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Norwil

Pat's Call from the Yukon
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Elim to Golovin to White Mountain. They call it Little McKinley. Coming out of Elim you drop out onto the Bering Sea ice and seven miles later you bang a right and you start climbing. I don't why they do this, but they tend to want to run this Iditarod Trail up the steepest part of every mountain they come to. And Little McKinley is definitely Little McKinley; it's just straight up.

"I'm just constantly in awe and humbled by how far it is from one point to the next...."

It was a good, hard trail, a beautiful, sunny day. I made great time getting into Golovin; dropping off the backside of Little McKinley was just a total hoot — passed up about four little dog teams that were on the Serum run and just motored right in to Golovin.

Golovin to White Mountain is 18 miles and it was like being in on a cloud; it was flat light, zero visibility. It was just kind of going by Braille. The trail was really hard and fast and the Iditarod trailbreakers had set laths up about every 40 feet and mostly because it is an open area and when the wind blows through there you can see pretty much 40 feet from one piece of lath to the next. So it was a nice, fast trip right in to White Mountain.

The one thing I am realizing about the Iditarod is Alaska is vast and it is just like everyday is a horizon; like looking from Golovin to White Mountain is 18 miles, well the curvature of the earth you can't see White Mountain from Golovin because it is below the horizon. And it is the same thing when I crossed Norton Sound, 84 miles from Shaktoolik to Koyuk, and you just don't see it. It is just amazing the distance out here — pretty awesome.

I'm just constantly in awe and humbled by how far it is from one point to the next. White Mountain to Safety is 55 miles. I took off at 4...no, 6pm and headed that way and you go over Topcock(?) Peak and drop down back onto the ice at the blow holes and, once again, it was just like you leave White Mountain and you look off in this distant direction to these mountains way off in the horizon and that's where I had to go. Six hours later I was over the mountains and back down onto the sea ice heading for Safety.

It was blowing about 45-miles-an-hour through the blow holes, which are probably some of the most treacherous and dangerous area of the entire Baring Straits. I held up for about three hours at this little safety cabin, before starting out to Safety. That three hours, plus pretty punchy trail conditions, allowed the Iditarod winner Rick Swenson(?) — Sweny — to catch me about two hours out of the safety cabin or six hours from Safety. Rick just had his dogs trotting right on by me. I was standing there walking, working as hard as I could to try to make the bike turn, and I was pretty frustrated with the snow conditions. And here comes Rick and his little dog team of dogs and they just trotted on by, and next time I looked up they were completely gone. They cruised at about seven to 10-miles-an-hour, depending on the trail conditions, and that's twice as fast as what I'm traveling at. Time and distance are pretty slow when compared to a dog team.

So, Safety to Nome, 22 miles, what a day. More later.

—Pat Norwil, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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