Blizzard Beasts

During the night, the shelter-cabin’s plywood and tin roof began to shudder and vibrate. The storm we’d been anticipating had arrived. Wind assailed the little shack in gusty waves, driving fine, crystalline snow onto the walls and roof at hurricane speeds. We were less than 10 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in the midst of the second and most violent storm of our fat-bike tour of northwestern Alaska. Cozily tucked into our sleeping bags, we were relieved that we’d made the decision to push on toward the shelter-cabin the previous evening and blearily doubted we’d be traveling the next day. 

I fell in love with the northwestern Arctic of Alaska in 2014. That spring my partner Kim McNett and I rode the Iditarod Trail from Knik, near Anchorage, north to the Bering Sea. In the village of Koyuk, we joined another trail, traveled over the Seward Peninsula and became the first people to bicycle to the Arctic community of Kotzebue, completing a 1,100-mile snow trail. We were already dreaming of new routes and making plans to return as we boarded the flight home to southern Alaska.

We returned to the region in the middle of March of 2016, this time flying to Nome with the goal of riding to Kotzebue and beyond, if possible. In the end, we made it as far as the coastal village of Kivalina, some 90 miles north of Kotzebue before the trail petered out and rain destroyed what was left of the cold, stormy spring.