"A Double Dance with Death"

The avalanche zone that nearly carried Jerry Dixon down the mountain in May 2006.

A DOUBLE DANCE WITH DEATH

FEBRUARY 2009

Jerry Dixon had nearly died many years before, and he was about to have another close call, but the irony of this newest narrow escape would not strike him fully until hours after the event.

Dixon was skiing beneath clear May skies with his friend, Mike Tetreau, in the mountains west of the Seward Highway near Lower Summit Lake. As morning became a warm afternoon, they climbed from the valley floor to a series of ridges and summits at nearly 4,500 feet elevation. Eventually it was time to head down, and they chose a new ridgeline for the final portion of their descent.

The final ridge featured several exposed rock outcroppings, and the two men kept a cautious separation between them as they maneuvered just below the rocks. While Tetreau waited, Dixon skied down and then turned left toward the ridgeline. As he turned, he kicked off a small point-release avalanche—a sloughing-off of snow, in this case a foot or two wide—dropping away from him for more than 30 feet.

But Dixon, who had spent a lifetime skiing in the mountains, didn’t stand still. He broke instantly for the safety of the nearest rocky outcrop. As he moved laterally, he heard a loud “whomp” and saw a crack shoot out in both directions from the bottom of the slide he had triggered. The crack was suddenly more than 300 feet long, and then the mountain face below it began to collapse.

As he reached the security of the rocks, the smooth slope disintegrated into a jumble of snow and ice, and spilled downward for nearly 2,000 vertical feet before rumbling to a stop in a wide deposition zone piled high with dense chunks of snow. Had he gone down with that churning mass, Dixon said, he would not have emerged alive.

“If you were caught up in that, there’s no way you could’ve survived,” he said. “Once again, I was lucky.”

Dixon, a long-time teacher who grew up skiing on the slopes of Alta Ski Area in Utah, pondered his good fortune that day as he drove home to Seward.



Jerry Dixon at home in Seward in January 2009.

When he arrived that evening, Dixon said, he hugged his two sons, Kipp and Pyper, and then kissed and hugged his wife, Deborah. “My wife looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You’ve been in an avalanche, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘I set one off. If I was in it, I wouldn’t be here.’”

Sometime in the next few hours, Dixon was struck by the timing of his experience in the mountains. The avalanche had occurred on May 13, 2006, one day shy of being exactly 30 years since the most harrowing experience of his life, the first time he almost died.



It was May 14, 1976, and Dixon, a 27-year-old smokejumper, was inside the belly of a twin-engine Volpar as it circled low over Birch Hill, just north of the Alaska smokejumper base at Fort Wainwright near Fairbanks. Dixon and the other smokejumpers inside the plane were preparing for their second practice jump of the day, readying themselves for another season of fighting fires.

Each jumper’s parachute was affixed to a static line that would pull his chute from his pack as he leaped from the airplane’s open door. As the line broke free of the top of the chute, the lower edges of the circular canopy would catch the incoming air and snap it open, buoying the smokejumper for his descent to the ground.

The nylon parachute canopy was attached to suspension lines that, upon deployment, would angle down toward the smokejumper’s harness into precise clusters of lines called risers, which the jumper could use for minimal steering.

The jumpers would exit the plane only about 1,000 feet above Birch Hill and would remain in the air for only one to two minutes. The idea was to practice real fire-fighting conditions, so the shortest jump, with the least margin for error, was preferred. In the case of a real fire, smokejumpers need optimum accuracy. Extra time in the air can mean extra drift, and extra drift can mean landing in trees or in the fire zone itself.

Up in the plane, Dixon, a fifth-year jumper who had trained in and worked out of McCall, Idaho, stood momentarily in

Smokejumper Jerry Dixon, 1976.

the open doorway and then launched himself into flight.

“Something didn’t feel right,” he wrote for the National Smokejumper Association in 2000. “The risers were tight against my face, and there was no opening shock. I pulled the risers apart and looked up to see a streamer.”

A “streamer,” which gets its name from its shape, occurs when a parachute fully exits its pack but fails to open. It appears as a vertical column of fabric and does almost nothing to slow the jumper’s descent. Such a malfunction requires the jumper to take emergency action, and Dixon knew just what to do.

He had trained for this eventuality, and he knew that, without a chute, he had less than 10 seconds before he would strike the ground.

Looking down, he located the handle attached to the ripcord of his reserve-chute pack, which was hanging like a small stuffed sleeping bag from his belly. He grabbed the handle and pulled, then punched the pack to release the chute. As the reserve chute shot upward, he turned his head aside and arched backward to avoid being struck in the face.

“The reserve blew past me, hesitated at the edge of the main (chute) and then flowed up alongside it,” Dixon said. “I was stunned to see it clinging to the side of the main.” Dropping at about 100 miles per hour, he pulled apart the risers to glimpse the rapidly approaching ground.

And once again, training paid off: “In my life, nothing’s been so clear. All fleeting thoughts were gone. There was almost a calm. My training told me to pull in the reserve and throw it out again. I grabbed the reserve lines and started pulling in the chute. Either the act of pulling or the fact that my body was arched so that I could pull harder caused the reserve to deploy. It seemed to explode, and I could actually see what appeared to be dust pulse from the canopy. (Then) the main started to billow and I was on the ground.”

Dixon landed on his back, his helmeted head smacking the ground forcefully. “My back hurt and I was in shock,” he said. “I left my chutes on the ground and walked away.”

Up in the Volpar, some of his fellow jumpers had assumed he was dead. From their perspective, he had disappeared, trailing two malfunctioning parachutes. One of the jumpers approached Dixon afterward and said, “We watched you go below the treeline. Everyone in the plane thought you went in.”

His only injury was a single herniated vertebra in his back, and he said that it was about a year before he was out of pain. But it was five more years before he was ready to jump again.

Dixon had been intrigued by smokejumping since he had watched Richard Widmark in the 1952 film, Red Skies Over Montana, concerning 13 smokejumpers who died fighting the Mann Gulch fire in 1949. And in his brief career as a smokejumper himself, he said he had come to love the camaraderie of the jumper fraternity and the notion that the very nature of their jobs meant that they had to rely on each other.

“You never look left; you never look right. They’re your buddies. They’re there for you,” he said. “You never wonder, ‘Will they be there?’”

Such a sense of closeness, of “brotherhood,” made it difficult for Dixon to stay away, despite his narrow escape in 1976. And in August 1982 he made what would turn out to be his final jump.

Dixon's chutes finally deployed just before he struck the ground.

From a DC-3 over the rugged Salmon River wilderness in Idaho, Dixon leaped out and caught a draft that kept him aloft much longer than usual. Instead of fighting it by pulling in his chute for a more rapid descent, however, he allowed himself to drift, taking in the beauty of his surroundings for nearly seven minutes before he touched the ground.

“I was just like a bird,” he said. And that’s when he knew that this jump would be his perfect ending.

Back at base days later, Dixon said he went to his squad leader and turned in his gear. The squad leader said, “I’ve never had a jumper in the middle of the day, the middle of the week, middle of a pay period, say he quit and turn in his stuff. Why?”

Dixon replied, “It took me six years to come back from a double-parachute malfunction, and that last jump was just so magic. I was floating. I was flying. And that’s how I’ll always remember it.”

Thirty years after the experience over Birch Hill, all these memories came flooding back, and Dixon recalled his other numerous outdoor adventures—traversing mountain ranges, making first descents of distant mountains and dangerous streams, skiing the route of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. He admitted that he had been lucky throughout his life, but he believed that life was too precious not to be fully lived.

As he is fond of saying, “Every day is a gift, and every sunrise is a new beginning.”

 

"A Good Doc Can Be Hard to Find"

In 1960, Dr. Paul Isaak moved to Soldotna to become that city's first full-time physician.
 

A GOOD DOC CAN BE HARD TO FIND

OCTOBER 2009

The 6:30 a.m. phone call brought bad news to Dr. Peter Hansen. On the other end of the line was the wife of Dr. Calvin Johnson, a physician who had been practicing in Kenai for only about six months. Mrs. Johnson wanted to know if Dr. Hansen could come over to her home soon and pronounce her husband dead.

“I’ll never forget the morning,” wrote Hansen for a 1997 Central Kenai Peninsula Community of Memory program. “He’d died during the night. It was something I wasn’t really prepared for at that time in my life.”

Hansen—then only a few years out of medical school but now the longest-tenured physician Kenai has ever had—managed to get through the experience, and he then continued a practice that has spanned four decades.

Prior to Hansen’s arrival in 1967, however, such longevity in Kenai was by no means the norm. Doctors had come and gone. None of them, it seemed, had had real staying power. And in Soldotna there had been no full-time physicians at all until Dr. Paul Isaak showed up in the fall of 1960.

The first doctor to work in Kenai was Dr. Joseph Deisher, a Seward physician who drove each week into town to work for a day or two in an office in the old Harborview Hotel on the bluff. Deisher handled the basics in the Kenai office, but for the bigger issues, such as surgeries, he directed his patients to the hospital in Seward.

Peggy Arness of Nikiski said that she went to Seward to have Deisher deliver her son Joe in 1951, and Donnis Thompson of Nikiski said that he also delivered her first two children in 1954 and 1956.

Visits from Deisher began to diminish as other doctors tried to set up full-time practices in Kenai. The first to make the attempt was a missionary doctor from Toms River, N.J., named Marion Goble, who was married to an aviation mechanic and arrived in Kenai in about 1953. Although most who remember those days claim that Goble stayed for only two to three years, stories concerning her exact dates here vary enough to create contradictions and cast some doubt.

According to Dolly Farnsworth of Soldotna, Dr. Goble tended to the ear infections of Farnsworth’s twin daughters in

In late 1960, Dr. Calvin Fair became the central peninsula's first full-time dentist.

about 1954. Arness said she taught Goble’s daughter in kindergarten in about 1956. And in separate entries in Once Upon the Kenai, Al and Virginia Poore said that Dr. Goble delivered their son, Tracy, in 1960.

Regardless of these discrepancies, Dr. Goble’s influence was keenly felt in the Kenai area. She is mentioned in more than a half-dozen entries in Once Upon the Kenai, and the details from patients who went to see her are clear and evocative.

“She never wore white uniforms,” said Thompson. “She thought that scared the kids. She wore a regular skirt and blouse, and she had a long braid of hair down the middle of her back.” When Goble moved her office from Louisa Miller’s leased ice cream parlor in town to her own home on McCollum Drive, Thompson added, “She only had afternoon hours, and you’d go into her office, and there was always the smell of fresh bread. It was great.”

Eventually, however, the fresh-bread fragrance moved away with the doctor, and Thompson said she can only speculate at the reason: “She delivered babies. She practiced medicine. She did everything. But it didn’t work out for them all that well. I think it was him who got a little bit antsy, and they left.”

When Goble departed, there was a brief physician void in Kenai, but a medical renaissance was under way in Soldotna. Dr. Isaak, who had been working with Dr. Deisher in Seward, moved into town and then joined with Dr. Elmer Gaede and new dentist, Dr. Calvin Fair, to open a clinic in Soldotna in 1961. They formed a sort of medical triumvirate of the central peninsula.

Downstairs at the new medical clinic. The door on the right led to Dr. Fair.
The door on the left led to the Soldotna public library.

Both Isaak and Gaede were pilots and made regular trips to see patients in the clinic in Seldovia and to perform rounds at the hospital in Seward. Fair, meanwhile, traveled once a month to Homer to spend two or three days working on patients from the southern peninsula. Although Dr. Fair soon became too busy locally to travel south anymore, Gaede and Isaak continued their long-distance doctoring, and by early 1983 Isaak estimated that he had flown through Resurrection Pass at least 2,000 times.

Sometimes, they flew in weather that Isaak said was “actually too bad to be flying in,” resulting in some close calls. “It was only a rare occasion that I was not able to fly, and in that case I would have to drive to Seward by auto to make my hospital rounds,” wrote Isaak in Once Upon the Kenai.

One such occasion occurred in January 1968. Here’s how Isaak described the trip: “I was going to take one of my obstetric patients and her husband (by air) to the hospital in Seward for delivery. This man was a prominent citizen in the community, and it turned out that when we got about five miles out of Seward, the weather deteriorated rather rapidly and I was unable to continue, so we turned around and came back.

“And so [the husband] drove to Seward, and about seven or eight miles out of Seward she decided that she was going to have that baby, and indeed did have it in the back seat of the car.

“Fortunately, I had some of the bare necessities with me to manage the delivery in the car, even though it wasn’t the most ideal situation. Everything turned out fine for mother and baby, and they spent several days in the hospital after that experience.”

The new Soldotna clinic offered a real waiting room with old magazines and comfortable chairs. The clinic also featured x-ray and minor surgery equipment, a small lab, medications, and a knowledgeable, professional staff. As the number of patients—and the number of instances requiring even higher-level facilities—increased, talk began in earnest of creating an actual hospital for the central peninsula.

Meanwhile over in Kenai, doctors were still coming and going. According to Hansen’s writings, a group of people, who included Thompson, Jim Fisher, Homer Swires and Ethel Sims, began a volunteer effort that resulted in the Kenai Community Clinic, which they then worked to fill by bringing in a physician to operate it.

Dr. Allen W. Barr became the first full-time physician to establish a practice in the clinic, and Swires was delighted with the doctor’s company. In Once Upon the Kenai, he wrote: “He was from Texas, which our President (Lyndon Johnson) was at that time. The doctor and I were very good friends, and he’d always stop in the morning and we’d have a cup of coffee together, and a lot of times, evenings, he’d stop by and we’d have a beer together.”

Dr. Barr stayed for only two years, but he was around long enough to deliver several babies, including Thompson’s third child in 1964. He was also able to impress former public health nurse Shirley Henley enough that she called him “a damn good doctor.”

When he left, however, Kenai residents were right back where they’d started—going elsewhere for services and waiting

Dr. Struthers (L) chats with Kenai dentist, Dr. Bailie.

for a new doctor to come to town.

Into the breach, then, stepped Dr. Robert Alden Struthers, a surgeon fresh from his own practice and regular rounds at a hospital in Portland, Oregon. He arrived with his nurse, Gloria Crandall (a single mom who later remarried and became Gloria Wisecarver).

Struthers—father of Emmy-winning television actress Sally Struthers (Gloria Bunker Stivic on All in the Family in the 1970s)—had replied to an advertisement calling for a doctor in Kenai, Alaska. According to Wisecarver, Struthers flew to Kenai for an interview, at which he was told that there were plans under way to build a hospital in Kenai—at the present location of the Benco Building—and that he could become the head doctor at that new facility.

“I just remember him coming back one Monday morning and saying, ‘Ah! I have the greatest deal!’” said Wisecarver. “And I was going to be the chief nurse. Well, I didn’t really have anything keeping me in Portland, Oregon. I could bring my kids with me, so that was no problem. So I might just as well strike out and see the world.”

In Kenai, Struthers and Wisecarver were installed in the Professional Building, off Willow Street. Their office was in a back corner, next to a beauty salon and a land-survey office.

Nurse Gloria Wisecarver in the mid-1960s.

“We had beds where people could stay, and we had an examining room with the doctor’s desk in there,” remembered Wisecarver. “And we had to go out a door to get to the x-ray, and it was primitive, to say the least. For us coming from Oregon, it was primitive, believe me.”

Just as Drs. Paul Isaak and Elmer Gaede had done in Soldotna, Dr. Struthers did in Kenai. In the days when a basic office visit might cost about $8, he handled everything that he had the facilities and equipment to handle, including setting bones, delivering babies, and doing minor surgeries.

“I can remember, I took my son over to Seward because Dr. Struthers took out his tonsils (there), and then he assisted Dr. Isaak on a gall bladder, and then we all came home again,” said Wisecarver, noting that they would all be back at their “regular” jobs the following day.

“People Outside cannot believe what they (the doctors) went through,” she said, and she added that she marveled at how many lives they were able to save, given the conditions at the time. “I talked to somebody who broke his back and had to ride in the back of a stationwagon all the way to Seward. It was just amazing. I always thought the Lord looked down on us here.”

Dr. Struthers was “an excellent physician,” Wisecarver said. “He was very patient-orientated. He was very caring, so-so outgoing, not that would overwhelm you. He was always willing to listen to you. Very nice, nice man. I’m glad I knew him.”

In the end, however, Dr. Struthers did not become the head doctor at the new hospital—which was not completed until 1972, and was constructed in Soldotna instead of Kenai—and Gloria Wisecarver did not become the chief nurse. Struthers, a heavyset man about age 50 when he arrived in Kenai, departed after little more than a year and a half on the job, while Wisecarver liked her new home too much to move.

Wisecarver, who was 36 when she arrived in Kenai, said that, in retrospect, she was glad she had never become the top nurse at the hospital. “I don’t think I’d make a very good chief nurse. I’m not really the hiring-and-firing-type person. Maybe the hiring. It’s the firing that would bother me.”

Dr. Elmer Gaede joined Drs. Fair and Isaak to form the
central Kenai Peninsula's first medical establishment.

As for Struthers, she said, “When it looked as if nobody was going to ever get this hospital built, he just lost heart and left. He just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I want to go someplace where I can practice.’” He returned to Oregon, and nurse and doctor gradually lost touch.

Sometime later, Arness was sitting in the beauty parlor in the Professional Building when she realized that a woman in the doctor’s office next door was giving birth. “I could hear her moaning and screaming and hollering through the walls while I was getting my hair done,” she said.

Arness’s experience was indicative of two things: First, a new physician had moved into the office vacated by Dr. Struthers. Second, the acoustics of the clinic were hardly soundproof.

The “new” doctor in town was actually the oldest physician who had yet hung out a local shingle: He was Dr. Osric H. Armstrong, a Louisiana doctor who had begun practicing medicine in the Matanuska Valley in 1939.

Armstrong, whose mother had given him the name of a minor character in Hamlet because she loved the works of Shakespeare, came to Kenai after stops in Seward, Valdez, Seldovia, and Palmer.

“He turned out to be my step-father,” said Thompson. “My mother came up here and met Doc, and within about a year or so they got hitched.” Armstrong, a widower when he first arrived, had been looking for a new place to live and practice when he heard about the Kenai opening.

Unfortunately, Dr. Armstrong’s tenure in Kenai was also briefer than he had planned. After living for a while in a Kenai apartment, the Armstrongs in the early 1970s moved out to Wildwood, where the doctor had been offered a position in the Native clinic. Shortly after the move, Dr. Armstrong suffered a stroke.

According to Thompson, the Pioneer Home in Anchorage was full, so Armstrong was moved into the Pioneer Home in Sitka until an Anchorage opening became available. In the meantime, Thompson’s mother also fell ill, and she headed south to enter a nursing home in California. Both died within a few years.

 Thompson said that when Armstrong died, no one in the state had a medical license that had been issued earlier than his.

The departure of Armstrong left Dr. Peter Hansen as the only physician in town for a while.

“Before Karolee and I got married, a few days after my graduation from medical school in 1963, each one of us had one condition for marriage,” Hansen wrote for in the 1997 Community of Memory program. “Mine was that she’d be willing to move to Alaska and try it out with me for up to two or three years. Hers was, if we started a family, that she and the kids could go home in the summertime to see the relatives as long as they would like. I didn’t really have any problem with that.”

Hansen finished school and then spent a little more than a year in residency in general practice in Minnesota. Then the Hansen family packed everything it owned into a little travel trailer and headed north.

 “It was about two months after the ’64 earthquake that we started to move. As we traveled around Alaska we came down on the Kenai Peninsula. Around Turnagain Arm, there were about 30 little bridges to cross because the whole highway had been washed out. We’ve got pictures of the big crevasses where the tidal waves had gone.

“We liked the Kenai area the best, but there weren’t enough people to support a physician. The pharmacist here, John Hulien, who owned Kenai Drug Store, did his best to convince us that we ought to stay because he was tired of sewing up people in his back room. But we traveled back down the highway and got on the ferry at Haines and went to Juneau. I found an opportunity to work with a group of mixed specialists there the next three years.”

In 1967, however, Hansen ran into Dr. Isaak at a State Medical Association meeting in Sitka, and Isaak convinced Hansen that he and Dr. Gaede needed help dealing with the growing peninsula population.

Two months later, Hansen moved again, and he has yet to run out of patients.

 

Dr. Isaak (far right) attends the groundbreaking for the first hospital on the central peninsula, circa 1970.

 

 

 

"Teamwork Trumps Individual"

This late-stage snowfield crossing exemplified the difficulties of the Gore-Tex Transalpine-Run.

TEAMWORK TRUMPS INDIVIDUAL

 

JANUARY 2011

 

Cattle were a problem on Stage Two of the race.

 

Alaskan runners Brent Knight and Brandon Newbould tried to make the best of the situation, but the bovine issue was difficult to ignore. There they were, high in the Austrian Alps, running as a two-man team for a second day in the arduous Gore-Tex Transalpine-Run, and even above treeline they were racing by livestock. Cattle on grazing land, cattle behind fences, and cattle on hillsides. Cattle nearly everywhere, on ranches and ranges up to nearly 6,000 feet in elevation in some of Western Europe’s most beautiful alpine country.

 

It might have been pastoral, except for the associated drawbacks.

 

“Much of the course,” wrote Newbould in a race update to friends and family later that day, “ran through cow pasture, which had been tramped down into ankle-deep muddy excrement.”

 

On the first of their two descents that day, Newbould, who was leading Knight, skidded to a stop into a three-line barbed wire fence that was blocking the trail. Cut only slightly, Newbould collected himself and continued downhill through more manure, once more leading Knight, and again encountered a cattle fence across the trail.

 

This time, Knight and one member of a Russian team slid into the fence, discovering to their misfortune that

A cleaner and decidedly more cow-free section of the Transalpine route.

it was electrified.

 

The Russian seemed to be briefly entangled in the fence, but Newbould said he was unable to render him any assistance because Newbould himself was busy “wiping out in a foot of wet manure,” gashing one of his hands in the process.

 

Knight and Newbould ran 20.6 miles on this day while logging a cumulative elevation gain of 5,938 feet. The day before, during the first stage of the race, they had run 22.5 miles and climbed 4,012 feet. The next day would offer no relief: 29.1 miles of running and 7,388 feet of climbing.

 

After Stage Three, they would have five more stages to go. As exhausted as they would feel, they would be only slightly over a third of the way through what was scheduled to be a 189.5-mile extreme-endurance contest that began in Ruhpolding, Germany, would cross through western Austria, and conclude in Sexten, Italy. During all those miles of mountainous travel, they were scheduled to endure a cumulative elevation gain of 44,291 feet.

 

Mutual Ambitions

 

The genesis of Knight and Newbould’s decision to enter this race through Alps goes back to 2008, but the genesis of their lives as teammates ranges another decade, back to the fall of 1998 when Knight entered Soldotna High School as a freshman and joined Newbould, a junior, on the Stars cross country running team.

 

Under Coach Mark Devenney, Newbould was flourishing as a runner. He understood that a key to his own success was disciplined training, and he also understood that a key to his team’s success was convincing the current crop of underclassmen to adapt the same philosophy.

 

According to Knight, while Devenney was the driving influence for the team’s overall success, Newbould was integral in holding the team together and keeping it motivated. The following year, the SoHi Stars boys cross country team won the borough championship, the Region III title, and the state championship.

 

The place Knight and Newbould met.

With Newbould leading the way in sixth place, SoHi runners—including Knight, Kyle McBride, Andy Liebner, Bill Keller, Daniel Harro and Mark Musgrove—captured four spots in the Top Twenty and surged past the powerful Dimond and Palmer teams to victory.

 

“We had nine guys on the team, total,” Knight said. “And we kicked the tar out of those big Anchorage schools.”

 

During the cross country ski season, it was more of the same. Under head coach Sarah Tureson, the SoHi boys were borough and Region III champs and finished fifth in the State meet. And in the spring, the same crop of SoHi boys, again under the direction of Devenney, finished high in the standings at the state track and field championships.

 

After his graduation, Newbould continued to train locally in the summer, and Knight and some of the others ran with him. “We ran together every day,” Knight said. “And those are one of those things you kind of need if you want to be a solid athlete. You need a training partner to keep you motivated and to kick you out the door.”

As they trained together, a deeper friendship developed. “We learned to talk a lot, and when you’re on your runs, it’s a lot of time spent together. Brandon’s just one of those guys I keep in touch with on a regular basis, and he’s one of my great friends from high school.”

 

Their friendship led Knight—who lives and works in Anchorage while skiing for the Alaska Pacific University development team—to visit Newbould in 2008 out in New Hampshire, where the talented trombonist works as a freelance jazz and orchestral musician in the New England area, and coaches cross country running and track and field at Phillips Exeter Academy.

 

There, Knight brought up the idea that the two of them should do a “cool” race somewhere together. Newbould concurred, and they began to consider options. Knight had read an article about the Gore-Tex Transalpine-Run and decided to further investigate.

 

“I was reading through (the article), and I was like, ‘Holy crap! When you think about it, looking at it on paper—man, you’re racing across the Alps. I mean, I love trail running. I love mountain running. This sounds like a great idea.’ The whole magnitude just doesn’t sink in,” Knight said.

 

Before Stage One began, Team Raven appeared ready to go.

He called Newbould about the race, and they decided to go for it. They began saving money for the flight to Europe and for the 1,250-euro (about $1,750) team entry fee, and then they began to train.

 

Actually, Newbould and Knight are always training. Newbould, 28, is a 5-foot-10½, 150-pound marathon runner who hopes to qualify this year for the next Olympic Trials marathon. Knight, 26, has won the Government Peak Hill Climb, the Robert Spurr Memorial (Bird Ridge) Hill Climb, and the Alyeska Mountain Run.

 

At six feet tall and about 175 pounds, he has also been a Top Ten finisher in the Mount Marathon run in Seward several times. He was winning handily in 2008, when he collapsed and passed out from dehydration only about 200 yards from the finish line. He awoke four hours later in the hospital, an I.V. in his arm, and learned that he had lost about six liters of fluids.

 

Newbould and Knight hoped that their levels of fitness and their individual strengths would play an integral role in the Transalpine-Run. According to several sources, no American team had finished high in the standings in the five previous incarnations of the event, but by combining Newbould’s abilities in long-distance endurance running with Knight’s powerful climbing abilities they hoped they could work together for success.

 

“I had never raced more than three days in a row before, and that was in track or nordic ski meets, short races,” Newbould said. “This race was totally different, uncharted territory. I knew I would need to alter my training to prepare, and I knew that this was a chance to back up my self-confidence as a long trail runner…. The allure was immediate—for those reasons and because Brent is a close friend. I was interested in the opportunity to do this with him, and confident that we could make a good team.”

 

According to Adventure World Magazine, the Gore-Tex Transalpine-Run—with its near-marathon length of running per day, its multiple stages, and its numerous difficult ascents and descents—presents a formidable challenge to the human body. “The force exerted on the joints, muscles and cartilage in your knees when you run down hill represents seven or eight times your own body weight,” the magazine said.

 

The magazine also estimated that a 5-foot-9, 152-pound male would burn 4,000 to 4,500 calories per stage—the equivalent, according to the publication, of 8.8 pounds of potatoes, 10 eggs, and three-fourths of a packet of butter. The estimated fluid loss per stage would range between 1.32 and 1.58 gallons.

 

Additionally, since about 60 percent of the course was slated for hiking routes and narrow mountain trails, runners would have to be sure-footed at the same time they were expending all that energy.

 

Getting Started

 

The sixth annual Gore-Tex Transalpine-Run was slated for Sept. 4 to Sept. 11, 2010.

 

Before the first stage began in the broad valley nestling Ruhpolding, Germany, a race official checked the runners for their required gear: Each athlete had to carry or wear a set of rain gear, a hat and gloves, and an insulating top layer. Each team had to carry a first-aid kit, a space blanket, and a map showing that day’s course.

 

Both Newbould and Knight wore Brooks Cascadia trail shoes and low-cut athletic socks, running shorts and t-shirts (always bearing the word Alaska, and usually containing a reference to Skinny Raven Sports, the Anchorage store where Knight has worked for the past five years).  On their backs, Team Raven wore narrow Gregory hydration packs containing a bladder for water that added two to three pounds of weight.

 

Chowing down on carbs on pre-race day.

As the pre-race activities continued, Newbould took a good look around and assessed some of their competitors: “As much as I enjoy running in excellent gear, I am drawn much more so to the minimalist ethos of the distance runner. So it was that Brent and I found ourselves in a sea of Gore-Tex gators and compression socks, $200 sunglasses and equally expensive hydration systems, while we stood out for our bare skin and bandanas.”

 

Just before the starting gun, Newbould spotted the defending champs, a pair of United Kingdom runners: “I respected them instantly. Like us, they came to the line in runner’s attire. One of them had nothing on his head; both wore a basic black singlet. They were shockingly gaunt, spare bodies on fragile-looking legs. I admit I was intimidated, but I also instantly wanted to duel with them.”

 

Then the race began in earnest, and Knight and Newbould were to learn over the course of the next eight days whether all of their experience, all of their time learning to communicate as teammates, and all of their willpower were enough in a race that would test them physically, mentally, and psychologically.

 

Figuring Out What Works

 

As they iced their aching legs in the frigid alpine creek running through town, Newbould and Knight shivered in a state of near-hypothermia and reflected on the day’s accomplishments. On the bridge above them, locals and tourists eyeballed the chilly pair, who sat hunched in their running shorts in the clear, shallow water, their bare legs extended across the sandy creek bottom, and their arms curled about their chests. Passers-by cheered them on and paused to take their picture.

 

Icing down in a cold, cold stream after Stage One.

The two young men had just completed the 22.5-mile first stage and were now resting in St. Ulrich im Pillerseetal, Austria. They had traversed that distance in three hours and 14 seconds—12 minutes behind the leaders, the defending champs—but good enough for third place out of about 100 men’s teams, and for a spot on the podium at that evening’s post-mealtime awards ceremony.

 

On the awards platform after Stage One.

However, the celebration that night was not as important as rest and recovery for the runners, who would be on the trails again at 8 a.m. the next day, and then at 7 a.m. the next, and so forth, for all eight days of the competition. So Newbould and Knight moved zombie-like from the cold stream to the warm showers available at the racing venue, and from there to put their legs up in the chocolate-brown Volkswagen Vanagon that Knight’s father, Paul, had rented and was using as a traveling getaway for the two runners.

 

The majority of the 250 running teams in the Transalpine-Run stayed each night in the gymnasium-like quarters afforded by the race committee in each host town along the way. Paul Knight, who had originally traveled to Europe solely to be a spectator, said he learned that he could “be of some use” by supplying the van and by helping Knight and Newbould just after and just before each race stage. “They discovered that it would be much more comfortable to sleep up top in the camper van and have some privacy,” Paul said. “I consider my role minor, but I think the boys appreciated it.”

 

Brent clearly considered his father’s role crucial: “Thanking my dad to no end, he had everything laid out for us. Like, we’re across the line, and he’s, ‘Showers are right here. The icing is right over here.’ He just kind of guided us into each place, so that way we weren’t really thinking about how to find things when we got there.”

 

Each day, which usually began in the chill of an alpine morning, Paul accompanied Knight and Newbould to the staging area. He collected their warm-ups and any other gear they left behind, and then loaded up the Vanagon and used his GPS to guide him down narrow, winding mountain roads to the next venue.

There, he located a nearby campsite, parked the vehicle and scouted for a handy stream, for the showers, and for everything else the runners might need. When they finished that stage, he met them with fresh clothes and sandals, clear directions and plenty of encouragement.



Exhausted on the trail during Stage One.

 

And frankly, they needed the help. The Gore-Tex Transalpine-Run is a grueling, punishing affair. During the latter portion of Stage One, Newbould and Knight were wobbly from their final descent, and Knight was hurting because he was inadequately hydrated and had eaten too little.

 

In Stage Two, Knight again had problems, this time during the final climb—a tightness in his right quadriceps that was threatening to turn into a cramp. He and Newbould were forced to walk and then to stop so that Knight could massage the leg before continuing. They finished the stage 30 minutes behind the leaders and slipped to fourth overall.

 

Newbould, who referred to his teammate as a “large aerobic machine,” said that it would be essential to keep him well fed the rest of the way.

 

Stage Three was the longest stage (29.1 miles) and featured the most elevation gain (7,388 feet). It also became arguably the best stage in the race for Team Raven, propelling them back into third place and back onto the evening podium.

 

“Our strategy today was two-fold,” wrote Newbould at the time. “(1) Run a steady pace, avoiding even slight over-exertion at all costs, regardless of position. (2) Make sure Brent eats something every 20 or 30 minutes! Brent must have knocked out a couple gallons of fluids yesterday afternoon in preparation for today … and today he carried a full water bladder on his back…. In addition, he ate all of my energy gels (I volunteered them), took gels at all three aid stations, in addition to other food and drink at each aid station. It’s like fueling a Lincoln Town Car on a road trip with that guy.”

 

The Town Car purred right along. And so did Newbould, revitalized by the terrain and his partner’s improvements: “The course felt like an Alaskan training run in the mountains. We even had to use our hands to climb the steepest sections of trail. Brent came to life in the roughest single track, reverting automatically into a power-hiking rhythm that I could never match. He was a sight to behold, monstrous legs stomping up the steep faces like pile drivers.”

 

During Stage Four, the runners crossed out of Austria and into Italy. They also raced in drizzling rain, endured occasional blasts of wind, and, at 8,750-foot Birnlücke Pass, scaled the highest point in the race.

Racing through an Alpine city during Stage Four.

 

Knight and Newbould once again managed to finish in third. “It was a great stage, but we are banged up” Newbould wrote. “Both of us have acute soreness in a couple of places, while the general soreness in our legs is somehow becoming status quo.”



Ready for some recovery time after Stage Four.

As they had done throughout the race, the two men communicated well and used their individual abilities to boost their performance as a team.

 

“We’re both comfortable in the mountains,” said Knight. “He trains for marathons, so his technical mountain training was not as good as mine, because he’s been away from it for a few years. But his durability was better—the day-after-day high-mileage—where my mileage running is not as much. So we kind of had some in-between. If we both played to our strengths, we’d have a chance to do pretty well.”

 

And they did do well, but it certainly was not easy.

 

The Going Gets Tougher

 

Before Stage Five, an avalanche on the course required a course adjustment, which added 3.1 miles and nearly 1,000 feet of vertical to the stage. In addition to this increase in difficulty, Newbould also found himself nursing a particularly tender area high in his left quadriceps.

 

As the terrain took its toll on them both, Newbould felt the tender spot becoming a muscle strain. He also feared that he was holding Knight back—and that it would take a great effort just to finish.

 

Fortunately for Newbould, he was able to cross the finish line, with Team Raven finishing fifth for the stage. Even more fortunate, however, was the post-race “rescue” he received. A Dutch runner—a licensed physical trainer and member of a team forced by injury to drop out of the race— offered to massage the strain and to tape the leg for the next stage.

 

As a result, despite continued soreness, Newbould performed well in Stage Six, and he and Knight were once again on the podium.

 

After another massage, a restless night with his legs in compression socks, and another tape job from their Dutch friend the following morning, Newbould, along with Knight, hit the trail out of St. Vigil, Italy, at 8 a.m.



Stage Seven was especially tough on Team Raven. Here, they salve their racing wounds in a public fountain.

 

Stage Seven was to prove the most difficult for both men. As they reached the first major climb, Newbould found himself falling behind. “I felt as if I had no power in my legs,” he said. “I was a heavy, hollow shell of a runner.”

 

A few minutes later, Newbould said that Knight “bent down and picked up a stick. In my fatigue I barely took notice, but then saw that he was offering it to me—Brent wanted to pull me up the mountain.”

 

Knight's expression is revealing as he recovers from Stage Seven.

With Knight alternately pulling and allowing Newbould to chug along on his own, they climbed—and “after a painful eternity,” Newbould said, they attained the summit. At that point, Knight’s legs were exhausted from the extra effort, and their subsequent descent was “numbing, painful, endless.” Both men wept as they crossed the finish line—somehow once again completing a stage in third place.

 

In the 20.7-mile, 4,163-foot final stage, Newbould once more struggled with his wounded quad, and in the end he could not swing his left leg in a full running motion. As a result, Team Skinny Raven finished fifth for the day while landing comfortably in third place overall.

 

 

Aftermath

 

After eight days, they had finished 53 minutes behind the second-place German team and more than two hours behind the repeat-champion runners from the United Kingdom.

Emotions ran high as they crossed the final finish line in Sexten, Italy.

 

Later that day, Newbould, who had earlier imagined the end of the race as a triumphant surge to the line, wrote that “a feeling of completion” was, instead, his dominant emotion. More recently, he said, “Afterward it was nice to know that I could simply sleep and recover. The stress of wondering if I could finish the race was finally gone. I felt pride in Brent and gratitude to God for the race.”

Time to toss an old pair of shoes.

Newbould celebrates a successful ending.

One of Knight's feet after the race.

Knight came away with a strong sense of the camaraderie among the many runners: “You don’t care where you finish so much sometimes; it’s more of an IF you finish. Even those guys who are finishing in 200^th place, you’re so proud of them when they finish because they just did something huge.

 

“In the end, in the last stage, the guys that won are standing there with the guys that are finishing in last place—but finishing—and sharing bottles of champagne because it’s such a huge deal to finish that race.”

 

Knight had blisters on his feet and later lost one of his toenails but said that those injuries were “no big deal.” Newbould added: “Physically, it seemed that some of my leg muscles were destroyed, but we were able to jog again in another day or two, and things healed up well.”

 

Both Knight and Newbould are considering participation in another race of this type this year, but they’ve made no decisions as to the venue.

 

Meanwhile, Knight just finished competing in the U.S. National Cross Country Ski Championships in Rumford, Maine, and out in New Hampshire where he lives with his wife and children, Newbould continues to train for distance, hoping to qualify for the Olympic Trials marathon.

 

And despite the distance between Alaska and New Hampshire, Knight and Newbould remain close—perhaps even closer because of their experience in the Alps.

 

“Brandon and I accomplished something that was beyond ourselves, beyond what we thought was accomplishable for both of us,” Knight said. “We had to rely on each other, and that reliance on each other was what got us through.”

 

 

The top three finishers included a jubilant Team Raven.