Iditarod Trails Athlete Beats Path Toward Nome

Nobody would pick Tim Hewitt out of a line up as an ultimate Alaska hard man. He is small, wiry, graying, and damn near 60 years old. Not only that, the guy doesn't even live in Alaska. His real life is as a Pennsylvania attorney. Rather, Hewitt is a visitor to the north, a throwback to those Alaskans and visitors of old who made their money in gold during the summer months and "wintered out," as they used to say, in Seattle or San Francisco or somewhere more hospitable.

Only Hewitt doesn't winter out. Hewitt summers out and comes here in winter to hike the Iditarod Trail, the whole 1,000 miles of it from the old Cook Inlet port of Knik north through the frozen heart of the 49th state to the still-thriving gold-mining community of Nome on the Bering Sea. He's already done this six times, more than any person alive. He's back for the seventh try this year.

The desolate, lonely, little-traveled Iditarod in winter offers what Hewitt considers the ultimate "vacation." Forget the howling winds of the Alaska Range or Bering Sea coast that can knock a man off his feet. Ignore the brutal, 50-degree-below-zero cold of the Interior that killed the protagonist in author Jack London's classic short story "To Build a Fire.'' Just keep moving and you'll be fine. That's Hewitt's mantra.

The man doesn't belong in this century. He would fit better in the Alaska of 1913 than that of 2013. He doesn't seem to understand that the serious Iditarod competitions of the modern day are dominated by the gas-powered, fire-breathing snowmobiles of the Iron Dog that can hit 100 mph, and Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race canines that are now more hound than husky, pulling carbon-fiber dogsleds driven by professional mushers with celebrity-size egos.

Hewitt seems to have no ego, though he should. Last year he accomplished a feat unimaginable in the world of human-powered endurance competitions. He led the Iditarod Trail Invitational race for about 200 miles to the crest of the Alaska Range. The Invitational is an event open to anyone and any machine powered by human muscles. Like Hewitt, it is a throwback to days when people competed in sport for the sheer joy of competition, not for the money, nor even for the glory.

The Invitational offers no cash prize, and there is little fame attached to success outside the small world of extreme endurance athletes. Who knows, for instance, that Hewitt set a foot-racing record for the Iditarod on the fifth of his six trips up the trail?

He made it to Nome in 20 days, 7 hours and 17 minutes in 2011. That is a little more than seven hours faster than the time it took the dog team of the late Carl Huntington, the only musher in history to win both the Iditarod and Fur Rendezvous World Championship sprint race, to reach the finish line during his victorious Iditarod of 1974.

by Craig Medred, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Photo: Craig Medred