Crossing The Gates of Alaska:. Dave Metz
bags, but it has no real effect. Then I take my socks off and check for any discoloration. To my relief they appear normal. I massage my bare feet with my hands and the warmth from my hands transfers to my feet. Then I run my fingers between each toe to get rid of all moisture and dirt, which also helps warm them. I find this is the most important procedure I can do to prevent frozen feet. I do it at least twice a day, once when I wake up in the morning and once before going to sleep at night.
I sit for a while fully clothed and make decaffeinated coffee with cocoa added in. I relish the steamy-warm drink and the chocolate taste here, but at home I never drink cocoa. Here I’ll drink any warm beverage I have without feeling guilty. I don’t worry about gaining weight or rotting my teeth; I care about eliminating my immediate discomforts. Soon, all the normal feeling returns to my feet. I can feel the warm blood surging from my feet into my toes, and I begin to feel grateful that I’m going to be fine. I also learn that sitting up helps warm my feet. Maybe this allows blood to flow into my toes more easily. I run my iso/butane stove for a couple minutes longer than I really need to just because the heat feels so good. I can’t go outside until my whole body is warm. It’s difficult to keep feet warm outside if you start out with cold feet. I need them to be warm once I get outside because it will take me some time to create ample body heat from exercise. And that basically is what keeps my toes warm. If I just stood still for an hour out in the cold, they would go numb. I start keeping my boots inside my outer sleeping bag at night so they will be thawed out in the morning. The number of items I must keep in my sleeping bag at night so they won’t freeze up grows: my headlamp, my boots, my water bottle filled with water, my watch, and my stove. I don’t mind all these things in my sleeping bag, as long as it means they will function in the morning. But I wonder if soon there won’t be any room for me.
March 27, 2007
My new stove arrives, and I’m able to leave Kotzebue and those crazy snowmobiles tearing around. I pack up my food and tent to get ready to leave. It takes me a long time, and I have to get back in the tent twice to warm up my feet before I can take it down. Taking down the tent is always my final task before departing in such cold weather. Once I make the commitment to take down my tent I work fast. Then I load it up and finish lashing the sleds. As soon as everything is loaded and ready, I hurry off to get the warm blood rushing through my veins so I can warm my toes. If my toes don’t get warm in thirty minutes, I have to stop, erect my tent, and get back inside to warm up. I can’t risk getting frozen feet when I’m traveling alone. If the air were warmer I would probably be able to take my time and think about where I’m headed, and how dangerous the cold will be. The only reason I’m able to head out on my own at all is because I don’t have time to think about it. It’s too cold to sit around pondering the future. It’s too cold to wait. It’s too cold to think.
The way we travel is called skijoring. I think it has Scandinavian origins. I put a special harness on each dog, one that has a loop far down their back—not up toward their shoulders like cheaper harnesses—where I connect a stretchable cord from my hip belt to their harness. Jimmy and Will travel side by side. They travel in front of my skis a few yards while I travel in front of my two sleds. I also have two aluminum poles that fasten from my hip belt to my first sled, to stop it when I stop without it running up on me from behind.
I haul a heavy load and I’m a little shaky on skis; I haven’t skied any this year. I used to ski every weekend years ago in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. I got pretty good and did a few ski races, too, though backcountry skiing was my favorite. This kind of skiing is far different and it takes me a couple of hours to get accustomed to the shock cords the dogs pull with. They stretch out or snap back each time the dogs adjust their efforts. They pull strongly now since they are so fresh and fit. Each time they reach the maximum distance they can stretch the cords, I launch forward behind them as the cords snap back. The dogs haven’t figured out how to keep a constant tug on their cords yet. They pull as fast and as hard as they can until their cords fully stretch out and they are forced to slow up as the tension becomes too great. Then I shoot forward as they hold their ground. The tension decreases and the dogs launch off again. “Easy guys, easy,” I say, but they don’t listen very well. This goes on for about fifteen minutes at the start of the first few days, but eventually the dogs learn how to anticipate the tension increase and decrease. Then they start to modify their efforts to make their pulling steadier and easier. I like to watch Will just before the sleds and I begin to shoot forward. I can almost see his mind working as his body tenses up right before the decrease in tension. He gets excited when it decreases because he loves to be able to run faster for a few strides until the tension builds back up. And he never looks back at me unless he is dead tired. A fresh animal scent on the snow in front of the dogs, or a scent carried to them by the wind, will excite them both. Then they will sprint forward like rockets, and all sense of pace and energy efficiency is forgotten. They pull like mad until they either reach the source of the scent, or it goes away. I let them run until their hearts are content at times like these, but when they want to veer off to the side I keep us on course by leaning in the opposite direction they are pulling. The snow is icy and hard, and it’s difficult to keep my skis from slipping out from under me when the dogs are yanking on me. Sometimes they pull me over. The tension on their cords becomes too great for them and they realize that to decrease the tension they must get back in front of me. It’s amazing how quickly they learn. And they seldom want to go back behind me. They don’t want to go where they have already been. I don’t blame them.
We follow snowmobile tracks four miles out onto the Baldwin Peninsula, which is a long piece of land that reaches over a hundred miles out from mainland Alaska. This time of year it looks like a flat, icy wasteland, with only an occasional shrub poking through the ice to convince me I’m on land at all. Every direction I look is level, frozen ground to the skyline. The last twenty or thirty miles of the peninsula is about ten to twenty miles wide and on a world map it looks like a skinny thumb with a fat tip protruding northwest into the dark blue sea. I plan to angle off this peninsula and head east over to the Kobuk River Delta, where I will follow the Kobuk River a hundred miles inland to the village of Ambler.
Halfway through our first day, a dog musher out on his daily training run comes up from behind. I don’t have time to react so I can move off the trail to let him pass. His dogs run into us from behind, and Jimmy and Will lunge into the middle of them. As they turn they pull me over while I’m strapped to my sled and skis. I expect the man to apologize for running up on me. As I fight to get my ankles untwisted while they are still strapped to my skis, I can’t see what is happening behind me. “Control your dogs,” the man yells at me. I’m frustrated about having fallen over while still strapped to my gear. “Control your dogs,” he yells again, which by now agitates me and sets me off. I think he expects me to apologize for being in his way.
“You ran into me,” I yell back. I give him a stern look and wait for his response, but he doesn’t say anything else. He manages to get his dogs past us as I hold Jimmy and Will. Then he stops about forty feet in front of us to untangle his dog lines and takes off again. Jimmy and Will don’t stand still to wait for other dogs to pass like I’m sure the man is used to. Jimmy and Will are large terriers, and terriers won’t stand passively to watch a dozen panting huskies gallop by. They always want to be in the thick of things, to get up close to other dogs. We follow the man’s trail for a while and Jimmy and Will run hard while the fresh scent of huskies is in front of us.
We can’t travel as fast as a dog sled because my sleds don’t have runners like a dog sled. The entire undersurface of each of my sleds rides against the snow, and this is much slower than if it were just two thin runners sliding against the surface of the snow. On the undersurface of my sleds there are several dull, rounded fins that run the length of each sled. These help keep the sleds from sliding sideways while we are traversing side slopes. But a dog sled only works well on flat, hard-packed snow, not in the mountainous backcountry where I’m heading. Their runners will sink in deep, fresh snow, while the flat surface of my sleds will ride more on the top of the snow.
Since I injured my back before coming on this trip, my fitness suffered, so I get tired too soon and I don’t want to risk re-injuring my back. I’m not really sure how I did it. I was training the dogs to get them used to pulling a sled by letting them pull me on my bicycle while I had their leashes wrapped