Note: This article was originally featured in the premiere issue of Recumbent and Tandem Rider magazine, 2001. Original title: Two to Tandem Alaska.
By Dan Sullivan
People told us that it would be the ultimate test of our new marriage. If we could survive a week on a tandem bicycle riding through Alaska and sleeping in tent cities in unknown weather, we could handle anything.
To a Southern California cyclist, the Palotta Teamworks-organized California AIDS ride is pretty well known. We had certainly heard about it, but had never seriously considered doing it. Local or not, 575 miles seemed like an awful long way to ride. At that point, the longest ride we’d done on our tandem was a metric century (100 Kilometers, 62 miles) and we didn’t exactly burn up the pavement. So, when we heard about their Alaska AIDS ride, it seemed a little too extreme for us to consider. But it did sound interesting, and we talked ourselves into going to the orientation meeting just for “entertainment.” After all, why would people from Southern California ride in Alaska?
The ride would begin in Fairbanks on August 21st and closing ceremonies in Anchorage would be on the 26th. Hearing the actual dates seemed to make the event more real, and brought the ride one step closer. Although we weren’t sure it was possible, we started to consider it.
We heard other potential riders ask if the tents would be wet on the inside, would there be a lot of climbing, how cold would it be, would it rain, would it snow, and were Alaska mosquitoes, in fact, larger than hummingbirds and carnivorous? Someone asked, “Will it be hard?”
Compared to some, our weekend camping experiences made us feel like experienced hard-core adventurers! This bolstered our confidence enormously, and we starting thinking about really doing it. We narrowed our personal paranoia list down to: temperature, bugs, saddle time and fatigue. Yes, the ride would be hard.
I was pumped up with the thought of grand adventure, and before the meeting was over I had picked up a pen and started filling out the registration forms. However, my finely honed powers of perception detected hesitation from my fiance and stoker.
Signing up would mean a lot. We’d be committing to raise $3,900 each over the next eight or so months to fund AIDS vaccine research, and to ride 510 miles of Alaska highway in six days with potentially very little training. Plus, the travel to Fairbanks and back from Anchorage would be on our own dime. The idea of riding around glaciers and through green mountains had me rationalizing all the difficulties away. I was ready to go.
Ami wanted to go too, but generally has a more pragmatic view. During the Q & A section of the presentation, someone had asked about where we’d camp on a particular day. To Ami, the response of “we don’t know yet” was rather unsettling. Plus, our calendar already held a few things for us to do before the ride-like buy a house, get married, and finish Ami’s MBA. We didn’t sign up that night.
We talked about it. To me, the Vaccine Ride looked like a dream. It would offer all the thrill of a road trip to destinations unknown without leaving us to handle every contingency unsupported. We acknowledged that the event organizers (Palotta Teamworks) had put on many other successful events, enough that we could rely on them to do their part. And if problems did arise, we figured we were somehow uniquely equipped with cleverness and resolve to handle almost anything. So, after sifting through the details we signed up along with our friend Peter.
In the months between signing up and leaving for Alaska, we asked just about everyone we knew to contribute. Local businesses contributed, family and friends helped the most. We learned along the way that income has little to do with willingness to donate, and that AIDS has affected more of our friends than we thought.
When it came time to leave, we had packed up per regulation (one bag each filled with no more than 70 pounds of gear) but we didn’t feel ready. We had put fewer miles on the tandem cumulatively than we were going to put on it in the coming week! But the time was near so we packed up our stuff and the considerable stuff we’d borrowed, and headed for the Los Angeles International Airport.
At the airport, cyclists were easy to spot. We saw the T-shirts which came with registration packages, often worn on the outside of long sleeve shirts and jerseys lest any passerby think we were normal air travelers, or anything less than super heroes in uniform. There were California AIDS ride T-shirts too, and others with Pearl Izumi backpacks with frame pumps and water bottles sticking out and cycling shoes dangling underneath.
The shirts and other various cycling-related items served as uniforms to those of us among the initiated. To the non-cycling airport population, there were just a lot of people carrying strange things. By the time we reached our gate, riders were everywhere. We met our first riding friends in line to purchase cinnamon rolls. They were Team Bissel, a mother and her son; at 17 the youngest Alaska AIDS rider. We also met Ed, who looked like Indiana Jones with bike stuff.
On the plane, we found that about half the passengers were AIDS riders, and after a short while the non-riders were assimilated into our mood of enthusiasm and camaraderie. For some non-riders, it was Road Kill that broke the ice. Road kill was a high-mileage, highly decorated brown teddy bear that had been a riding companion to one of the riders since he’d been rescued from the roadside. Needless to say, Road Kill was noticeable, and a fine mascot.
When we landed in Fairbanks, we were directed to a lovely yellow school bus that took us to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks where we spent the next two nights before the ride. After we settled in to our plush dorm room where my wife and I shared a single bed and our friend took the other one about 4 feet away, we walked down to the Carlson Center auditorium to make sure our bikes had arrived A-OK.
The bicycle “parking lot” was impressive. Bicycles ranged from a very few knobby-equipped low price mountain bikes to a good showing of top end dream machines. For the most part though, bikes were high-quality singles, and well-maintained. Our tandem, a Trek hybrid converted to drop bars, was one of only eight two seaters out of the whole group! The others included a pearl colored Co-Motion with S&S couplers to disassemble for travel, a low budget mountain tandem with a mixte frame, a nice orange Ibis, a white Cannondale, a titanium bike we couldn’t identify and a recumbent tandem with a “fat Girls” sticker on it. There was another one, but we saw it only as it scooted under an overpass on day six.
A husband and wife team rode the recumbent tandem, with she up front and he in the rear. We met briefly enough to learn that he was blind and that she would be riding despite a recently broken wrist. We had entered the event expecting to feel some pain from inexperience and lack of training, but over the next six days we had many such humbling experiences, and our own complaints were few.
We got our bikes and they looked fine until Ami noticed that the timing chain was dragging on the ground, collecting mud. Although it’s not a pretty sight to see mud on your chain before your biggest ride, it wiped off and the chain went back on quickly. After looking around at all the other cyclists, we were glad we chose to truck our bike instead of disassembling it and paying horrendous fees to the airline. Aside from the question of how in the world we would box up a tandem with a frame that doesn’t disassemble, the $150 we paid for trucking bought us the luxury of receiving a fully assembled, as-we-left-it bike.
Instead of wrenching on our bike, we were eating chili and hot dogs with sauerkraut at the Dog House. It’s our favorite place to eat in Fairbanks now, and it’s only about 20 feet from the Marlin bar, our favorite after-hours establishment! If you visit Fairbanks, we recommend both.
Sunday we took in the University’s Museum of Natural History where we learned bear survival tactics. Did you know that wearing a bell and carrying pepper spray is all that you have to do to keep safe from brown bears? Grizzly bears are a different story, however. Avoid them by learning the signs. You can tell they’ve been around if you see bear dung with little bells in it that smells like pepper spray.
We balanced out this educational experience with a trip to the Alaskaland frontier town. There, we had buffalo burgers, found a place selling pancakes and sausage on a stick, and went to a drag show. I don’t think that’s the way most people prepare for big rides, but it worked for us.
Read on for a day by day account of our grand adventure.
Day one: bicycle touring from Fairbanks to Delta Junction >
