the Circle-Fairbanks historic trail

 

Brie and I hoped this trip would warrant a write-up in the News-Miner. The Circle-Fairbanks Trail isn’t particularly remote, but it’s almost 60 miles long and no one we knew had done it. Just finishing it would be worth a story. Alas, not finishing it probably isn’t, so here’s a blog post.

I had explored the trail from both ends before. Several years ago, I hiked a few miles in from the 12-mile Summit end looking for caribou. I didn’t know how to field dress a caribou then, but I wanted to hunt and none of my friends could come, so I went anyway. I thought if I shot one, I would figure it out. A few years later, I rode my motorcycle in from the Cleary Summit end, splashing through mud puddles and dropping my bike so many times I wore down the battery.

I’ve wanted to do the whole thing for years, imagining it being fun on a mountain bike in a dry year. Or on foot. A few weekends ago, Brie and I hiked part of it when we walked from Cleary Summit to Chatanika Lodge and back. The trail was wide and gradual, and someone on a 4-wheeler had made a track in the few inches of snow. The walking was easy.

We decided to hike the whole route over three days Thanksgiving weekend. When I mentioned it to people, a few had fond memories of parts of the trail, but none had done the whole thing. To me it seemed like an obvious trip – a short drive from Fairbanks, with miles and miles of ridges above treeline. It didn’t have cabins like the White Mountains, but otherwise seemed ideal for an adventure on skis or fat bike. We arranged to have a friend drop us off at 12-mile Summit. We would walk back to a car left in Fairbanks.

Without leaving a car at the beginning, we would have little option but to complete the trip once we started. I found the trail on a topo map and studied Google Earth until I had cross referenced the trail with the landscape.

I knew we were strong enough to do it. We’d done some long hikes and runs over the summer. And we’d camped in similar temperatures north of the Brooks Range last fall. But neither of us had exactly gone backpacking in Alaska in November, and it wasn’t clear how we would stay warm, or how fast we could move. As Thanksgiving neared, we studied the forecast and debated what gear to bring.

In the end, we didn’t have all the answers, but I was confident we could figure things out as we went. It had been a while since I’d attempted something with this much doubt, a result, I suppose, of choosing doable routes and always being prepared. Equipment can be a crutch for lack of skills, and I’ve tried on summer trips to learn what I can do without. But the skill of not getting into trouble is different from the skill of getting out of it, and I had rarely exercised this second skill, if indeed I had it. We both dream of doing much bigger trips. At some point we'll need to test ourselves. And if something truly went wrong on the trail, we could always hike out to the road.

We started from 12-mile Summit a little before noon. The car’s thermometer said minus 11, and the wind blew strong over the ridge. A few bands of caribou grazed on a distant hillside. A dozen more crossed the trail in front of us. We walked fast with our faces covered. The trail was easy to follow and tracked by snowmachine and 4-wheeler. We dipped into a slight draw. The wind let up and soon we were shedding layers.

A little while later, with daylight fading, we stopped for water and a snack. I struggled to get my mitten off. Once I did, I couldn’t open a Ziploc bag of chips. I swung my arms and ran down the trail, suddenly aware of how delicate a balance was needed to stay warm. Wearing too many layers made you sweat, which made it harder to stay warm once you stopped. Wearing too few layers made your core temperature drop and made it harder to keep fingers and toes warm. Moving would generate heat, but only if you kept eating. Somehow I had let myself get cold enough that now I could not bend my thumb. I was glad my life did not depend on my ability to build a fire, as I could not have struck a match. 
I managed to open a packet of hand warmers and slip one into my mitten. Brie zipped my jacket for me and we kept moving.

I’ve often carried hand warmers on winter trips, but can count on one hand the times I’ve used them. I think I see them as unnatural, and I don’t like the idea of relying on them. But now I was glad to have them.

Somewhere along the trail, we agreed to make a list of things to do differently next time. I already questioned our choice of running shoes. They had kept my feet warm during a 100-mile walk in the White Mountains a few winters before, but now it seemed like one more obstacle to staying safe in this environment. To keep our feet warm, we would have to move constantly.

Brie asked how far we should go. I proposed that 15 miles today would leave a little over 20 miles for the next two days. The whole trail, according to the pamphlet we had from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, was 58 miles. It ran mostly along ridges and was the summer route, a hundred years ago, for miners traveling between Circle and Fairbanks. (The winter trail followed the Chatanika River.) I’d heard there were roadhouses, but I thought of those guys now, braving the cold and wind in whatever gear they had.

We came to a fork in the trail. We had not bothered to follow our path on the map, but either place we might have been, left would work. The trail was wider to the left, and the 4-wheeler tracks turned left, so we did too. Soon we came out of the forest and onto a ridge. We could feel the rocks under the snow. The 4-wheeler tracks faded out, and then the trail they had followed. The wind blew hard. We shuffled to a clump of willows and hid in the lee to study the maps. I added a puff jacket and Gore-Tex shell and pulled the hood over my head.

We could see a trail climbing a hill off to the right, and another glimpse of a path along the ridge that followed from the hill. We didn’t know of any other trails out here, so we sidehilled over to the trail. I felt the wind blowing through the open mesh of my shoes. We wore our warmest clothes and moved fast.

Climbing, we warmed again, and I stripped off jackets. Willows grew up through the track, clearly less defined than a mile before. At the top, we put on headlamps and followed the trail between mounds of granite. At times, a few feet of straight line was all that differentiated the trail from the tundra. The trail split. We followed one fork until it faded out, and then backtracked and followed the other until it did the same.

Sometimes I think of running whitewater as a metaphor for situations in life. There are times in a canoe when you cannot stop and think. You are heading downstream regardless, and you just have to make the best choices you can.

I made a mental check and concluded we were still okay. We could camp, make hot food, find the trail again with map and GPS. But we didn’t have much time.

The ridge was windy, and although it was only 4:30, it was almost night. A few miles off, we could see lights on the highway. We knew it would be less windy if we got off the ridge, but we still had to choose whether to head north toward the road or south toward where we assumed the trail must be. We chose south, but only because it seemed more sheltered. We moved fast, pushing our way though willows and grass toward the trees silhouetted by our headlamps. When we found a spot relatively sheltered and relatively flat, we stopped. Setting up the tent, the excitement I had felt at finding a used winter tent for cheap was gone. I simply wanted it to work.

Inside, we huddled in sleeping bags, Brie trying to warm her feet and me hoping desperately that they were not damaged.

Once we warmed up, we figured out where we were. In the morning, we’d called the number on a sign posted by a trapper and learned that he did have traps out, and that they would pose a risk to free-running dogs. We considered bailing, finding a different hike, and then decided after some time to keep our plan and leave the dogs home. At the end of the call, I’d thanked the trapper as he started to say something else, and a few times I wondered what he might have said. That no one travels the full length of the trail?

We fired up the stove and melted enough snow to fill hot water bottles and foil bags of dehydrated food, which we tucked against our bodies. We slept with jackets on and both woke around midnight, overheating. Despite the long night, we slept until it got light. My little thermometer read five above.

Because the easiest way to the road was to keep following the trail, and because we still held some hope we might complete the route, we backtracked to where we’d climbed the ridge and regained the trail. Willows grew up in the track, trees lay across the trail, and rusted traps hung from angled spruce poles. We knew from our map that this was the trail, but the mileposts promised in the pamphlet – and which we’d seen the day before – were nowhere to be seen. We walked hard and fast along the ridge, buoyed by the sun, then dropped into the trees, down to the creek where we would choose to continue or not. Halfway down the hill, amid burned black spruce, we found a milepost telling us we had 45 miles to go.

At the bottom of the hill, we found milepost 43. The trail continued up a hill to the south. The highway lay to the north. We got out the map and frozen grilled cheese. The temperature had dropped as we descended, and the low-angle sun hid behind a ridge.

Our record of meeting our outdoor goals is pretty good. We didn’t reach the top of a mountain in Sitka for lack of time, and we came nowhere near the Sawtooths, where the research we should have done became clear only once we were there. But mostly we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. Neither of us likes to quit.

In camp, Brie had commented that if we did keep going, we could walk all night rather than camp again. I thought of that now. If we chose to push on, we would need that kind of energy. We would need to be excited by the challenge and confident we could meet it. Between us we had three pairs of toe warmers. Each pair lasts six hours. I thought I could do without, but I wasn’t sure. I ate some Fritos and ran circles to warm up. If last night was whitewater, this was an eddy, from which we could take out and portage.

The trail followed a long ridge for a dozen miles, then curved around a drainage and climbed a hill. The trapper had told us he’d been out 25 miles, which left up to 18 miles untracked. The sun would set in a few hours. If we could hike all night, if we could find the trail in the dark, if we could stay warm… There were too many ifs, so we hiked out to the road and caught a ride back to Fairbanks.

Brie has concluded I give too much credence to Google Earth, but the problem might be that I haven’t trusted it enough. Scanning the route before we left, I’d noticed that the trail, visible on both ends, disappeared in the middle. I rationalized this as the result of different quality images, or images taken in different seasons.

I also had not registered the bold warning in the DNR pamphlet explaining that although the trail had been marked and cleared, “there is not a well defined tread the entire length.” Or the fact that the pamphlet was made in 1986.

Back in Fairbanks, we told a few people about our adventure and got the same response. Heard of it. Never heard of anyone doing it. Which has left us even more determined than ever.