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Norwil

Pat Calls from the Yukon
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They said that when we got to the Yukon it was going to be like a sidewalk. It was going to be the super highway all the way to the coast. And for the 260 miles of overland travel that we did from McGrath to Ruby all we could think of was, get to the Yukon. We're going to just make good time. It will be big ring spinning.

Well we got to Ruby and had a great night sleep at the high school and had a wonderful breakfast of waffles and sausage and eggs at the B&B and got on the Yukon, and it was punchy and it was slow and it was wind drifted. The only saving grace was that we had a tail wind. And we spun and let out of our tires and spun and let air out of our tires and by the time I got to Galena, 56 miles later, I was almost running on six pounds of air pressure less than what I was running when I went from Cripple to Ruby — just totally frustrated. We were all just kind of going, 'What is going on?' We're going to be out on this river for four days getting to Portage and over to Unalakleet?

"Some of the really big news is Stamstad and I have split up. Team Slacker is dissolved. John just has not been able to recover from his superhuman effort on the Extreme Race..."

Got into Galena. Curiak is still in first place. The guy is super; he's going at an incredible pace. None of us can believe what he's doing. It's sort of like we're all upset that he's out there and got such a big gap on us and the other side of it is we're just kind of going, 'Wow, he's really having a great race!' I mean the bottom line is the guy is having a really good race. The question of the day, and of the week, and of the month, and of the year, is 'Can this guy hold onto the pace?' He was walking quite a bit between Ruby and Galena and he was walking a bit between Galena and Nulato.

I'm in Nulato right now and I'm doing my laundry at the high school. Going to cook up a little Top Ramen and Cup of Soups and hit the trail for Kaltag. John Kirschke is ahead of me by about a couple of hours. He did a bivy on the front porch of the high school. I did a bivy out on the Yukon. Just sort of laid down on the middle of the trail and shivered myself to sleep. Thank goodness for 40 below down sleeping bags and Patagonia Doss jackets and pants. It was a bloody cold night.

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Some of the really big news is Stamstad and I have split up. Team Slacker is dissolved. John just has not been able to recover from his superhuman effort on the Extreme Race and he was really hoping that when we got onto the Yukon that he was going to be pretty recovered from that race. And that just hasn't happened. He's been really slow the last two days and we decided in Galena that the best thing for us to do would be to split up and myself to start attacking Curiak and see if I can't dwindle down on his lead a little bit and reel him in.

The general consensus for all of us is that we don't want Mike to win and there's a lot of motivation there to reel this guy in. Who is this guy Mike Curiak? Well, Mike Curiak is kind of a rolling stone from Grand Junction up to Canada over to Hawaii and back to Grand Junction. Somewhere on the shores of Molokai he lost 20 pounds and found his cycling legs and is really showing us that he means business. He's sponsored by Marin and Cliff Bar and a plethora of other sponsors and he's kind of a lone wolf and a rolling stone and he does a little bit of freelance writing here and there, but this has been his race. He has completely dominated us — to the chagrin of all of us.

Greg Blackwell is in fourth place behind me by, I don't know, probably by six hours. He's really sucking wind but he's hanging in there and John Kirschke's ahead of me a couple of hours. Did a gnarly bivy last night, pulled an all-nighter basically last night to get to Nulato and he's heading for Kaltag. He's really going to push the pace on Curiak and see if he can't reel him in when we get to the coast.

—Pat Norwil, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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