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Jeff Adams may have logged more miles by bicycle last summer than he had during the past five summers combined.

He lives northeast of the city and works downtown, enough of a span to save hundreds of miles — 389, to be precise — by biking or carpooling from June through August.

He said among the benefits came better health, lower gasoline bills and a share in winning the first annual Don’t Be Fuelish competition, in which participants collectively saved thousands of miles in driving trips by walking, biking, taking the bus or carpooling to work.

Bike or no bike, Adams is no stranger to getting outside. But he said during the three months of friendly competition, he felt a difference. His heart rate relaxed and his energy level improved. And he saved hundreds of dollars that would have been spent to gas up the family Subaru.

“I was more in shape for playing basketball, too,” he said.

Adams was one of many at the federal offices, which house the Internal Revenue Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies, that chipped in to help the building beat two other organizations for the fuel-saving prize.

The trophy was an old fuel can that organizers bought at the hardware store and painted red.

A traveler

A fisheries and habitat restoration supervisor for Fish and Wildlife, he worked around the western hemisphere on projects affecting all types of living things. His love of the outdoors extends back to childhood.

Adams said many of his childhood days were spent walking the railroad tracks to find creeks, fields and woods in the tiny eastern Iowa town of Malone where he grew up. In the summer, he said, he bicycled to visit friends from school or enjoyed picnics with his sister and grandparents. He also played a lot of baseball.

After graduating from high school, Adams earned a degree in wildlife management from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. After college came a three-year stint in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, teaching family farmers the basics of aquaculture through the use of small ponds to raise Tilapia, a breed of fish. Adams said he learned enough Spanish there to stay with him years after he left.

“It pops into my head once in a while when I think about it,” he said. “But it hasn’t been tested for a while.”

Shortly after his return to the United States, Adams was sent by the National Marine Fisheries Service to work as an American observer in western Alaska. He flew to Dutch Harbor and spent two months on a Japanese-owned fishing vessel.

Adams said he was in charge of sampling the catch, primarily black cod, and of watching out for prohibited species while recording sightings of other marine life, such as killer whales and sea lions. He said he was fascinated by the other stuff pulled from the water by the vessel’s longlines — corals, odd-looking “critters” and the occasional chains or fan belts that had been thrown overboard during years of sea fishing.

“Being a farmer from eastern Iowa and suddenly being out in the middle of the Bering Sea, I learned a lot,” he said.

Alaska bound

Adams returned to Seattle following his work at sea, but he had been bit by the Alaska bug.

In early 1984, he caught a ferry to Haines and then hitchhiked to Northway, a town near Tok close to the Canadian border. He met up with Mary Burtness, a sweetheart from college.

The two were married in 1987, shortly after they moved to Fairbanks so Jeff could attend graduate school. Alaska had grown on him even more by then, he said, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks was the only school he pursued.

“We thought the Interior was the only place to be,” he said.

Adams earned his graduate degree in 1990. Following that, the Fish and Wildlife Service sent him to King Salmon to work as a biologist, where the couple settled in for more than a decade and started to raise a family.

Life in King Salmon was slow and unencumbered, Adams said. Many people there live a subsistence lifestyle, relying on caribou or salmon much of the year.

Brown bears are common in the area and have adapted to life with small villages nearby.

“It was not uncommon to have brown bears walk across your doorstep or see one walking the road on the way to work. They were everywhere, and very tolerant of people for the most part,” he said.

The family canoed, picknicked or walked and spent plenty of time outside.

In 2000, the family moved back to Fairbanks when Adams’ daughters, Catey and Frana, were in sixth and fourth grade, respectively.

He dragged along the old bike he had kept through part of his time in Alaska.

Over the following seven years in Fairbanks, he said, he would ride the bike only occasionally. But it never grew into a full-fledged hobby — he said he might have biked to work once or twice over that seven-year stretch.

Still, he made it a priority to buy a new bike after his old one was stolen a few years ago.

Healthy competition

Adams’ interest in bicycling spiked last summer after receiving word of the Don’t Be Fuelish competition. Bob Henszey, a coworker, had been drumming up interest around the federal building.

Three months later, the team, one of three in last summer’s competition, had collectively saved close to 6,000 miles by biking, walking or starting carpools to avoid single-occupancy trips by car or truck.

The competition didn’t require an entry fee — interested teams needed only sign up, find someone to keep a record of the driving miles they saved, and report it each month with the contest’s organizer.

Lori Hanemann, who is volunteering to keep track for this year’s competition, said that by keeping cars off the road, participants prevented more than 16,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere last summer.

Hanemann also suspects the friendly competition can buttress office morale and improve energy levels amongst, and communication between, office coworkers.

Hanemann said more than a dozen agencies and organizations had signed up as of April 15 for this summer’s Don’t Be Fuelish competition, already promising a bigger turnout than last year’s. Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, Wal-Mart and the Fairbanks North Star Borough are included in the list, which is open to interested groups through the competition’s May 1 start.

“I think each year, we’ll continue with the program as word gets around and people see that it’s a fun program and that their employees can save money on their fuel for commuting to work and (enjoy) better health by walking or biking and cleaner air in their community,” she said.

Of the three agencies in last summer’s competition, the federal building easily saved the most driving miles per worker — almost 45 miles for each person, whether he or she participated or not, in the building.

Tom Preshaw, a security guard, reported walking 100 miles.

Byron Broda, an IRS worker, biked almost 700 miles.

Others had saved almost 3,600 by teaming up for carpools.

“We did everything but take the bus,” Henszey said. “There were several people that were very excited about this program.”

By the time three months had passed, Adams said, he had biked to work as frequently as three or four days in a given week. He said he’ll definitely participate again in this year’s competition, which runs for five months instead of just three. He said he thought about preparing by biking to work a couple of times this month — that is, until Fairbanks was blanketed by a bed of wet, unexpected snowfall this week.

He likes the idea that he’s doing more this year than previously to reduce his carbon footprint — the measure of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted through human activities including driving.

“It was something I’d been thinking about but never had found the motivator, if you will,” he said.

Team effort

Adams said part of his motivation last summer came through friendly challenges from coworkers.

Vince Mathews, a subsistence specialist at Fish and Wildlife, biked regularly from his home north of Farmers Loop. He said he and Adams developed a good-natured, regular challenge to make sure each one kept up his end.

“We were trying to, by joking around on this ... to get other people to think about it: ‘If those over-the-hill guys can do this and compete, why can’t we,’ kind of thing,” Mathews said.

For their win, Adams, Henszey, Mathews, Preshaw and the rest of the federal building workers claimed the first annual Don’t Be Fuelish award — the can — from Mayor Jim Whitaker in November.

“Another satisfying part,” Adams said of the award, “was seeing other agencies that you don’t normally think of as natural resource conservation-minded contributing quite a bit of (saved) mileage.”

Contact staff writer Christopher Eshleman at 459-7582.