A few miles outside of Tananna the trail dumped us onto a slough, which was glare ice. It was all we could do to double pole and stay upright--this wasn't nice, flat skating-rink ice. It was convoluted, bumpy and very stressful mentally to get across. We got back on snow and Pat just skated away from me.

I got to the confluence of the Tananna and Yukon Rivers, and, as usual, the wind was blowing 30 mph on the Yukon. The snow was blown clean down to the sandbars, so I decided to walk some of it instead of grinding my skis. The Yukon is really an amazing sight. You can feel the power of this river even when it is buried beneath a think layer of ice. The ice just groans.

	"Everyone quickly realized that the 'highway' was going to be a death march."

I made it to town about 45 minutes after Pat. We were both going to take a long break here. After Tananna there is nothing for 125 miles and I wanted to be fresh for it. The top 10 racers all congregated here again just like Manley, except for Eric who was still out front, but his lead was shrinking. He had taken the river route out of Manley on advice of race officials because they were not able to break the trail going over the mountain yet. He followed a trappers' trail up the river for 55 miles and then it just ended.

He bivouacked overnight and then pushed through deep snow until finally getting to a point where the river had been blown down to bare ice and he could ride.

One biker, Jan from then Czech Republic, left that night. The locals told Jan that the Yukon should be a 'highway' with lots of snow machine traffic and great fast trail conditions. We all thought he would catch Eric and make it to the next village of Ruby, 125 miles down river in 10-15 hours. I have biked on the Yukon before and it was a dream--nice wide trail, rock hard and fast. Another biker, Elliot, went out that night too only to return in the morning. He said the river was a total push, a complete disaster. Nobody believed him. Not the Yukon I thought, there may be slow sections, but overall it is always fast.

The rest of the lead group hit the trail at dawn. Everyone quickly realized that the 'highway' was going to be a death march. Bikers were pushing right from the start. Even skiing it was incredibly slow. The further we went, the more snow there was. I ran into the race director heading back up the trail. He said there was 3-feet of fresh snow further down. He had to turn around because he was running out of gas. He was using twice as much gas as normal breaking trail.

This was a bad sign. Most people had loaded food for maybe 20 hours at the most. I went conservative, because experience has taught me that things can go really wrong up here and food is one thing you can't live without for very long. I thought I had a 2-day supply of food and figured it would be plenty. It didn't really matter because I couldn't have put one more thing in my pack--it was completely jammed.