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FAIRBANKS -- John Lapkass may not have finished first in the 2008 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, but he won the award for the wildest hallucinations.

Just like last year, there was the rock in the creek that was playing music, though this time Lapkass didn’t check for wires.

“Same rock, different station,” he said. “This year it was playing Hispanic rock.”

Even though he knew his mind was playing tricks on him after going five days with only seven hours of sleep while trudging across the Alaska wilderness, it still seemed very real.

“It got louder as you got closer to it,” Lapkass said.

Then Lapkass noticed a stick in the creek next to the rock.

“I swear to God that thing turned into a cat,” he said. “It turned its head toward me and was mouthing the words of the DJ.

“I even took a picture of it to see what it looked like later on,” said Lapkass, a 51-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Anchorage.

Suffice to say, there was no cat in the photo, just a stick in the creek.

Lapkass watched rocks turn into famous historical figures such as Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung and cartoon characters such as Buzz Lightyear. Leaves and trees blowing in the wind transformed into people waving at him and dancing and playing violins. Lapkass said he would stop and talk to them.

Such is life in the Wilderness Classic, where competitors test both their physical and mental limits in Alaska’s longest, unsupported wilderness race.

Route choices

This year’s race, which began on June 15, was the third and final installment — the course changes every three years — of the grueling, approximately 300-mile route that connects the mining communities of Chicken on the Taylor Highway to Central on the Steese Highway.

Once again, the eastern Interior course proved a challenge. A field of 16 competitors — none from Fairbanks — started the race and only nine finished.

It took the winning racers — the team of Butch Allen and Jim McDonough and the team of Craig Barnard and Tyler Johnson — 4 days, 22 hours, 56 minutes to reach Central.

Lapkass, the lone solo finisher, was second in 5 days, 15 hours, 57 minutes in what was his 16th Classic. Other than a couple blisters and a few missing toenails, Lapkass said it was an enjoyable experience.

“One of the things I like about this race is that it’s a chance to be out a long time on my own,” Lapkass said.

The favored route this year was the Fortymile/Yukon route. From Chicken, racers hiked 15-20 miles to the Fortymile River before inflating their one-man rafts and floating about 85 miles down the river to the Canadian border — racers aren’t allowed to enter Canada — before hiking another 40 miles overland to the Yukon River.

Racers then floated 110 miles down the Yukon to Slaven’s Cabin at Woodchopper Creek, a common stopping point for racers in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, before bushwhacking another 40 miles to Central.

Like last year, low water on the Charley River proved a problem. Of the seven racers who scratched, five followed a route that involved floating the Charley. Mike Sullivan and Leo Claunan, a pair of Air National Guard pararescuemen from Anchorage, were the only racers to complete the Charley River route with a time of 7 days, 8 hours and 44 minutes.

Down to wire

The crux of this year’s race came down to the last 40 miles.

Barnard and Johnson had the advantage when they pulled off the Yukon River at Slaven’s. They were leaving after a six-hour rest when Allen and McDonough arrived.

Barnard and Johnson chose to head for the high country and travel on ridge tops, a route that would require considerable climbing but less bushwhacking, while Allen and McDonough ended up stumbling onto the infamous Joe Vogler (a.k.a. Bielenberg) Trail and following it all the way to Circle Hot Springs.

“We just lucked into it,” Allen said of the trail.

Vogler, the famous miner and political maverick known for his confrontations with the federal government, bulldozed the trail into the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Park and Preserve in 1984 and ended up in an armed standoff with the National Park Service.

The Park Service claimed they had stopped Vogler and his D-8 Caterpillar at Webber Creek, miles short of his mining claim on Woodchopper Creek, and news reports said the Vogler left his dozer in its tracks.

“Apparently, Old Joe Volger must have snuck back in a few weeks later and fired up the Cat to finish the job,” wrote McDonough in a post-race report. “The dozer track does indeed go all the way from Vogler’s claim (now owned by Stan Gelvin) at Woodchopper, past Webber Creek, to the east shore of Birch Creek , and finally on to Circle Hot Springs.”

While Barnard and Johnson —fueled mostly by Taco Bell burritos — were climbing what turned out to be an estimated 15,000 vertical feet on their 42-mile high-country route, Allen and McDonough followed Vogler’s trail, which at times had them wading through thigh-deep swamps and shoe-sucking mud a foot deep.

Finishing pact

Ironically, the two teams emerged at Circle Hot Springs, just eight miles from the finish, at almost exactly the same time. Allen and McDonough were walking down an ATV trail, thinking they had the race in the bag, when Barnard and Johnson popped out of the woods onto the trail.

The two teams sized each other up for a few testosterone-filled moments before forming a pact to finish together rather than race to the finish, which Allen said “would have looked like the geriatric Olympics,” given how gimpy the four racers were.

This year’s winning time was five hours longer than last year’s top time and 12 hours more than the winning 2006 time. It’s the first time in the history of the Classic that anyone can remember that the winning time in successive races got longer than shorter.

“It’s a brutal course,” Allen said.