I was having one of those weeks — legs mottled with a painful patchwork of chilblains, bruises and sunburn, knees and elbows scabbed and bleeding on my bed sheets, shoulder throbbing beneath a blue hematoma, and a gut roiling with so much anxiety that I’d only been able to stomach fruit, yogurt, and granola for several days. Compared to the anxiety, the surface injuries were almost comforting. I knew where they came from. The chilblains came from unknowingly hiking in snow-packed overboots for hours through deep powder and “frost-burning” my calves. The sunburn came from failing to acknowledge that late February means the sun is high enough in the sky to scorch unprotected skin. The bruises, scabs, and hematoma came from running while distracted and taking a fall. I knew the origin of these pains and I knew they’d heal. The anxiety, on the other hand …
Beat was back on the Iditarod Trail, which is always an easy explanation for why I feel anxious whenever Iditarod time rolls around. He’s exposed to a lot of dangerous elements while he walks one thousand miles across Alaska. Luck can change with a gust of wind — perhaps you lose a mitten, and then frostbite sets in, and just like that a simple mistake lapses into life-threatening danger. Fortunes unravel in an instant out there. But this was Beat’s 12th time on the trail and he’d always been safe. Statistically, his odds were better than mine on I-70.
Still, it makes sense to feel nervous for my husband who was man-hauling across the frozen wilderness. But this didn’t explain why I struggled to eat, struggled to sleep. When I dug below this surface anxiety, I realized I was roiling in my own cauldron of traumas. This too made sense. Since Beat set out on Sunday, I’d done almost nothing but work, clean, run, and obsess about the Iditarod Trail Invitational. I refreshed the tracker, I scrolled social media for updates and photos, I dug up records and facts, I wrote reports. My psyche was drowning in Iditarod imagery and it responded by dredging up the murky sediment of memory. All of the times I was frightened on the trail — the numb extremities, the yawning darkness, the outer-space-like cold, the crack of clear ice, the open water, the swirling snow, the North Wind — all of it haunted my waking daydreams. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
It didn’t help that from the moment my Iditarod obsession set in, Boulder’s famous Winter West Wind settled in for a long stay. Every night I was rattled awake by 50 mph gusts knocking against the windows. The wind fought me as I wheeled grocery carts across parking lots. It accompanied me on my daily runs, making every mile feel twice as long. I was trying to peak my mileage for White Mountains 100 training in this terrible wind, at a time when there was nowhere to run but icy trails and sand-blasted dirt roads.
On Monday night, my neighborhood Nextdoor Page lit up with alarming posts about a wildfire at Meyer’s Gulch, a mere two miles from my house, due west. The West Wind was howling and it was dark. I couldn’t see smoke in the air, but I could look at the laptop screen and see the pleas from my neighbors for more information. It was idiots lighting fireworks, one man wrote, blue fireworks. Gender reveal? A dozen emergency vehicles were heading up the winding road to respond. Our current snowpack is spotty at best and the flames could easily spread through the tinder-dry grass and pine. I rushed around my house, frantically packing a “go bag” that I soon realized was a bunch of garbage I didn’t even want. I was angry that I was made to care about stuff. You know what? When the fire comes, I’m going to let it all go.
Luckily, firefighters were able to contain the blaze at a half-acre with no injuries and no damage to private property. But my anxiety did not need that 9 p.m. jolt. I barely slept, again. Instead, I fixated on the Iditarod tracking page. Refresh, refresh, refresh.
Meanwhile, I was aiming to run at least a hundred miles during the week. It would be my first time running a hundred-mile week in training, and not as part of an ultra or multiday race. The White Mountains 100 will be an exercise in keeping the legs moving through soul-sucking conditions such as churned snow and postholes, while carrying all of my food and winter gear in a heavy pack, at what I hope will be closer to a running pace than a walking pace.
So this is what I did — ten miles here, 15 miles there, across dirt and ice as the wind jostled me around, occasionally stopping me dead in my tracks with a deafening roar. I went down to Rocky Flats to escape the ice, only to meet the full brunt of prairie wind. Halfway through the loop, Beat called me from his satellite phone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying through his wind-blasted mouthpiece. Afterward, my mind drifted into the darkness of memories. I lapsed into believing I was trudging across the windswept tundra and not jogging over the loose rocks of Rocky Flats. My toe caught a boulder and I took a hard fall, slamming my shoulder and then elbow into the ground. It was one of those falls that knocked the wind out of my lungs and caused me to writhe in the dirt for five minutes until I caught my breath. But that’s all it took from me — along with a bit of skin — and then it was over. I got up, dusted myself off, and kept running.
My plan for the weekend was two long runs of 30 miles or more. I couldn’t bear the monotony of more dirt roads and icy trails near home, so I hatched a plan to head to Moab. There I could start from Island in the Sky and run sections of the White Rim. After all, that sandy road with its off-camber slickrock is just like the White Mountains 100 (okay, it’s nothing like the White Mountains 100. It’s still good training.)
It was tough to boost myself out of the house on Thursday. My anxiety had nearly taken over, warning me that only bad things awaited if I dared test my luck with #i70things. But I managed to gulp down the unease and ultimately enjoyed the drive away from the wind-blasted mountains and into the red desert. Which, as it turned out, was also under a High Wind Warning.
I thought life on the downslope of Colorado’s Front Range had conditioned me well for high winds, so I wasn’t worried about this silly wind advisory and its threatened 50-60 mph gusts. Bah. For Friday’s run, I started at Murphy Point and made my way to Gooseberry, where I dropped down for the most scenic part of the White Rim. Here the route flows around gorges stretching like veins from the Colorado and Green Rivers. I even ran out to White Crack, an overlook I’d never visited because I’d always been too lazy to bother tacking on an extra three miles when I had a bike. The wind knocked me around but I felt strong. I felt like screaming, “Is that all you’ve got?” The only people I saw over the entire day were an older Québécois couple in a stock Toyota 4Runner who drove nearly as slowly as I was running. We played leapfrog all day and they marveled at my progress. I felt like a superhero.
After I trudged back up Murphy Point, I ended my run with 34.3 miles with 4,642 feet of climbing. Ain’t nothing to it. I couldn’t wait to come back out here tomorrow.
On Saturday morning, I received an alert on my phone. “HIGH WIND WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM FRIDAY TO 5 AM MST SUNDAY it screamed at me. Southeast winds of 30 to 40 mph with gusts as high as 70 mph. Damaging winds could blow down large objects such as trees and power lines. Power outages are possible and travel could be difficult. Seek shelter.
I thought of Beat, who had been experiencing similarly extreme winds along with extremely low temperatures as he climbed over Rainy Pass and dropped into the frigid Interior of Alaska. In comparison, my winds at 40 or 50 degrees above zero were manageable.
After running short on water during my Friday excursion, I shed my puffy jacket and wind pants in favor of bringing five liters of water instead of four. As soon as I stepped out of the car into the refrigerated blast of air, I knew I had made a mistake. Overhead, sunrise lit up the lenticular clouds in a deep and ominous crimson.
“Red skies in the morning, sailor’s sure warning,” I whispered, repeating a line my Dad often said to me while we vacationed in the desert when I was a child.
On this day, I started from Gooseberry and ran a 10-mile segment of paved road to connect the two points on today’s agenda. The wind was mostly at my back through this section and I kept a relaxed pace that made me feel like I wasn’t even working, almost like I was coasting on a bicycle rather than running. This was a great feeling.
Crosswind on the Lathrop Trail alerted me to just how much wind had been at my back on the road. No wonder I’d felt like I was coasting. Gusts roared and shoved me sideways, pummeling the skin on my legs and face with sand shrapnel.
“It will be more protected once I drop down into the canyon,” I thought. Instead, the canyon funneled all of that wind into a tight space, like compressed air. Buffeted by intense yet erratic air, I had to pick my way down the steep and crumbling trail. The boulders under my feet were as unstable as the wind gusts. I was on all fours, crab-walking, and still unable to maintain a sense of balance. The route only became steeper and fainter as I descended. Rocks rolled away from beneath my feet and tumbled a hundred meters. A squeak escaped from my throat and the fearful sound startled me so much that I started to cry. The swirling wind projected the vertigo I was feeling, a dizzying cyclone through which I couldn’t move up or down.
I managed to gulp down the vertigo and stop the tears for long enough to talk myself — out loud — down from the crumbling gully. “It’s okay. You can put your foot there. “It’s going to be okay.” The ordeal ate up nearly three hours though, during which I had covered a mere five miles since I’d left the road. Once I’d reached the safety of the White Rim, my legs were shaking and I wasn’t gung-ho about continuing my planned loop. But there was no way I was climbing back up Lathrop.
Instead, I pivoted in a third direction. I continued dropping down the Lathrop Trail — which becomes a jeep road at this point — to see another corner of Canyonlands I’d never seen: where the White Rim drops to the Colorado River. According to a sign on the road, this diversion was going to add 12 miles to my run. But that was good; it would put me over 30 miles again. I’ll never fail to find this odd about my psyche — how quickly I can let go of traumas when I’m engaged in an adventure. They’ll come back to haunt me later, but that can be a problem for future Jill.
As I descended toward the river, I encountered a tour group in three jeeps. One of the drivers stopped and asked me if I was a ranger.
“No,” I said, holding up my trekking poles. “Just a hiker.”
“Huh,” he said. “Where did you come from?”
“Lathrop Trail,” I said, not adding that I’d started on the road 10 miles beyond the trailhead. At that point, I was only about seven miles from the trailhead, which I don’t think is an unreasonable distance for a typical hiker. Still, the tour jeep driver regarded me as though I were an alien.
“I’ve never seen anyone down here,” he said. “Besides rangers. Ever.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s strange.”
The road was an easy jog and I received more accolades when I showed up at the river put-in ramp four miles and 50 minutes later. Two of the tourists approached me while holding their lunch plates, clasping the flimsy paper as pieces of lettuce and bread flew away.
“You must really know these parts,” one said, as though I’d navigated my own way into their secret hidden cove that few had ever explored.
“Sort of,” I said. “I mean, I researched this route before I drove out from Boulder, where I’m from.”
“You a trail runner? Training for one of those marathons?” the other asked with a tone of admiration rather than the confusion or derision I’ve come to expect.
“Yes.”
I went down to the shore to eat my lunch by the river, feeling the warm ego boost of becoming something of a superhero just because I was a woman on foot in the middle of nowhere.
Somehow, the river and lower Lathrop Canyon had been mostly protected from the wind. This lulled me into a false sense of security, believing I’d gotten through the worst because I survived the descent. But the wind was waiting, sure and true, to continue its assault as soon as I crested the lip of the White Rim. Even though I’d covered 24 miles that had already wrung out some tears, all of the hard miles were still in front of me.
This part of the White Rim wraps around the fingers of several Colorado River tributaries. I was constantly on the edge of a gorge, running in place against a solid wall of headwind, struggling to balance my weight against an unsettling crosswind, or flat-out dropping to the ground and covering my head to brace against a gust so strong I was convinced I would blow away. Blowing sand had become a constant, like rain, and my buff and sunglasses did little to protect my lungs and eyes. A high-pitched wheezing accompanied my breathing as I constantly rubbed my face.
As I rounded the bend of Buck Canyon, not even bothering to look at its beautiful sandstone spires, I glanced up in time to see a whirlwind of sand spinning in front of me.
“A dust devil,” I said out loud. “How cool!”
This amusement was short-lived. As soon as I said it, the cyclone of sand was on top of me. I involuntarily stopped running when my body hit a seemingly solid wall. As I tried to step forward, I was suddenly yanked to the side. It felt as though I was engaged in a wrestling match with a ghost, a mean ghost who doesn’t play fair. The ghost was jumping from side to side and tossing me around like a rag doll. Just when the back-and-forth pressure released its grip, a massive gust shoved me from behind and pushed me over.
The dust devil moved on as I continued to lay like a rag doll on the dirt, angry and stunned. As I finally stood, I felt a deep ache in my rib cage and wondered if I’d cracked a rib. The knees and elbows I skinned earlier in the week had opened back up. Blood trickled down all four limbs. Later, I’d find new bruises in places I didn’t even remember hitting, like my big toe and lower back.
“What. The. FUCK!” I screamed to the wind. The wind didn’t care. It would fight me with great gusto for the entirety of the twelve miles I had to run on the White Rim. I mostly walked. I had no fight left. The wind won. My strength was sapped by the time I began the climb up Gooseberry, where one mile of ascent took nearly an hour.
Somehow I clawed my way to the top of Gooseberry with 37 miles and 6,270 feet of climbing on my watch. As I stumbled, defeated, to my car, another driver pulled up. A man got out, put on his backpack, and started hiking against the crosswind toward the trail. Less than five minutes later, he was back.
“You go to the lookout?” he asked me, meaning an overlook that was 0.8 miles from the trailhead. Later, when I looked at myself in a mirror, I wondered what he must have thought — my limbs were caked in blood and sand and my entire face was stained red with dust. But he regarded me as though I were a normal hiker returning from a normal hike, and I simply said, “No.”
“Yeah, me neither,” he replied. “Too windy.”
On Sunday, I had my 100 and some miles for the week, a badly bruised ego, and an even more badly bruised body. I had been worried about the knees I knocked more than once while fighting my way down the boulder field of Lathrop Canyon, but the bruised rib turned out to be my main complaint. Still, I was in Moab. I love it here. I didn’t want to leave without saying hello to some of my childhood favorites in Arches National Park.
The wind was still blasting and it was 40 degrees, but the stroll was so relaxed and enjoyable that I stuck with it much longer than planned and ended up hiking more than 13 miles. At the far edge of the “primitive trail” in Devil’s Garden, I encountered a woman sprawled on a sandstone ledge and frozen in fear. Her male partner was trying to coax her down, but she had succumbed to vertigo and she was crying. The man kept apologizing because they were blocking the route.
“Don’t apologize,” I urged them. “Please take your time.”
I too am frightened of exposed sandstone ledges, enough that I don’t feel comfortable on parts of this trail. But I summoned what courage I could and crawled up to a steep slope below her to try to help. She handed her backpack to the man. He climbed down with it as I braced myself beside her, urging her to scoot down and not worry about falling because I was there to “catch” her. I knew full well — and she probably knew too — that if she fell we were both going down. But I’ve been in her exact position before and I know another person offering up their body as a blockade from the yawning chasm can provide enough comfort to generate courage.
Finally, she was back on flat ground and crying with relief. I felt like a superhero all over again, grateful that I can still be “strong” when strong is truly needed.
My total for the week: 122.3 miles, 18,114 feet of climbing.
Sorry you have to deal with the anxiety, and all the training injuries. But I'm glad you got to play the hero. And I am SOOOOO JEALOUS that you now have an awesome story to tell: I wrestled with a tornado and survived!
You got knocked over by a dust Devil. That is rad. That was some awesome description of that wind too. Kudos.