By the end, after weeks of wallowing in deep snow and battling headwinds that blew the frozen tundra bare, only four of the 20 athletes who began the 1,000-mile Iditasport Impossible race crossed the finish line in Nome.
Weary and frost-nipped, the first of them -- Big Lake's Mike Estes and Englishman Andrew Heading -- wobbled into the Gold Coast city on mountain bikes Thursday night in late March.
About 12 hours behind came the other two -- never-say-die runners Tom Jarding and Tim Hewitt from Pennsylvania.
Once again, simple human determination had proven the Impossible possible.
After the Feb. 24 start of the human-powered endurance race along the fabled Iditarod Trail, it was uncertain for a while whether anyone could make it from Knik to Nome this year.
''I wouldn't do the southern route (of the Iditarod Trail) again,'' Heading said Friday. ''We must have walked 500 or 600 miles, pushing the bikes. That was not fun.''
Often the snow was too deep to ride. Other times there was too little snow to fill the voids between the frozen tussocks.
And so the bikers pushed and pushed and pushed some more.
''It was brutal,'' Heading said. ''I can think of no better way to describe it. I don't know what the temperatures were. They're so far off the scale of anything I know. We were just in survival mode for the last 10 or 14 days.''
First there was too much snow, Hewitt said, then wind, bad trail, too little snow and extreme cold -- down to minus 38 degrees when the runners stopped outside of White Mountain Wednesday night.
''I guess that's just Alaska,'' Heading said. ''Nothing's predictable.''
Among even the fittest and strongest, the punishment the weather dishes out in wild Alaska can crush the toughest pysche.
''Yesterday (Thursday) afternoon at Solomon River, about 30 miles out of Nome, I was ready to sit down and quit,'' Estes said. ''I don't know why.''
Trailmate Heading had to browbeat his newfound friend into finishing.
''We hung together,'' Estes said, ''and we made it.''
For that, they will split about $10,000 in prize money, though neither set out for Nome with any hopes of placing in the Impossible -- let alone winning.
A seasonal construction worker, Estes only has time to ride his bike in the winter, and Heading crossed the ocean for this race, purely in the name of adventure.
''I don't think you come and do an event like this for the money,'' he said. ''I didn't expect to get into the prizes. This is way beyond my expectations.
''We didn't set any blistering pace, but we earned it,'' Estes said. ''It was tough. It was practically impossible.''
What kept the survivors going was stubbornness.
''I think stupidity comes in there somewhere, too,'' Heading said.
''I just didn't want to come back,'' said Hewitt. ''You start thinking, 'Well, if I don't finish this damn thing, I know I'm going to have to come back. You tell your kids to finish the things they start.''
His trailmate, Jarding, meanwhile, said he worried about letting down the 110 Pennsylvanians who helped sponsor his race.
''There was just too much invested in this,'' he said. ''I felt indebted to so many people, and it's such a big experience. I couldn't live with myself if I went home and said, 'Well, I got 600 miles and I quit.' ''
Perhaps the worst section came between the Ophir and Iditarod checkpoints. Waist-deep snow and the lack of a visible trail demoralized all the bikers and defeated several.
''We were postholing up to our waists,'' Heading said. ''I think we spent three hours doing the first mile and a half. We'd have to lift the bike, throw it forward, push yourself ahead, lift the bike.''
It didn't take much of that before people began to realize they were going nowhere fast.
''We turned around and went back to Ophir to get more fuel,'' said Heading, who was fully aware that it would take days to make the next checkpoint at Iditarod, and that over those days fuel for the stove would be vital in order to melt water.
It was, Heading said, good that everyone went back.
''Ophir to Iditarod took us four and a half days,'' he said.
By that time, runners Jarding and Hewitt, an employment lawyer, had moved to the front of the race and looked as if they had a shot at winning. The two men, who live near each other in Pennsylvania, had paired up in the Alaska Range after Hewitt realized he wasn't going to be able to run to Nome.
''As much as a runner hates to think of himself as a walker,'' Hewitt said, ''that's what I was reduced to.''
These walkers, however, managed to push the pace.
''We were the first to Iditarod,'' Hewitt said, ''first to the Yukon (River), first to the (Bering Sea) coast. But we knew it was only a matter of time before the machines beat the men. And that's OK, because you're really only competing against yourself out there.''
When they checked in with race officials, it was mainly to find out who was left on the trail.
''We were rooting for the people out there as it went from 16 to 12 to 10 to 9 to 8,'' Hewitt said. ''It's a lot like living in the in the same foxhole in combat.
''When the wind is blowing so hard it's almost driving you backward, and your eyeglasses are frozen to your face, and you can't hardly see . . . it's pretty easy to turn back.''
