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.

Peggy often balked when I pushed her toward her limits on those adventures. Her overprotective father, worried about the safety of ten kids on a middle-class income, had never bought Peggy a bike, never taught her to swim, never set up camp away from the road, nor allowed her to take a chance that might result in injury. His strategy had worked. “Out of ten of us, nobody was ever seriously hurt,” Peggy pointed out. Her rearing left her risk-averse, a complement to my risk-taking behavior.

Our experiences crisscrossing the continent taught us to communicate, share, and compromise, skills necessary to make a family work. We could also see the outlines of children more sharply in our shared lives. When we returned to Fairbanks in May 1983, my former adviser in the math department stopped me on the street to describe a new graduate offering at UAF. “Roman,” he said, “this program is tailor-made for you.”

Working toward an M.S. in mathematics at UAF would allow me to continue analyzing an ecological model I’d developed as an undergraduate. It would also give me financial support working as a graduate assistant and a skill in teaching math. While unscheduled on my science career timeline, the decision seemed a good one along a path that included Peggy, kids, and our future adventures together.

I had no idea that a steep mountain in the Hayes Range would hurry me on my way.

Chapter 4

The Cornice

Hayes Range cornices, January 1984.

Courtesy of the author

Not long after we got back to Alaska, I walked into the Hayes Range to climb McGinnis Peak. At its base my partner revealed a dream he’d had the night before: I fell while leading, and to save himself, my partner unclipped to let me fall past. While only a dream, this confession against the inviolate bond of the rope unnerved me as we headed up our climb. Dangerous conditions chased us off, but I named the route anyway: “Cutthroat Couloir.”

Two years later I went back with a mercurial mountaineer named Chuck Comstock. Stocky, blond, and belligerent, Chuck was the toughest guy I would ever know. He climbed with a brutal style that many, including me, misunderstood as incompetence. On rock and ice, he thrashed like he was only marginally in control. He made hard things look desperate, scary, unnerving. He’d fall on rock, on ice, in the mountains, but somehow, he would survive to terrify—or inspire—those around him.

Like two partners at the start of a buddy movie, we didn’t hit it off right away. On our first major expedition together, Chuck warned me during an argument not to turn my back, or—as he drawled in his Iowa country-boy accent—“I might sink an ice ax in the back of your head, Romin Dahl.” Later, as roommates at Sandvik House, we came to blows over something petty. Cornered, Comstock landed a punch to my jaw. I replied by pummeling his belly, then throwing him on a table, breaking it and ending the fight.