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As he crawled up a mountain towing a 35-pound kayak behind him, Jim Lokken decided his new method of moving through the Alaska wilderness might not be the way to go.

“I was trying to take a shortcut, and the shortcut was a huge cliff that I had to crawl up on my hands and knees, pulling the boat,” said Lokken, one of 13 participants in last weekend’s Hot Springs 100 wilderness race from Chena Hot Springs to Circle Hot Springs.

“It took me two hours to get up this mountain,” he continued. “When I got up to 3,200 feet, the map said it was supposed to be tundra and muskeg; I got up there and it was grown up to knee-high dwarf birch.”

Dragging a kayak strapped to a 30-pound backpack through knee-high dwarf birch wasn’t easy, Lokken said, but things got tougher higher up the mountain he said. A huge cornice too steep to climb blocked his intended route, and he was forced to bushwhack his way through about three miles of black spruce and alders.

“I broke down so many trees,” the 48-year-old Lokken said.

Such is life in the Hot Springs 100, a wilderness race in which competitors basically bushwhack their way through the woods carrying everything they need on their backs, which in the case of Lokken, was a 15-foot downriver kayak attached to his backpack. He had a plastic skid plate duct taped to the end of the kayak that was dragging on the ground to protect it from damage.

It was an untried wilderness travel technique and, though he ended up beating his competitors to the finish by more than three hours after using the kayak to speed ahead of slower boats on a 40-mile float down Birch Creek, Lokken wouldn’t necessarily recommend it after dragging a kayak more than 30 miles up and down mountains, through thick brush, across boulder fields and through old burns.

As Lokken put it after the race, “The boat and I are going to take a long break from each other.”

Abandon ship

In the end, Lokken ended up abandoning ship, so to speak, when he dropped the kayak about two miles from the actual finish line after he ran out of duct tape and couldn’t keep the skid plate attached. When the boat developed a hole in the side from being dragged on a rocky road, Lokken left it by the side of the road and ran to the finish, where he hitched a ride back to pick up his boat.

Lokken, who tied for first last year with Andy Seitz, had an unofficial finish time of 25 hours, 50 minutes, about an hour slower than last year, but because he violated the race’s code of conduct by not carrying his boat to the finish, Lokken was disqualified after he turned himself in to race organizer Mark Ross, who was the first to reach the finish behind Lokken in 29 hours, 9 minutes.

“I didn’t lose any prize money,” Lokken quipped, referring to the fact that the only reward awaiting racers at the finish is a free hamburger and shower at the Steese Roadhouse in Central.

Eleven of the 13 racers who started the race reached the finish line at Circle Hot Springs while two racers — Brenna Gallagher and Heather Brown — turned back after about 30 miles when they discovered they lost their emergency locator transmitter.

Even though he was DQ’ed, Lokken’s Herculian effort of dragging a kayak more than 30 miles through the Alaskan Bush earned the respect of his peers.

“That guy is an animal,” veteran wilderness racer Rourke Williams, who teamed with Randy Pitney and Darren Rorabaugh, said of Lokken. “I’ve never seen anybody pull a hard shell boat over the mountains like that.”

Said Pitney, who spent several miles admiring Lokken’s innovative set-up as he followed him through the woods, “He was able to drag that kayak every bit as fast as I could walk. He’s an animal.”

Lokken chose the kayak because it’s faster than the ultra-light, inflatable Alpacka rafts preferred by most wilderness racers. The one-man rafts weigh only 4 pounds and fit in a backpack. Lokken used one when he won the race last year.

Even though he didn’t reveal his intentions before the race and waited until the starter was counting down the final seconds to the start before running to his car and grabbing the kayak, the boat wasn’t intended as a secret weapon, Lokken said.

“I just didn’t want to get laughed at,” Lokken said. “My dad told me I was stupid. I called him after the race and told him, ‘Well, you were right.’”

Low water

Instead of dragging kayaks, Pitney, Rorabaugh and Williams hauled an Ally Pak folding canoe between them and assembled it when they reached Birch Creek. The canoe “is basically just some aluminum tubes inside a tough PVC plastic shell and foam liner on the bottom to hold it together.” It weighs 36 1/2 pounds and is 16 1/2 feet long. It was the same boat Pitney used in 1988 when the course was part of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, which Pitney won that year.

This time, though, it didn’t work as well. They spent almost as much time out of the boat as they did in it.

“The first time we did it we only got stuck two or three times,” Pitney said. “This time we got stuck 80 to 100 times. The water was real low.”

Pitney and his teammates got to Birch Creek, about a 25-mile hike from the start, just as Lokken was taking off. They never saw him again.

“He went sailing right off,” Pitney said. “We had to walk a mile to get to enough water to float.”

The team of Doug Bishop, Dave Edic and Josh Mitzl encountered similar difficulties with their Ally Pak canoe. They reached Birch Creek a couple hours before Lokken but lost time getting in and out of their canoe when they hit low water. Lokken caught them and pulled away in a shallow stretch of water, Edic said.

“We came to this shallow riffle and he made it through there and we had to get out,” Edic said. “We came around the next corner and he was gone and we never saw him again.”

Both teams ended up finishing in just over 33 hours, a little more than seven hours behind Lokken.

Ross was the first racer to reach Birch Creek.

“I got a lead on the hike because knew those guys in those boats were going to be going 5 mph faster than me,” said Ross, who paddled an Alpacka.

Lokken caught and passed Ross at 10 p.m. Saturday, scaring the daylights out of him when he came up behind him and slapped his kayak paddle on the water like a beaver tail.

“He was just flying in that hard shell boat,” Ross said.

Cold float

The 40-mile float down Birch Creek was one of the toughest parts of the race. Temperatures dropped into the 30s during the night and low water forced racers to get in and out of their boats multiple times, which meant getting their feet wet walking the boats through shallow areas. That, combined with the fact most racers wore minimal clothing to cut down on weight, made for a frigid float.

“It was a cold night,” said Mike Kramer, who floated the creek in an Alpacka. “I had to stop a couple times to do jumping jacks and run in place to warm up.”

Likewise, Edic, Bishop and Mitzl stopped from midnight to 4 a.m. to build a fire to warm up after Bishop fell in the water when they got out of the canoe to avoid a log jam.

Lokken knew it would be cold on the river and he brought extra clothes to help stay warm. He also went to great lengths to stay “totally dry.”

“I didn’t splash myself. I portaged around rapids. I didn’t blast through things like you normally would in a kayak,” Lokken said.

No mosquitoes

Though some racers reported seeing grizzly bears along the way, none of them posed a threat. In fact, racers reported seeing more owls than bears. The owls were hunting voles in areas that have been burned by wildfire in recent years.

“You’d walk through these burns and there would be mouse tunnels everywhere,” said Bishop. “I couldn’t imagine a better place for an owl to live.”

Lokken counted eight great gray owls in one particular burn.

“They were just flying everywhere,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many owls.”

One wildlife species that racers were happy they didn’t see were mosquitoes.

“There were no bugs,” said Williams, who has covered the same trail five times now and always has had to contend with a plethora of mosquitoes, gnats and other biting insects. “The last time I did that the bugs were so bad you couldn’t open your mouth.”

Rookie racers

The Hot Springs 100 was the first wilderness race for Kramer and Edic, two of Fairbanks’ uber-athletes. Kramer, an Equinox marathon champ, called it “a different experience.”

“To stay constantly exercising for 33 hours, whether it was hiking or paddling ... it was different than what I was used to,” the 40-year-old Kramer said. “To be sitting in a cramped boat freezing to death but still nodding off in mid-stroke and then snapping awake and realizing where you are again, that was a different experience for me. Having to sit bow-legged in a small, cramped raft for several hours straight was a new sensation.”

Kramer, an attorney, made some rookie mistakes, such as following creeks and rivers when he should have stuck to the ridge tops, but all in all he said it was a learning experience that he hopes to try again. Just a couple days after the race, Kramer was looking at the map trying to figure out a faster route.

“I was just trying to see what adventure racing was about and see some big country in a short period of time,” he said. “The one thing that was fun about this race is that you saw so much country because you’re moving fast. Every hour you were opening up a new landscape.”

Edic, 50, said wilderness racing posed a different kind of challenge and was “definitely enjoyable.”

“It wasn’t as hard as I thought,” he said.

The pace was a little too quick for Bishop, another wilderness racing rookie who is more interested in seeing country than burning calories. While he doesn’t necessarily fit into the uber athlete category that Kramer and Edic belong, Bishop was able to keep up with them, though more out of necessity than desire.

“To describe it as fun is not accurate,” he said. “You see a lot of neat stuff but you don’t have time to stop and smell the roses. You’re always going, going, going. You have to pass great opportunities to check this or that out. Next time I’ll take a tent and sleeping bag.”