Tim
Burning up COVID downtime by watching my original sports hero crawl along the Bering Sea coast … again
It happened. Five years into the pandemic, the Rona finally found me. I was genuinely beginning to believe it never would. I even stopped bringing my own hand sanitizer to the gym, for which I have no excuse. That place is more disgusting than a 7-Eleven men’s room in Vegas. And I did fly from San Jose to Denver on Sunday — although I travel a lot. Why would this short trip do me in?
From Monday to Wednesday, I felt great. My recovery from the 50-mile race seemed to be coming along well. I avoided hiking and running to give my Achilles tendons a break. But I achieved new PRs with a few upper-body lifts and managed a decent effort on my Zwift bike on Tuesday.
On Thursday, I attempted a one-hour spin on my indoor bike and felt like garbage. I could barely boost my power over 130 watts when I was easily spinning 150 watts on Tuesday. By evening, I had congestion and sneezing beyond my usual omnipresent allergies, so I warned Beat I might be sick and to stay away from me.
On Friday morning, I felt reasonably okay, decided my congestion was a symptom of allergies (maybe a delayed reaction from California?), and pondered a run on Green Mountain. Then I received a text from my friend Betsy asking if I wanted to join her for a walk in Clear Creek Canyon. Betsy is in a medically precarious position, so I decided to take a COVID-19 test to make sure I wouldn’t expose her to a virus. The test came back positive.
It all came crashing down after that. Body aches, headache, fatigue (I get winded walking up the stairs), and more congestion. I am being as diligent as possible with rest and fluids, hoping I can keep the crud out of my lungs. I’ve seen too many athletic friends cope with varying degrees of Long Covid. And any respiratory infection is a danger to my lungs. I fear I’m susceptible to pneumonia. My asthma doctor has warned me of as much.
It’s been several years since I’ve been sick enough to be confined at home with no ability to exercise — the last was just before the pandemic hit in January 2020. The virus hit early in the month but lingered for weeks due to my aggressive push to keep training through it (Beat and I raced the Fat Pursuit — 56 hours in snowshoes with heavy sleds — while we were both coughing up brown phlegm.) By early February — three weeks out from my one (failed) attempt to hike a thousand miles across Alaska — I had to force myself into a recovery week to get a handle on my health. During that time, I obsessed over meager updates about my friend Tim Hewitt, who on Feb. 1 had embarked on his first independent Alaska expedition after nearly two decades of racing on the Iditarod Trail. His goal was the 1,400-mile Iron Dog route starting in Fairbanks.
It’s déjà vu: Being sick, following Tim, wondering why he was moving so slowly before he’d reached his first resupply access in Tanana, why did he stop for so long on the unstable ice of the Yukon River when it was 40 below, what was he thinking? When he quit after trudging for 12 days and more than 300 miles through unbroken snow, I was relieved. I can’t help but worry about him. The risks he’s taken and the close calls he’s had over the years are legendary. I love Tim like a family remember, perhaps a crazy uncle. Tim is a larger-than-life character who enticed me to join the most impactful community in my life — the Iditarod family.
And here I am again, sick in bed, clicking too often on Tim’s tracker. This year, Tim is again attempting a feat no one has ever done — because, honestly, it’s almost certainly impossible — a 2,000-mile yo-yo of the Iditarod Trail from Nome to Wasilla and back on foot. I don’t call this feat impossible because I’m pessimistic about Tim’s abilities. Even at … how old is he now? 70?!? … he’s likely more capable than almost anyone else. The thing is, there’s only a limited window when it’s even possible to travel the frozen waterways that form a large percentage of the Iditarod Trail. Rivers are freezing later, breaking up sooner, and mid-winter thaws flood the rivers and swamps in overflow. Because of volatile weather, poor trail conditions, and the increasing efficiency of village-to-village air travel, snowmobile traffic is scant these days. This means no one is reliably breaking the Iditarod Trail outside a week in mid-February when the Iron Dog Snowmachine Race runs, and two weeks in March when the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race runs. That’s — at best — a month when there’s any trail at all. The increasing number of wet, warm snowstorms in Interior Alaska tend to bury it quickly.
But Tim … well … Tim doesn’t quit. I first became aware of his crazy adventures in 2006 when I watched “A Thin White Line,” a low-budget documentary about the 2001 Iditasport Impossible. Tim was an unfathomably young 46-year-old when toed the line of a thousand-mile race across Alaska for the first time. The two bikers and two runners who didn’t quit before Nome dealt with bad trail conditions for more than 600 miles. Somewhere along the Yukon River, Tim stumbled into a moose hole and broke his leg. He actually broke his leg — fractured his tibia, to be exact — and still limped 500 more miles to finish and tie for a win in under 27 days. Madness. I was transfixed.
I idolized Tim’s accomplishments as the gold standard as I set out to bike the Iditarod Trail in 2008. I met him for the first time in 2009. I’d plunged into open water on Flathorn Lake and developed frostbite on my right foot. By morning, I was hobbling around the first roadhouse in the race, Yentna Station, and showing my gray, blistered foot to anyone who could give me advice about my prospects. No one was willing to weigh in until Tim walked up to me and said in the gentlest, kindest tone: “You know you can’t go on.”
And Tim would know. His word was law. I could barely walk, but I still had race mania flowing through my blood. Who knows what I would have decided if he didn’t offer that voice of reason? I might have gone on and would have likely lost my right foot because of it. Tim saved my toes.
In 2014, Tim and I co-wrote a book about his first eight completions in Nome, “8,000 Miles Across Alaska.” Tim sent me nearly a half million words in journal entries he’d written over the years, then I shaped his musings into a third-person narrative. During that project, I immersed myself in his mindset. His methodical racing strategy seemed starkly juxtaposed against his often dangerous decisions. I put myself in his shoes as he nearly died of bronchitis in a remote tent camp in 2006. I experienced “The Blow” when he and another racer huddled in the skeleton of a ruined fish camp on the Yukon River during a perilous storm in 2009. I winced when he soaked his sleeping bag with a pot full of water during his unsupported expedition in 2013.
“I think you’re certifiably crazy,” I told him after we exchanged edits. “I hope Beat never takes the ITI this far.” (Beat made his first trip to Nome in 2013 and traveled much of the 2014 race with Tim and his wife, Loreen, who went on to set the women’s foot record. Tim had inspired Beat to attempt the 2014 race partially unsupported — with only two resupplies in 1,000 miles — and it was becoming apparent that my boyfriend would try just about anything Tim suggested.)
In 2015, low-snow conditions forced the Iditarod Sled Dog Race to move its start north to Fairbanks, which means it didn’t use the first 500 miles of trail that year. The Iditarod Trail Invitational still went forth on a two-week-old Iron Dog Trail. The first few hundred miles were snowless, icy, and fast. But then a storm buried the Northern Route in two feet of fresh snow. Tim was racing on a bike that year. Although the trail through the Interior had been erased and Tim wasn’t likely to see another trail user for 200 miles, he stubbornly persisted in leaving the village of McGrath. Beat, his friend Steve, and Loreen — who were all on foot — followed. A couple of others who returned to McGrath after testing the unbroken trail and giving up insisted they were all going to die.
For days, I watched their trackers move at speeds under 1 mph. I received daily satellite phone calls from Beat about how difficult the snowshoeing was — an endless stairmaster, climbing to nowhere. About two days ahead, Tim was moving even more slowly. He had a comically useless bike to shove around, after all. Temperatures dropped to 45 below. Every day, Beat begged me to check the forecast and give him better news, and every day, deep subzero temperatures persisted.
After five days, I was certain Tim was out of food. Probably fuel as well. His tracker stopped for an extended time in the dilapidated ghost town of Poorman. Then his dot plodded to the top of a hill, where the map showed an abandoned airstrip. There his dot stopped and ceased to move for nearly two days. I fretted until I swallowed all of my pride and called the race director, Kathi, on the personal cell phone number she’d given me a year earlier, which as a spectator I was not supposed to call.
“You’ve got to go and check on Tim,” I begged. “I’m worried he crawled up that hill to die.”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Kathi laughed dismissively. “He’s Tim.”
Tim was fine, but truthfully, he might not have been if Beat hadn’t caught up to him — indeed out of food and having spilled his fuel in his sleeping bag — and given him a portion of the extra supplies he’d purposefully carried from McGrath in case he ran into someone in distress. The four traveled close together for several days with Beat breaking trail. Unfortunately, Loreen developed frostbite on her thumb. She and Tim caught a ride with the first snowmobiler they encountered in 9 days — a person the race director reluctantly dispatched from the village of Ruby to check on them. Beat and Steve continued, but ultimately had to scratch a hundred miles later due to a tragedy in Steve’s family.
I thought Tim would be traumatized after 2015. But no, he came roaring back the following year to break the record. His 19-day record from 2016 is — in my opinion — nearly untouchable. Tim’s expertise and athleticism, combined with astonishingly dry weather, are what made it possible. That’s what it would take for it to happen again. I had a chance to see him finish and spend time with him in Nome, as I had ridden the thousand miles that year. Even though I arrived a mere two days earlier, my 17-day finish still stands as the women’s bike record. That record is much more touchable. But Tim is unbelievably fast. It was fun to share his triumph. Now he had everything he wanted.
Of course, he didn’t have everything he wanted. He returned to finally get his bike finish in 2017 — his 10th and ultimately final finish in Nome during the Iditarod Trail Invitational. He returned for the foot race in 2018 and 2019 but had to drop out both years with severe knee pain. As I understand, his knees are destroyed. He needs a double knee replacement, but he won’t agree to the surgery because that would mean he’d have to stop running.
So he’s done, right? No more weeks-long Alaska expeditions for a man in his mid-60s with destroyed knees? For people who are not fanatics, I suppose this would be a given. But not Tim. Tim continued to up the ante. He attempted his Iron Dog route in 2020, took a year off because of the pandemic, and set out for his first yo-yo attempt from Nome in 2022.
He and his sled “Cookie” arrived on the evening flight on February 5. Landing at 6:34 p.m., he set out directly from the airport, fighting an intense north wind. After walking for about 15 miles, he slept three hours in a lee near Cape Nome, then continued east along the windswept coast. This segment along the Norton Sound is infamous for “blowholes” — powerful gusts of Arctic air that funnel through canyons and reach speeds approaching 100 mph.
As Tim crossed into the Topkok Blowhole, the roaring wind hit him sideways and knocked him over. As he rocketed over glare ice through the chaos of blowing snow, he was able to use his trekking poles to stop the slide. He saw his sled slamming into the ice and spinning into the air. When he looked again, his duffel bag was missing. Gone. Tossed by hurricane-force wind toward the open sea.
The duffel had everything — his sleeping gear, his parka, his headlamp, his stove. Everything he needed to survive. It also held the tracker. As Beat and I watched from Colorado, we could see Tim’s dot making an extended stop well off the trail at the edge of the sea ice. And his dot was in the middle of a known blowhole. That was a bad sign. Worse than bad.
Meanwhile, Tim was stumbling blindly in the dark toward his only chance for survival, the Topkok shelter cabin about 12 miles from where he fell. His goggles kept fogging up. He removed them so he could at least squint at the ground and trace the scratches of snowmobile tracks. He knew removing the goggles was perilous, but it was a calculated decision, he told me. He was knowingly trading some skin on his face for a shot at survival.
Tim did feel his way to the shelter cabin, started a fire in the wood stove with a roll of paper towels, and used his personal satellite messenger to mobilize a rescue team. He did survive. But damn. Is Tim a cat? How many lives has he used up now? By my count: 2001 (broken leg), 2006 (bronchitis), 2009 (Yukon blow), 2013 (soaked sleeping bag), 2015 (out of food), 2019 (evacuated off the Yukon with unworking knees), 2020 (hunkered down in three feet of snow on the Yukon River at 40 below), and 2022 (lost gear in a blowhole). Tim will probably disagree with many if not most of these. But by my count … eight brushes with expiration.
Tim recovered and returned for another attempt in 2023, which was thwarted by a lack of trail that left him wandering along hunter paths. He didn’t give up easily and made it as far as Kaltag (about 330 miles.) I’m not sure if he was out there last year. My adrenal gland was overtaxed from too many years of tracking Tim and I honestly don't remember. But he’s back this year.
“Oh, that is a bad sign for you guys, Tim Hewitt always picks bad years to do these things,” ITI veteran Jay Cable wrote in a Facebook group for this year’s racers. “You Nome-bound folks are DOOOMMMMEEEDDD.”
Indeed, Tim and a longtime friend who he conned invited to join have been trudging through windblown snow since they left Nome four days ago. A weather warning for today (Saturday, February 1) indicated they’d be dealing with “Snow, blowing snow, and freezing rain. Total snow accumulations of 3 to 5 inches. Visibility one-half mile or less at times. Winds gusting as high as 45 mph. Ice accumulation of a light glaze.”
“This weather forecast gives me a sick feeling in my stomach about Golovin Bay,” I told Jay. Indeed, in my COVID-induced emotional delirium, I was lying on the floor pleading with Beat. “You have to call Tim. You have to stop him!”
“Tim’s a big boy,” Beat replied calmly. “He knows what he’s doing.”
The problem is when there’s a gusty south storm like this one, the sea ice across Golovin Bay can be inundated with tidewater surging from the open ocean. It’s not just a matter of wading through miles of frigid salt water. It can be a matter of plunging into the abyss when you’re not able to see weaknesses in the ice beneath the tidal surge.
So today — much like I was on February 1, 2020 — I have been lying on the floor with a viral infection and obsessing about the movements of a man who was once my idol of ultimate badassery, but now I just want him to come home safely. The movements of his dot indicate he and Rick have not found a broken trail from White Mountain to the village of Golovin. They seemed to try the Mudyutok River for a while (likely a hunter trail), turned around, headed straight toward Golovin Lagoon, and then broke east toward the shore (my guess is they encountered some open water.) Just before 8 p.m. Alaska time, they were able to venture back out onto the ice and are closing in on the village.
Their persistence is admirable … but at mile 85 after four days, it’s not a pace that can extend to 2,000 miles before the end of March — if La Niña gives Tim that much time. Still, I’m guessing he won’t give up. Hopefully this cursed COVID will release its grip soon so I can get outside. Otherwise, I might lose my mind over this tracker.
Thanks for writing this and hope you’re feeling better! He actually is my crazy uncle (my mom’s older brother). Loved the book and really appreciate all of the context you provided in this post!
Great read; yes I loved your and Tim's book and even had Tim sign a couple copies for my girls. Tim's life's work is awe -inspiring, there will never be another quite like him. I am glad you told us who Beat is, I have oft tracked him when checking on Tim's progress. The people who compete here are the pioneers of our generation. Hope you are well soon!