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Norwil

Pat Calls from Nikolai
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It's Pat Norwil again, and what a race. It's finally over. I knew I was in deep doo-doo when I woke up and I was shaking this tree, asking him if he was going to continue on up the trail or not. I decided I better take a nap; I needed to bivy. So I bivied on the south side of the Burn, just before Hallucination Alley, and it was just a surreal night.

Northern lights were like a giant curtain of green floating down the valley. I was talking to trees, talking to myself. At one point, I was sleeping, straddling my bike with my head on my bike bag. As my knees would buckle, I would wake up and then mosey down the trail. Leaned up against — sitting on my bike — I leaned up against a tree and slept for a half hour. I was just a total mess.

Got into Nikolai and had two cheeseburgers and two orders of fries and six cans of Diet Pepsi and took off for McGrath — the last 60-mile leg. Jon Kirschke was with me. We left at 8pm; I had enough light for four hours of burn time on my headlamp and at midnight I turned my light off — well, it turned itself off — and I stuck a MagLite in my mouth and rode for another hour, clinching this little MagLite, drooling all over myself and worrying I was going to suck the MagLite in and choke to death. And that lasted until about 1am, and then I got off my bike and I started walking. I walked through the night until 6am. When it had turned light enough I could ride, but it was a total Death March.

I could just barely see the shadow of the trail and I would walk along and then wander off and fall knee- or thigh-deep into fresh snow and crawl back on the trail and continue going. It lasted all night. The light show, the northern lights, was just mind-numbing and stars were so close I was trying to reach out and grab the stars. I was looking at life through a three-dimensional box and it was just too much.

Twenty-five below zero on the Kuskokwim River and I'm walking at a Death March snail pace. I'd wake up and I'd be just standing on the trail and then I'd walk some more, and then I'd fall asleep and I'd stand on the trail and then I'd walk some more. It just went like that from 1 o'clock to 6am. And I kept thinking 'oh, I'm pretty close, I bet I've only got about 10 miles. I started riding and it was more like 30 miles to go; and I hadn't eaten in over 10 hours and I was out of water and it was a true, true slog all the way into McGrath.

Then, you know, once you get into McGrath, these roads are super windy and they take their time to get anywhere. So just powering through the roads, it took everything that I had left in me to get to Peter and Tracy's house at the finish line. Pretty much exhausted.

John Stamstad came in at 12 midnight Thursday night — no, Wednesday night. Jon Kirschke came in at 6am Thursday morning and I showed up at 9:30 Thursday morning. That rounds up the top three. Guys have been trickling in all through the evening and I think we've got a full house of about nine riders.

There are still some skiers out there and the foot people are slogging along. Rocky Reifenstuhl and his brother Steve are fast on their way to setting a new course record for running the 350 miles, which I personally wouldn't want to do.

So there you have it. I'll call back with interviews, with the top two finishers: Jon Kirschke and John Stamstad.

—Pat Norwil, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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