late-July evening stuck on a remote beach along the Gulf of Alaska, stranded by weather and unable to advance, retreat, and most crucially, restock our supplies. To kill time and distract from our hunger, Kim and I napped in our two-person sleeping quilt.
I dreamt I was running from something frightening, but no matter how hard I tried, the terror at my back gained ground. When we woke from our midday slumber, I redirected my internal uneasiness and read aloud to Kim from our only book, simply titled Ireland. The stories transported us thousands of miles away from our soggy worries.
Later in the afternoon we listened to the VHF radio for a weather report. The National Weather Service had given us reason to hope the night before, but now the conditions sounded as bad as ever-another low-pressure system had moved in to the southern end of the Lost Coast of Alaska, accompanied by 25-mph winds, 9-foot sea swells, and the ubiquitous buckets of rain. We would not be traveling. We agreed to cut our daily food ration of soupy noodles and watered-down oatmeal, once again, even smaller.
Alaskan adventures are an intrinsic part of Kim’s life and mine. My own fascination with adventure came at a young age. I grew up in a small, rural Alaskan community, called Slana, in the interior of the state, surrounded by family friends who were ice climbers, mountaineers, kayakers, skiers, dog mushers, and sailors. At the age of 17, I began to test my own wits and strength in the Alaska backcountry.
Kim was raised in the rainy Pacific Northwest, tromping in the hills, harvesting mushrooms, and learning the ecology of coastal rain forests. In her mid-20s, she moved to Homer, Alaska, for a summer environmental educator job and, after meeting me, never left. Our romance was sealed over our love of wilderness and adventure. Nine years later that passion is still burning.
In the late 1990s, I built up a mountain bike with the widest wheels and tires available and began looking at a map of our state for possible lines. By the time Kim and I met, commercial fat bikes were available. Under my advice she bought a frame and fork, and together we built her wheelset. We cobbled together the rest from my old parts. Since then, expedition cycling has been the steady fixture in our lives, an axis upon which everything else revolves. More so than sea kayaking or mountaineering, long and remote cycling trips issue a distinct challenge-we were sometimes out for up to two weeks between resupply.
Typically, Kim and I pour our energy into big winter trips, and, like most good Alaskans, work in the summer. In 2014, for example, we became the first people to bike from Anchorage to Kotzebue, above the Arctic Circle-a 1,100-mile winter expedition.
For 2015, however, we spent three months scheming up a long-awaited summer expedition: We would ride northwest from Alaska’s capital city of Juneau to our hometown of Homer, a route of almost 1,000 trail- and road-free miles. Our means of travel: lightweight, carbon-fiber Salsa Beargrease fat bikes and Alpacka Denali Llama whitewater packrafts to circumvent the bays, fjords, rivers, and other bodies of water in the way. The six-pound, single-chamber rafts roll up to the size of a stuffed sleeping bag.
As the trip approached, we talked about how a summer expedition would be so much easier: half-naked days riding in the sun, bathing in fresh-water streams, no risk of frostbite, no melting snow for water. Other aspects would be more difficult. On this trip, like many others we’ve concocted, we would send food to the rural post offices along the route, allowing us to resupply. Very few communities exist, however, on the Gulf of Alaska coast between Juneau and Homer. Our loads would be oppressively heavy at the outset and after each resupply.
Our hopeful vision of topless biking on sunny Alaskan beaches got its first dose of reality on our three-day ferry ride down the coast from Homer to Juneau. Chilly rain and thick clouds surrounded us during our sail. We were reminded, as we walked the deck in our rain gear, that people often succumb to hypothermia in the summer months up here as well as in winter.
All eyes were on us as we rode through downtown, which was overtaken with four cruise ships’ worth of tourists. Fat bikes have grown in popularity in south-central Alaska during the last several years, but in Juneau they are still uncommon. It had been a while since we’d heard “Hey, how fat are those tires?” and “Where’s the motor?”
Despite the rain and melancholy atmosphere, we rode over the bridge and away from the capital onto Douglas Island in good spirits. After months of preparation and meditation, we were finally underway. What had taken the ferry three days to cover, we expected to take us the rest of the summer to travel in reverse. We were on our way home.
“If you are caught unprepared by a sudden rainstorm,” a quote from the Samurai manual, the Hagakure, cautions, “you should not run foolishly down the road or hide under the eaves of houses. You are going to get soaked either way. Accept that from the beginning, and go on your way. This way you will not be distressed by a little rain. Apply this lesson to everything.” Two days into our trip, it began to look like this expedition was going to require that particular conviction.
Alaskan innovation and experimentation led to both the fat bike and the packraft, and in a state with scarce trails and few roads, it’s no wonder these clever contraptions sprang forth. But no matter how fat-tired a bicycle is, if the terrain is too soft, overgrown, or otherwise impassable, it becomes necessary to become cleverer still.
Friends of ours had hiked across Admiralty Island years before and told us that the trail across the middle section would be the best way to go. We’d found the trail, but in no time it disappeared into a thick forest, then swamp. “Don’t you dare take a picture,” Kim said as she extracted herself from the waist-deep muck she had fallen into. After recovering on firm ground, she felt bad. “If I fall into another sinkhole, I’ll let you take a picture.”
We finally gave up on the nonexistent trail, returned to the shore we’d landed on, and paddled along the shore instead. Paddling was to be our optimus bene for much of the roughly 80 miles between Juneau and Gustavus, the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park. Until we reached the outer coast beaches along the Gulf of Alaska, we knew the bikes would be marginally useful and potentially cumbersome.
A few days later, Kim and I rode, freshly resupplied, out of Gustavus. Our four overstuffed, flat-rate boxes of food had been waiting for us in the small post office. As we neared the entrance of Glacier Bay National Park, we debated how we wanted to handle the next stage of our journey. There are no bikes allowed in the park wilderness. I extol conservation, but I find it unfortunate that bicycles are often lumped together with motorized vehicles in these protected areas. Although we’d only be paddling our bikes across Glacier Bay, we worried that some fresh-faced park ranger with an itchy citation finger could, with a swift ticket, shoot our expedition to pieces. A friend of ours had been ticketed in this national park for peeing outside. With that in mind, we decided to slink past the park headquarters late at night.
We planned to cross the mouth of Glacier Bay with the last hour of the flooding tidal current. Crossing bays and fjords with strong tidal currents requires precise timing, especially in packrafts, which have a maximum hull speed of about 2.5 miles per hour. According to our plan, the current would gently push us up into the fjord, slacken while we were in the middle, and then turn us out to the mouth as the tide began to ebb. But when the time finally came to make the four-mile crossing, a thick fog band and strong wind rolled in. We delayed the crossing for a day.
As we crossed the following day, we were surrounded by a pod of humpback whales and again our forward momentum was stalled. The moment was too rich to rush past, as one whale after another surfaced in front, behind, and on our sides. We could sense these gentle beasts, their slow and graceful elegance, working the tide to their favor for the sustenance they casually sifted between their hairy baleen filters. The air around us filled with the mist of their breath, and on it was the aroma of the sea and ancient life.
Two days later we again paddled hard against a tidal current to make the last mile into Taylor Bay-our final stop within the inner protected waters. Soon, we imagined, we would be on the outer coast, riding our bikes and making easier miles.
“This makes no sense,” I said. Kim and I were standing in a sketchy boulder field in the narrow valley between the Taylor Glacier and a mountain. On our way up, refrigerator-sized rocks hung precariously above us. We wanted to move quickly, but our route was not syncing up with the map.
We were en route from the protected inner waters to the outer Gulf Coast, traveling along the glacier’s western moat. At first we had been able to weave through the big rocks on our bikes. Eventually, we set in for serious hike-a-biking. We had stripped all the bags off the bikes, stuffed everything into our oversized, lightweight backpacks-Mountain Laurel Designs 72-liter ARK packs-and began schlepping.
But now, after careful study of the rapidly eroding and morphing glacial landscape, we determined that the first lake we should have passed had drained and disappeared, and the second lake was what we had traversed, thinking it was the first. Glaciers make fools of cartographers and adventurers alike. We turned around and carefully descended the shooting gallery-hoping no big rocks bowled down on us-to the spot we should have been in if we hadn’t gotten ahead of the map. From there, we paddled to the beginning of a major overland bushwhack.
We stopped to eat and mentally brace ourselves for the brutality ahead. It brought to mind a running joke between the two of us, based on the cult ’80s flick Better Off Dead, starring John Cusack. In the movie, Cusack’s mother makes a gloppy meal with raisins. As she slops the gelatinous goo onto his plate, she says in a nasally voice, “It’s got raisins…you like raisins.” For years, Kim and I have modified this statement to, “It’s got adventure…you like adventure.” We say this to one another when the misery of our surroundings reaches a fever pitch and one of us shows signs of cracking.
Leaving the shore of the beach, a wall of green foliage immediately greeted us, and within minutes of our march we could no longer see the lake we had left behind any more than we could see our escape from the dense forest ahead.
The line we drew on the map involved going up and over a steep col, which we initially assumed we’d get beyond in one day. As we neared the summit, however, I began to feel sick to my stomach and lightheaded. And it’d begun to rain again-hard. I soon became overtaken with nausea, and dolefully told Kim I needed to stop.
In the downpour and on the only semi-level ground we could find, Kim and I set up a pathetic camp between lumpy spruce tree roots. When the last drop of tea hit my stomach I projectile vomited, spoiling a precious corner of level real estate.
“Could it be the moldy jerky, or that weird suicidal herring we ate?” Kim asked, half jokingly.
“Or maybe I am allergic to bushwhacking with a bike,” I offered. We chose to stifle the unspeakable word: Giardia. I fought against the urge to feel sorry for myself. Adventure…I like adventure.
For the next two days, we pushed and threw our bikes through the brush. For much of the time I felt queasy, and I worried about throwing up again and wasting precious calories. In one particularly bad section, Kim broke down, threw her bike with all her force, and shouted at the forest. Fortunately, we were nearing the end of the brambles.
After a float down the Dixon River and a short portage around Class IV rapids, we were finally on the gulf coast. “I guess it was a bushwhack allergy after all,” I said to Kim. My symptoms had cleared and our optimism began to ratchet back up. A few more headlands were all that remained before the long, open-beach riding would finally begin. But a new storm was developing.
That night I patched a small hole in my raft and we discussed our plan for the following day. Ten miles, as the crow flies, was all that separated us from Icy Cape, the end of the open-water paddling and the beginning of the uninterrupted beach we’d worked hard to reach. With an early start, we hoped to sprint past this pelagic obstacle and remain ahead of the storm.
Our hearts were in our throats as we rounded the first cape in our rafts in the dim, overcast light of morning. Huge, erratic seas sloshed us up and down as the swell crashed into the near-vertical wall of rock to our right and sent the waves rebounding back. The storm had moved in faster than predicted. “Stay close to me,” I called to Kim. Years of experience in big seas with kayaks-which are fitted to our bodies, allowing us to roll if capsized, or brace against waves-helped our composure. But packrafts are not sea kayaks, and this was the most exposed water we had ever ventured in with them.
Once we moved beyond the confused and lumpy waves near the cape, we began to feel the full weight and size of the uninterrupted ocean swell. Our plan to reach Icy Cape evaporated. We needed a new one, quickly.
On our map, it appeared that the southern beach of Boussole Bay was the only semi-reasonable option. As we neared the beach I cautiously moved into the surf zone. After watching several big sets move through, I pulled hard on my paddle, rode the back of a wave in, jumped out, and drug the raft up the beach. I turned around just in time to see Kim being swamped by a wave. In a flash, she was out of the water and running her gear up to me. Dripping wet and with wide eyes, she said, “That’s the limit.” We had pushed the gear and ourselves to the brink.
Brown bear tracks littered the beach that we understood would be our new home until the seas calmed. We took stock of our beautiful but storm-battered surroundings-steep forested mountains, blanketed in mist, rose up on either side of the low-lying, miles-wide sandy valley. We found high ground, set up shelter, and painstakingly built a big fire with wet driftwood. It served a few purposes: to make a hot meal, warm and dry our soggy bodies, and send a smoke signal alert to the bears of the valley.
Three days later we sat in our shelter, still pinned down, and began to debate our options. Returning the way we’d come seemed unthinkable. Besides, the beach we’d need to land on to retreat was now being hammered by nine-foot-high breakers, as were the beaches ahead. We could only continue to cut our food rations and hope that the storm would soon pass.
When the clouds lifted a little, we could see Icy Cape, a mere eight miles distant, being battered by the explosive waves. Icy Cape or the moon, it made no difference. We were stranded.
As the rain-soaked days wore on, our already watered-down meals grew smaller and smaller. Kim took to jigging for rockfish to help supplement our dwindling stores. In a small waterproof box we carried a trifling tackle box. I tied one end of a fishing line around an animal leg bone. Onto the other end I tied a lure and a couple of lead weights. Lying prone over a wave-battered boulder, Kim dipped the shiny lure into the sea. Over the next two days her efforts were rewarded with a few spiny, meal-size fish, but our clothing still hung looser on our bodies and Kim’s face began to look drawn and gaunt.
After five days, we took stock of the remaining food-two days of rations, with more than 100 miles to go to our next resupply, and no end in sight for the storm. It was time, we agreed. With heavy hearts we punched a message into our inReach two-way, satellite texting device: “Send a plane to these coordinates, please.”
Southeast Alaska is typically a wet region, but later we would learn that the summer of 2015 was one of the wettest on record. The community of Sitka experienced a lethal landslide in the month of August due to persistent and heavy rains. Our expedition was ambitious and required no small amount of luck. Sadly, this was not luck’s season.
As we lifted off the beach in the wheeled, single-engine bush plane, I was filled with tremendous remorse. We’d fought hard to reach the semi-open terrain suitable for our bikes, only to be denied access. Were we just being soft, I wondered? Were we giving up too easy? Learning the limits of constantly evolving equipment while pushing our personal boundaries in new environments is thrilling, but it’s often hard to know where the actual threshold is. I knew we’d found ours.
Our air taxi was based out of Yakutat, which had been our next objective. The pilot flew below the clouds, along our proposed route back to the village. As I looked down at the swell-battered coastline and the rain-swollen creeks, we spied the herculean challenges that still remained. All of the creeks were in extreme flood stage, many may have not been passable at all, and paddling offshore to avoid them was out of the question due to the heavy, breaking waves. It finally sank in-we hadn’t stood a chance.
After paying our substantial air charter bill, Kim and I walked into the lodge at the Yakutat airport and ordered breakfast with extra everything. An hour later, around noon, the menu switched, so we ordered lunch.
Nineteenth-century explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen, who spent three years attempting and ultimately failing to reach the North Pole, once said, “Have you not succeeded? Continue! Have you succeeded? Continue!” With a full stomach and a beer in hand, Kim and I began to discuss what we wanted to attempt next.
The following March, Kim and Bj?rn successfully rode 450 miles from Nome to Kivalina in the Northwestern Arctic region of Alaska; in June and July of 2017, they did a 430-mile packraft–fat bike expedition from Point Hope to Utquigvik. They were the first to attempt, and complete, both routes.
You Might Also Like