The Adventurer's Son(25)
It was hard to argue with that.
LIKE MANY OF us, Roman shifted his interests when puberty arrived and he became more interested in adventure than natural history. Between his junior and senior year of high school, he suggested we compete together in the 2004 Wilderness Classic. Roman’s initiative to enter the race was a natural outcome of family hiking trips and the fact that Peggy and I had participated together three times ourselves. At sixteen, he figured he could meet any outdoor challenge his mother could.
At fourteen, Roman had helped me field-test an adventure race course in the Alaska Range. As he preran the course with Peggy, me, and a handful of others, Roman discovered his endurance and tolerance for discomfort on a new scale. He also discovered the excitement of swift-water packrafting. The Classic would test his boating skills, as well as his tolerance for discomfort and his endurance. I also knew from a dozen Classics that the grueling event’s rugged courses destroyed participants’ feet. For Roman’s first race, I proposed that we use mountain bikes and packrafts to avoid “feet-beat,” making the experience as positive as possible for him.
Fortunately, Roman had commuted by mountain bike, winter and summer, five miles each way every day all through middle and high school. To train specifically for the Classic, we pedaled and pushed our bikes up nearby mountains and paddled down rivers and streams in our packrafts with bikes strapped to their bows—“bikerafting.” We also made a ten-day trip to the Brooks Range, where we packrafted three rivers that we linked with overland treks. Come race time, we were ready.
Thirty-five of us started the race at Eureka Roadhouse, a hundred miles from Anchorage. The finish line waited 150 miles away in Talkeetna. By the end of the first day the sky threatened rain and both of us found ourselves exhausted and butt-sore. For well over fifteen hours, we had pedaled, pushed, and carried our mountain bikes across fifty miles of Alaskan backcountry and wilderness.
We set down our bikes on a tundra shelf, high in the Talkeetna Mountains, and pulled on our puffy Patagonia pullovers. After arranging our sleeping pads next to each other, we pressed ourselves together to share body heat, pushed our feet into our empty backpacks, and pulled our deflated packrafts over us like blankets against the rain. To save weight, we carried no sleeping bags, bivy sacks, tent, or even tarp. Before we settled in to bivouac a few hours, Roman reached into his food bag. “Here you go, old man,” he said, grinning as he tossed me a Cadbury bar. “I didn’t eat my full ration today and figured you’d need this to stay warm tonight.”
“Thanks, son. That’s very generous of you,” I replied, smiling back. “I’ll just stash it for later, in case you want it back.”
After cycling, pushing, and sometimes carrying our bikes for three days, pausing only long enough to shove food in our mouths or nap a few hours, we prepared to float the Talkeetna River for the final stretch of the race. We had followed well-used grizzly bear trails to portage a canyon full of burly Class IV rapids. As we inflated our rafts and assessed our progress, Roman asked, “Do you think we’ll sleep tonight, or just paddle straight through?”
“Up to you. It’s about twenty-five miles to Talkeetna. How do you feel?” We had slept maybe eight hours of the last seventy-two or so. He looked strong, although near three in the morning the previous “night” he’d dragged a bit while shoving his bike through the thick alder brush.
Roman stood up from his boat. Scratching his head with both hands, he thought for a minute, then said, “I feel pretty good.” He gave me the punchy grin of a sleep-deprived adventure racer, his shoulders broad, his back straight. “I say we go for it and get this thing done. It’ll be great to get off our feet and into our rafts. Here, Dad, let me help you get that bike on your boat.”
Ever since Dick Griffith had pulled out his “secret weapon” two decades before, packrafting had been a staple of the Classic. The Talkeetna River on this course presented the biggest whitewater challenge of any Classic to that point. Fortunately, Roman had moved to the forefront of whitewater packrafting in the previous couple of years.
At sixteen, during his first trip down a local Class IV canyon on Ship Creek—a run that most packrafters found terrifying in the early 2000s—he declared, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had!” He reveled in the amusement-park excitement of dropping off Ship’s back-to-back four-to six-foot waterfalls. My friend Brad Meiklejohn, one of those early white-knuckled packrafters, first met Roman there. Brad told me he had been blown away by how calmly Roman handled its whitewater. Photos of Roman paddling the creek pepper my book on the sport.
Over the next decade, Roman and I took our Ship Creek skills to the Appalachians, Brooks Range, Mexico, Tasmania, Bhutan, even the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, where he and I were the first paddlers ever permitted to packraft its length.
While we had passed the Talkeetna’s biggest canyon, there were still eddy lines, hydraulics, and riffles to negotiate while top-heavy with bicycles strapped to our bows. Below one canyon wall, I watched a whirlpool grab Roman’s stern. He looked startled, but in control. Leaning forward and digging hard with his paddle blades, he pulled himself free, then flashed his teeth at me in a big smile. “That one almost got me!”
After three nights, we arrived in Talkeetna in sixth place for the 2004 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic without a single blister. Roman’s finish remains the top placement by a seventeen-year-old in the history of the race. A decade after Umnak, he wasn’t only carrying his own weight and keeping up: he was wilderness racing.