The Adventurer's Son(7)
Out of food during a storm in March of 1981, three of us retreated from a stern face on a peak called Ninety-four Forty-eight. Waiting in the tent, I was restless and suggested that we ski across the tundra plains to the highway to salvage our trip. Neither tentmate was interested. I left for the road anyway, without a map, tent, or partner. It took fifty-five hours to cover the fifty-five miles along a route paralleling the glaciers that Carl and I had skied the previous year after Ten Nine Ten. Alone on the tundra I wondered: Which way is faster? Perhaps a race could tell.
In Fairbanks, the idea of a ski race the length of the Hayes Range was met with curiosity, mostly at Sandvik when someone broke out the beer. The idea gained critical traction later that fall. During a guides’ association meeting on the UAF campus, an impish guy in his mid-thirties arranged a stack of flyers. I picked one up and read: “Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Classic: An Overland Footrace from Hope to Homer. Carry all needed equipment and food. No roads, no pack animals, no caches, no outside assistance. Finish with what you start with.”
“Hi there.” The imp grinned. “I’m George Ripley. You look interested in Hope to Homer.” Ripley had a round, open face with ears that stuck out as if he were really listening to whatever you said.
“Yeah, I am interested. I want to put on a race, too, but in the Alaska Range—a ski race from highway to highway.”
George’s grin grew. “Why don’t you come do my race first? And then we can do your race.”
That August, ten of us, Alaskans all, lined up in Hope near Anchorage. By the end of the first day, Dave Manzer, a twenty-seven-year-old Anchorage resident, had caught me. By the second evening, the Skilak River had stopped us both in our tracks. Gray water churned in a single channel seventy yards across. This would be our first river swim on the race course. Intimidated, we decided to make camp. Pulling out a candle, Manzer dripped wax on tinder and started a campfire.
“Want some tea?” he asked.
As an alpinist, I had never had much use for campfires, but welcomed this one’s cheery warmth. Soon, other racers caught up to us, including a white-haired, fifty-five-year-old named Dick Griffith. With a quiet confidence and chiseled features, he resembled Clint Eastwood in tennis shoes and a backpack.
“What are you doing here?” asked Dick, dropping his big pack. “I thought you young guys would be halfway to Homer by now!”
“We’re waiting till morning to swim across. It’ll come down after the sun gets off the glaciers,” Manzer said.
“You gonna swim that?” Dick asked incredulously. “You can’t swim these glacial rivers! They’re too cold and fast. How you gonna swim with all that stuff on your back?”
We nodded, wondering that, too.
Dick chuckled, pulling a red Viking hat with blue horns over his head, and said, “You may be fast, but you young guys eat too much and don’t know nothin’.” He shook his head, the blue horns wagging in scorn.
“You need one of these,” he said, reaching into his backpack to unroll a small, one-man vinyl inflatable raft at our feet. It looked like it weighed only a few pounds.
“What’s that?” someone asked.
“That’s my secret weapon.” He chuckled again. “Old age and treachery conquer youth and skill every time.”
Manzer and I looked at each other. “He’s going to use that thing to float the Fox River, too,” Dave whispered. The Fox River valley was twenty miles of thick alder brush and swamp that would take us more than thirty hours to cover on foot. Dick would paddle it in five.
In the morning, Dick blew up his little packraft and rowed across. Manzer tied into a rope held by a race official for safety. As he swam into the current, the line tangled dangerously in his legs. Manzer struggled and Dick rowed out to save him from drowning. It was a sobering lesson and I swam untethered. We hurried onward to warm up.
The next day we caught George, who led us along animal trails through thickets of dense brush. “Game trails are the way to go, aren’t they?” he asked rhetorically, looking over his shoulder at me with his impish grin.
Manzer’s campfires, Dick’s packraft, and George’s game trails offered me new lessons in wilderness travel. I would pass their techniques on to my son like my uncles had taught me theirs a decade before. The Wilderness Classic—as the race would come to be known over its thirty-eight-year history—would ultimately transform Alaska from inaccessible wilderness to multisport playground for me, Peggy, my son, and my friends, especially the use of Dick’s “secret weapon,” the packraft.
A FEW MONTHS after the Wilderness Classic, Peggy and I headed south for six months, wanting to see the world as independent travelers who find their own way. Peggy Mayne was no stranger to life on the road. Born in Massachusetts, she went to elementary school in Ohio, then Oregon. When she was twelve, her father drove his wife and six youngest kids to Alaska, where he hoped to get rich in the “bush,” that part of the state beyond the road system.
The Mayne family lived first in Tok near the Canadian border, then later in Selawik, an Inupiaq village above the Arctic Circle in northwest Alaska. Peggy graduated high school during the year her parents spent in Anchorage between stints teaching in bush villages. Soon afterward, she left for UAF, happy to be away from an alcoholic and domineering father she feared.
With money we had earned from working at UAF all summer long—me in the carpenter’s shop and Peggy in the paint shop—we drove to Mexico in a beat-up little red Toyota pickup that I’d bought for five hundred dollars. Along the way we gawked at the Canadian Rockies, snowshoed through Yellowstone, rock-climbed in Yosemite, and hiked across the Grand Canyon. In Arizona, we parked the pickup in Tucson, bicycle-touring across Sonora and the length of the Baja Peninsula. We spent three months in Mexico: biking, hiking, climbing, and eating. Afterward, we drove east to visit family, then north to Alaska.