Jaclyn Arndt fulfilled her greatest athletic achievement last week when she crossed the state by bike, nearly 1,200 miles from Prudhoe Bay to Homer.

A captain with the Homer Volunteer Fire Department, Arndt is no novice when it comes to feats of endurance. She’s an accomplished competitor in Ironman triathlons and Alaska’s own Iditarod Trail Invitational ultramarathon, where she was named Women’s Ski Champion in 2022.

Nevertheless, Arndt said she’d never before embraced an endeavor quite like this — an 18-day odyssey (with two rest days spent waiting on bicycle parts and resting an irritated knee) traversing 1,170 miles and 60,213 feet of elevation gain, all under her own power.

“I’ve never bike packed at all. I’ve never carried gear, so that was new,” she said.

Arndt started the trek south from Prudhoe Bay on July 18 but hit a snag the very next day when “super muddy” road conditions damaged her bike. She spent a day and a half sheltering at an Alaska Department of Transportation station while waiting for new parts to be delivered.

Once repaired, she biked about 10 hours a day — an average between 60 and 80 miles depending on the terrain — and spent most of the journey on unpaved roads.

“The mosquitos — you would lay in the tent and they would just coat the lining under the rain cover,” she said. “I had a bug net that I wore over my helmet, and it was fine if I was moving. But anytime I stopped or had to walk uphill, they would just attack (me).”

Arndt wasn’t entirely alone on the road; she described hearing hauler trucks “from miles away” and pausing as they came up behind her to give them greater leeway.

“Rocks do fly,” she said. “But I honestly felt pretty safe. I think pulling over was just nice because I could kind of control the situation.”

She encountered a few northbound cyclists on her trek, as well as several roaming Homerites.

“I saw Poppy Benson in Coldfoot … I saw someone driving down the Alcan. It was really neat to see friendly faces. I didn’t really ever feel alone out there,” she said.

Thankfully, she said, other than the mosquitoes, she encountered little wildlife — a moose, five foxes, what was probably a coyote. While stranded at the DOT station, she heard of musk ox in the area and said she did go a little out of her way to check them out.

“That was one of the wildlife sightings I wanted to see. There were some baby musk ox, which was pretty neat,” she said. 

Weather posed challenges along Arndt’s route, from muddy, slick roads to strong headwinds. She described hearing thunder and lightning as she approached Atigun Pass, a high mountain pass across the Brooks Range, and stopping at the sight of heavy, gray skies.

“It all of a sudden turned into this gnarly storm. I couldn’t get my tent set up, and I was chucking rocks in it to make it stay on the ground,” she said.

She waited out the storm in her tent and checked the weather forecast, which showed more thunder and bad winds over the next couple of days — except for a reprieve that night. She started out again at 9 p.m. and rode till 6 a.m. to get through the pass.

“It was beautiful … how they cut the road through the pass. I did have to walk the last mile or so, but it was great because it was cool, there were no mosquitos and the truck traffic was way less and it seemed like the nighttime drivers were a little friendlier,” she said.

“Right at the peak of Atigun Pass, the sun came over the mountains and it was just very surreal. Yeah, it was beautiful.”

It being summer, the sky never fully darkened, but Arndt felt like she was travelling back in time as she continued south, and the daylight hours grew shorter, and the fireweed changed from nearly going to seed to just being in bloom.

“It was like I was going back into the season, which was neat,” she said.

Arndt camped outside until she reached Wiseman, a small mining community three miles off the Dalton Highway with about a dozen year-round residents. She accepted a friend’s invitation to stay in a cabin and clean her gear. Next she stopped in Coldfoot, about 16 miles south of Wiseman, to resupply and heard from other travellers about impassable conditions on Beaver Slide, a notoriously hazardous hill on the Dalton Highway.

“It was like four to five inches of mud. It took me about an hour to get up a quarter mile.… There was only one way you could go right in the middle (of the road) and I kept having to move so vehicles could get by,” she said. “It was a soupy mess.”

Arndt passed through the Arctic Circle on July 24 and reached the end of the Dalton Highway on July 26. She said her favorite area to bike through was along the Richardson Highway from Delta Junction to Glenallen.

“It was beautiful — barely any traffic, and the scenery changed every 20 miles. It was also flatter, which was great because I had done a lot of elevation change,” she said.

Biking Turnagain Arm, with winds gusting between 35 and 40 knots, posed one of the greatest challenges for Arndt.

“Once you turn a corner to the lookout, it would just be pure headwind and almost make you stop because it was so strong,” she said. “I definitely took my time there. There was a period where I was definitely like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ but I had to make it home at some point.”

She made it through and spent the night in Girdwood on Aug. 2. She reached the Kenai Peninsula the next day, and on Aug. 4, her final day, biked the nearly 100 miles from Sterling to Land’s End Resort in Homer in one shot. 

The community had been following Arndt’s journey all along through her GPS tracker, and the homecoming celebration started early last Tuesday as Arndt made her way to her finish line. She said a friend drove up to Ninilchik to say hi, and people were cheering her on as she got closer to Homer. 

A huge welcoming committee met Arndt at the top of Baycrest Hill last Tuesday evening. About a half dozen of her friends accompanied her down the hill and, determined to make it all the way to Land’s End, Arndt battled a pure headwind all the way to the end of the Homer Spit, where another, even larger welcoming party met her to celebrate.

“It was really neat to come home to my family and friends,” she said. “I had a tracker throughout the trip so people could see where I was; some of my friends called me the monarch butterfly making my migration. They got me butterfly wings. It was pretty fun.”

For Arndt, the trip offered her a chance to take time away from the daily grind and reset her mind.

“It’s been a super busy year — I’m going to nursing school and working full time,” she said. “It was great to experience the beauty of Alaska and the vastness of it and … what there is out there. There’s still so much to see.”