“Man, this weather makes me so angry. Are you regretting not racing this year?”
“Not even a tiny bit.”
What draws you back
I’ve been on lots of trips in my 39 years on this earth. I went to all 50 states by my 30th birthday* (*plus a 30 day grace period, to accommodate schedules). According to a buzzfeed-style online quiz I just took, because I got curious and couldn’t remember, I’ve visited 10% of the world’s countries. Nearly all of these trips have been lovely, with magical moments and new experiences and things I knew I’d remember for years to come.
And I knew I’d never be back.
The first time I visited Alaska back in 2015 (for said 30th birthday), I kind of thought I’d never be back. I wasn’t especially outdoorsy then. My then-boyfriend and I showed up at an outfitter on the edge of Denali National Park, totally clueless, and the poor woman who owned the place took pity on us and set us up for a three entire day CAMPING trip where we managed to not kill ourselves. Funny, looking back, how little I knew. Thankfully, Outfitter Lady was legit and some of the gear I got then is still in my standard 3-season backpacking kit.
Six years later, I found myself back in Alaska, under very different circumstances, in a different season, with different people…and for whatever reason, this time something clicked. And I KNEW I’d be back. I’ve been back every winter since. First for fun, then for ITI camp, and then to try to my hand at the race itself last year.
If you’re stumbling across this and seeking some context, the story of my attempt to ski the ITI350 last year can be found here.
and here.
and here.
and also here.
I had a lot to say. And that thing that clicked? I still haven’t quite pinned that down yet. For now, I’ll characterize it thusly: I’m still not done with Alaska just yet.
So, I knew I was going to race again and go for that finish. But the immediate realities of the situation screamed to take a year off. I didn’t feel comfortable to sign up again not knowing how my frostbite would heal, or how I would finance gear, travel, and other expenses besides credit card debt. The time, training, and financial burden of 2024’s attempt all needed to be recovered from, before I could dive back into all that.
But a winter trip back West to keep my streak alive, help the race, and get to hang out somewhere awesome for a week? Sign me up! When Adrian came asking if I wanted the open volunteer position at Finger Lake, I was an immediate and hard yes. A great opportunity to stay involved with the race, learn from 100+ athletes who could come through, and defendably give me a reason for another trip to the 49th state. The details were simple: just get myself to Anchorage, with the right gear to hang out for a week in a dry cabin and wall tent.
The weather in Alaska has been strikingly different from last year’s lead-up to ITI. Last year was a record snow year in Anchorage. Within 24 hours of my arrival (3 weeks early, to acclimate and train), the mercury plunged to -43f. This year the weather was…mild. Warm, even. Too warm. Anchorage has next-to-no snow on the ground, and the conditions remained snowless so far up the trail that the Iditarod Dog race had to pull a last minute switcharoo and start their race from Fairbanks.
As a checkpoint volunteer, I also helped out at the racer check-in and party that happens the Friday before race start. The scuttlebutt among the bikers was that this year would be fast. Possibly record-breaking. I chatted with Kyle, the Race Director that I saw nearly every day on the trail last year. This year, he wasn’t even getting to follow the race form the ground, because the leaders were anticipated to move so fast and the logistics further up the trail called for his plane and pilots license within the first 24 hours to move checkpoint supplies into position. What a difference a year makes!
The ski and foot athletes were nervous about a long snowless stretch of trail after Rohn. This area typically has a couple dozen miles with sparse snow, but the extreme conditions this year created a 70-mile stretch that was nearly truly snowless. Pulling sleds and melting drinking water are both very hard on dirt. Last minute gear shits and mods to address this challenge were untested and making everyone nervous.
They’re off! [And I am also off. At the same time. Hope we get the tent up before they arrive!]
Sunday morning, the day of race-start, I met my pilot and plane at the Lake Hood Seaplane base in Anchorage. We flew out in a Cessna 206 float plane packed to the gills with the checkpoint wall tent and other supplies. The flight path parallels the route I took last year after scratching in Rohn, so it wasnt a total surprise, but its always a stunning flight when you have good visibility. We could see clear to Denali, and I felt like I could have reached out and almost touched Mt. Susitna, the Sleeping Lady.
The plane did a fly-by of Finger Lake before turning around to land on the snow airstrip (video below), which felt like a scene out of a movie. Also a scene out of a movie–my welcoming committee of snowmachines and sled dogs running up the runway after the plane. Alaska Uber, indeed!
I landed on Finger Lake about Noon, and immediately met Wes and Taylor, the Lodge caretakers on-site. Tony, the other ITI volunteer, was the same Tony who volunteered at Rohn last year so we were already best buds :). We immediately got to work setting up the checkpoint with all the supplies I’d ferried in with me. We anticipated the leaders could get to us as quickly as midnight that same night. We wanted to be sure we were all set with a warm tent, food, and everything they might need.
Thankfully, the weather was fully cooperating. I was finding it hard to believe that I’d been through this place last year. THIS was Finger Lake? THE Finger Lake of the demon windstorm, zero visibility, almost missing my turn, and feeling like the tent was going to blow away across the lake? It was so…calm. And nice out!
We got the tent erected and tied down, wood stove installed and operational, and set up and organized inside before we lost daylight. We even had time afterward for a little sunset sled dog ride, with Wes and Taylor taking me out on the sled behind the Lodge’s resident team for a run up the finger of Finger Lake. Pretty amazing to be dog sledding right there off of the Iditarod Trail!
We had access to Starlink at the lodge which was about a 4 minute walk from our Checkpoint Wall tent this year, which was a huge help to be able to access the TrackLeaders race online tracker and know when to expect racers. Tony and I decided to both stay up to see the leaders come through. We turned on the Tent’s twinkle lights a few minutes before they were set to arrive (2am), and mother nature fired up her twinkle lights at the exact same time. What a show!
Race Flow
The race leaders came thought tight at 2am as a pack of four–Tyson, Clinton, Tim, and John. As they rolled up, I stated they were kind of freaking everyone out with how fast they were traveling. The response? “That’s the idea, right? It’s a race!” Fair enough! They were super friendly and upbeat considering they’d been biking for nearly 12 hours straight at a record-matching pace. After some time sitting around the woodstove, drying out, resting their legs, and refueling off of snacks from their drop bags and our official race Burritos(TM), they packed up and shipped out together at about 3:30am. Would any of them crack that record? We’d all have to wait and see. The lead women bikers, Lael, followed by Kate, rolled in shortly after. Kate was having a scary issue with her vision blurring and couldn’t really see well on arrival. I helped her get what she needed off her bike, change her batteries, and such so she could recoup and dry out her gear. Thankfully it seemed on the mend after 45minutes, and she was able to continue on. She later said it cleared up by the time she got to the next checkpoint, and she was able to continue on for a second place finish in the Women’s 350 Bike!
Once the lead women were through, Tony tucked up the hill to get a few hours of sleep, and I…ahem…definitely totally stayed up the rest of the night.** (**only one racer had to wake me up off the floor to check in.) As the sun rose, the checkpoint flow fell into a rhythm. Tony had chainsawed, chopped and split a metric fuck-ton of firewood in the two days before I arrived, which was an incredibly big workload off of our shoulders in the midst of the event itself. The two of us ran the tent (or took turns running errands) together though the busy stretches, and alternately took breaks up the hill to nap, relax, and check in back home during quieter periods.
Racers would generally start to arrive around sun-up (7-8:30am), stop for a breakfast break, and continue on. Those arriving late morning and into lunch had typically already put in a number of hours on the trail and would stop for longer breaks, often including a quick post-lunch nap in the tent. mid-afternoon arrivals were a mix of quick stops and longer rests, with some folks tucking in to sleep and await cooler temperatures to travel on starting later in the evening. Evening arrivals typically lingered planned to sleep until witching hour and get moving again in the wee dark hours of the morning, and folks arriving proximate to midnight often chose to sleep until sunup. The longer we got into the race, the longer these rest periods got–by day 3, folks were often sleeping for 8+ hours before continuing on.
When a racer arrived, Tony or I would try to greet them while they were still outside of the tent to help orient them. We’d get their drop bag, and get them checked in on our official list. We had the wood stove to sit by or hang gear by to dry layers out (whether damp from sweat or a tumble into a snowbank!), hot and cold water, coffee, booze, burritos, trash bags where racers could empty their pockets of wrappers, and abandoned drop bag bins of racer’s spare food, chemical hand warmers, batteries, advil, and other disposable items that were now up for grabs to other racers. One long side of the tent is reserved for sleeping on carpet padding and outdoor rugs where racers laid out their sleeping pads and sleeping bags. The tent got quite crowded at certain rush times and some preferred to take a nap or overnight rest outside instead. Below are some typical scenes.
Josh, who has gone to Nome on skis and on foot, was marveling at how much faster the bike travel was!
A look around the tent when it was full of action
Is this the same Finger Lake!?
Looking back on my race report last year, the following phrases were used to define the approach into, and departure out of, Finger Lake Checkpoint: “…and the wind cometh“, “a biblical plague”, “so strong it nearly bowled me over”, “physically lean into it to keep going”, “nearly snatched away my mitts from my hands”, “on the surface of Hoth”, “a demon windstorm”, “floundered across the lake”, ” the tent almost DID blow away overnight”, “wind was still positively howling outside”, and “it do be windy.”
Sensing a theme?
If last year’s checkpoint theme was “Demon Windstorm Cometh”, I officially dubbed this year’s theme “Margaritaville”. The weather, the weather – what a contrast! I almost couldn’t get it to sink in that it was the same physical place as those conditions last year. And each day, I desperately soaked it in, assuming that the next day would bring the blustery, tempestuous skies that the area is renowned for. But day after day, the morning sun rose clear and burned off lingering clouds for sunny, calm, bluebird skies. Barely a whiff of wind billowed the tent doors, and each night the calm and clear skies alternately displayed an explosion of stars or the Northern Lights–and often both!
Nearly every single racer who had competed last year rolled up to the tent commenting on the difference in conditions. When I shared with them that I was a racer last year, often their face would light up at the opportunity to swap windstorm war stories, or at least to know they’d found a fellow commiserator knew they weren’t exaggerating. The friend quote up top here is from a fellow 2024 racer who also took this year off. He was poking to see if I regretted sitting 2025 out since the weather conditions were so…perfectly pleasant. Did I feel cheated, that the wind took so much out of me (and frostbit my fingies!) that I hadn’t gotten a finish? Easy answer. Nope. I just feel like I got my winter ultra money’s worth from 2024. Echoing what I said on the WWW Youtube series (linked at the bottom here)–its not that the trail was easy this year, its never easy, but some years the conditions make it more favorable than others, and 2025 is just one of those years!
The pleasant weather made it easier to run the checkpoint, too. We set up the tent in under an hour with zero wind or precipitation slowing us down. When the tent was busy, I could just chill outside in a camp chair, soaking in the sun out of everyone’s way. We didn’t have to stay up all night standing at the corner points of the tent to literally hold it down from blowing away (ahem, last year they did). No frostbit or pre-hypothermic athletes to assist with. It was as simple as this: 4.5 awesome days, hanging in great conditions, on a beautiful scenic lake, with an endless stream of cool people who doing epic things moving through,. Lots of the racers were total characters–hilarious stories, dirty jokes, wild hallucinations, volunteer gifts and handmade thank-you cards…Tony and I were continuously surprised, and always in a good way.
A Grande Finale
Our final five athletes, all on foot, arrived in quick succession on Wednesday late afternoon. After a bit of R&R, they made an agreement to all set their alarms for 1am. This way they could depart together after reasonable and unterrupted sleep. As a checkpoint volunteer, I will say it would be great if more groups could achieve this level of coordination. This allowed me to head to bed for a few hours and set my alarm for 12:45 to come down and make fresh coffee! (Tony manned the tent to keep the fire going and be available as needed–thanks TONY!).
When I came down to the lake at 1am, the aurora was just starting to drift along the horizon. While Sarah, Carla, Jim, Klaus, and Donald had breakfast ( is 1am breakfast?) and got prepared to leave for the next 90 minutes, Tony and I most stood outside the tent, eyes trained straight up, agape. The Aurora was exploding. Tony checked later and it had been a couple hour bust of storm-level aurora. I’ve seen aurora, but never anything as vivid as this! It looked like it was being poured in from a pitcher straight overhead and cascading down in a dome all around us, filling the sky in 360 degrees. It was pulsing like a heartbeat, flashing like a strobe light, shimmering like a waterfall. I’d always warned my sister (a keen Northern Lights chaser): the colors dont really show up that much to the naked eye, those bold greens and reds are a trick of the camera. Turns out…wrong! They were right there, actually better to the eye than the camera.
Above is my attempt to document with no photography skills and a piddly little iPhone 12. Apologies. I guess you kinda just had to be there.
With all the athletes through and on their way 11 hours before our cutoff, we started to break down the checkpoint. Tent to storage, food to donate, supplies to pack up and haul back to Anchorage by snowmachine or plane…we got it all sorted and Tony headed out with Brian, ITI Trail Crew volunteer who had been at Rohn checkpoint, about lunch. Quick work to break down our happy little outpost we’d run for 5 days!
Weather had definitely moved into the mountains, with intermittent fog, haze and snow blanketing the mountains from view. Thankfully, I received word that my flight was still going to make it in to get me back to civilization. Wes gave me a lift out to the airstrip once Devon had landed, and I got to have what I thought of as my Peak Alaskan Moment (TM):
- getting a lift on a snowmachine;
- away from a beautiful remote lodge;
- to a snow airstrip on a frozen lake lake;
- as my bush-plane landed;
- while being chased by sled dogs;
- on the Iditarod trail.
I mean…does it get more alaskan than that?!
Apparently it does, as our fist attempt to fly back to Anchorage was thwarted by a sudden ice storm. Right about over Shell Lake (~15 miles into the flight), we pulled a U-ie and headed straight back to Finger Lake. Devon (the pilot) told me the reason was not the visibility, but concern how much ice was building up on the wings. Cool cool, cool. Anyways, Devon is a total pro, we landed without incident, it was warm enough the plane ‘self de-iced’ on the lake, and we just went and hung out in the lodge kitchen to wait it out. He (and his partner back at base in Anchorage) ascertained our weather window by checking radar and weather camera stations at Skwentna and the Denali-cam. Pretty soon, bout 60 minutes after we’d landed, he announced we were good to go and we did the departure all over again!
We flew even lower than typical on the way back, and followed the twits and bends of the Skwentna a bit closer than my other two flights, both to help with visibility. According to the flight software and my Garmin app on my phone, we were flying about 400-500 feet above sea level, so about 300-400 feet off the ground. At moments it felt like we were at risk for clipping the tops of the trees! We went through one more minor squall (snow this time, not ice), then popped out of cloud cover to a panoramic view of the Cook Inlet, all of Anchorage, and the Chugach Range beyond–it was quite a welcome back to civilization!
**Note: I also shared my experience from the checkpoint on the WildWinterWomen’s daily YouTube news update: a chunk of it is probably redundant to what I shared here, but if you prefer a Podcast-style version…here ya go!
Decompression
Please enjoy these slides from my 72 hour post-ITI vacation. Thanks to the generosity of my lovely friend Katie, I got a free stay at the AK Dogstead in Big Lake. This is one and the same where I lived and worked from Yurt for three weeks last year, but this year featured an upgrade to the cabin! Shower, laundry, and full kitchen…oh my. Its so nice to land somewhere familiar. I had some nice relaxing long morning walks on the trail network–due to the mild winter, the trails did not have enough snow for dogsleds so I didn’t have to watch my back quite so much as past visits!
I took a morning trip into the town of Palmer, 40 minutes away. I wanted to thank the folks who had helped me last year as a racer, so I brought a big bag of pastries to the ski shop that had serviced my skis for me last year before the LittleSu 50K and ITI. This is not something I would have thought to do before my volunteer stint, but seeing how others had shown such gratitude toward us for supporting their effort, I was feeling like paying it forward. They were quite surprised but very appreciative! Palmer is an adorable little town, with a tight grid of shops and restaurants surrounded by open fields and mountain views on three sides. I went to a few shops and ended up getting into long conversations with the storekeepers at each stop. Its a spot I could definitely see spending more time!
I got to go into Anchorage and experience the Iditarod Sled Dog race ceremonial start, which starts right downtown. It typically runs a 12 mile route through the city but this year had to shorten to only a couple of miles due to lack of snow. I hung out near the start and even got to sneak to the front to watch a couple of starts. I got to meet a few folks who I have only interacted with online, who were there to watch the start of the race. It was a very fun, mild morning of people watching, street carnival atmosphere and LOTS of sled dogs. Finally, Katie and I got to catch up Sunday morning with a good long lunch before I headed to the airport to begin the long trip home to New England. It was great to see half her dog-pack afterwards too…Frankie the mini pibble remains teddy-bear adorable.
Video of Bib #27 Quince Mountain’s Iditarod start!
On Gratitude
So…are you actually glad you didn’t race this year?
Yup. A main original driver for me participating in ITI, in any capacity, was just to see the trail. Due to the nature of a race, particularly one with time cutoffs, there are always parts of the course you move through in the dark, or in shitty weather, or when you’re expressly not feeling it, that you just sort of…miss. You may see them with your eyes but not take them in, zoning in and out due to hunger or tiredness (or both). You may pass through in the dark, unable to see beyond your headlamp cone or what moonlight reveals. Last year, I came into Finger Lake in the dark, in a windstorm, and departed at first light in…still a windstorm. I didn’t see the lodge. I didn’t even take in the fact that we were surrounded by mountains. For all intents and purposes, despite being at the checkpoint 10 hours…I sorta missed Finger Lake.
Getting to come back and really soak in this special place was such a gift. Seeing the mountains reveal and conceal themselves in weather, seeing the northern lights and bright panoramic star-filled sky, seeing still quiet sunrises and sunsets, enjoying the warm, the somewhat cold (we never got real cold!)…I soaked it up. I let myself revel in the beauty of staying put. After my first visit to Finger Lake, I had a healthy respect for it. But now its a special place for me.
Can we take one more minute to talk about Tony? Tony is the best. I met him last year at Rohn when I hung out for ~26 hours after my scratch. Tony and Jay took such good care of us there, and then when the other racers moved out, we got to help set up for the dog sled race together before James and I were shipped back to Anchorage. This year, we got to spend a whole lot of time together. Tony arrived days before me, and did a bulk of the heavy lifting including building the tent platform (with Wes and Taylor’s help!) and splitting days’ worth of firewood. Equal parts goofy and thoughtful, Tony was constantly making me laugh over some hairbrained thought or idea. He also was always three steps ahead of me in our volunteer tasks, from moving wood to prepping burritos to bringing down a 40th load of hot water for for the 5 gallon Yeti jug. One night, as we switched shifts, I went up to my staff cabin at 1am and he had made me a fire in my woodstove. I fully expect to come across Tony somewhere on the trail next year, as part of the the trail crew and/or checkpoint volunteer, and I will be disappointed if I don’t. I’m very grateful for Tony.
ITI 2024 was about fortitude, about learning to go to the well and dig deeper to keep moving down the trail. This year, while not racing, it was gratitude that percolated up as the defining trait of my ITI 2025 experience. I felt it as deeply as I ever have. I felt it emanating from Kate, the biker who came in with blurred vision and relied on me to dig through her frame bags, replace her batteries, and hang her gear to dry. I felt it from Tracie, a phenom skier who went on to smash the women’s 350 record, who found our tent to be simply much too warm (it was a hot day by winter ultra standards!) and had a picnic out front, sorting her gear out front and handing me little piles of trash to dispose of with a smile and a thank you each time. I felt it from Beth, who couldn’t sleep due to a wracking cough, who accepted my Nyquil and then I got to enjoy hearing her settle in, pass out, and start softly snoring as her body finally let her rest and recover. I felt it from Jonathan, the skier who’s (absolutely fucked!) feet skied away from our checkpoint with fresh padded blister coverings and a handful of wet ones to keep those blisters clean and tidy all the way down the trail. I felt it from Jason, my buddy from ITI camp and last year’s race who arrived with a big hug and had his biggest race day coming through my checkpoint, moving for nearly 24 hours straight to secure his first finish a couple days later. I felt it from Erick, the skier from France who had a huge grin on his face and told me “it was just “so nice to ‘parle français’ on the trail!” after a quick conversation in his home tongue with Quebecois racer Daniel. I felt it from Cheryl, our only scratch at Finger Lake, who called the dry cabin accommodations “a five star Hilton!” and was beaming how glad she was that she had even made it to the start and made it as far as she had, after suffering a serious car accident two years ago where ever walking again was in doubt. I felt it from John and Jerry, an absolutely raucous pair who came through the checkpoint all booming laughs and dirty jokes and irrepressible good humor. I felt it from Alexandria, a cyclist who was a literal ray of positive energy and couldn’t stop gushing about the incredible experience of riding down the trail, and how even the awful parts had been amazing. I felt it from Klaus, an ITI perennial veteran and our final athlete to arrive, who couldn’t stop smiling when he learned there was a sled dog named Klaus now on the Winterlake sled dog team, and “now [he] could retire from the race when [he] chose, because a Klaus would remain on the Iditarod trail!”
I felt an extra little jolt of happiness as each of these athletes I had interacted with crossed their finish line in McGrath, or at least arrived to get giant pancakes and some R&R before continuing on to Nome. I felt it in the handwritten cards, and chocolate bars, and cash that the racers had for us, the volunteers, carrying them from the start in Knik (the cash got passed on to the Winterlake Lodge caretakers for all their help all week!). I felt it from all the excited and thankful replies and to my janky Instagram story updates that I tried to blast out a couple of times per day, walking those 4 minutes back over to the WiFi signal to share out the smiling faces of racers pouring through. I felt it from the race boosters who flew out and landed their personal planes to encourage the athletes, ask after specific racers they had met prior years, leave cookies and other goodies for the racers in our CP tent, and carry out our bags of trash for us.
Even for a proper New England cynic like myself, all this was truly and unavoidably infectious. I got to be here, sitting in the sun, staring out over bluebird skies, storybook mountains, taking part in something amazing. Hell yeah I was grateful.
But I’ll see ya’ at the start line next year, skis in-hand. We racin’.
The TypeTwoFun Club 
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