This is my sweet rig from the 2002 Alaska Ultrasport. This was actually the first official year of the Iditarod Trail Invitational. The previous years it was called the Iditasport and the race was put on by the now infamous Dan Bull.
After pushing my snowcat-equipped bike a large portion of the distance to McGrath in 2001 I purchased a Wildfire Designs Fatbike form Mark Gronewald. Mark had a small bike shop in Palmer Alaska and was the pioneer behind the offset frame design that we now see utilized by the Surly Pugsley and poorly imitated by some other lesser brands. The only really wide rims in 2002 were the Remolino 80mm sand rims. They were designed by Ray Molino and produced in Mexico. Generally they were poor quality, but they were the only rim available, so except for a few folks with homemade rims, the Remolinos were the gold standard for really fat rims for a few years. Fat tires in 2002 were limited to either another Remolino product, which was a wide, flat, low profile chevron tread tire that also had a poor quality reputation or the heavy and bombproof 3.0 Gazzaloddi. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to use one of the Remolino sand tires. Many riders preferred them as a rear tire.
I ran the 3.0 Gazzaloddis front and rear. I cut out every other row of tread on the Gazzaloddi to create something closer to a chevron tread thinking it would be less likely to pack up with snow. The only noticeable difference this created was that on a hard packed trail the widely spaced tread made for a bumpy ride.
The small zippered pack attached to my saddle with string since Revelate Designs and huge seat packs didn’t exist at this time.
The 2 biggest problems I recall having this year with my gear were the Velcro straps on my shoes and my stove. The straps on the Lake winter shoes I wore, now over a year old would not stay fastened and were constantly coming loose and flopping around, particularly annoying when I spent a day postholing over Rainy Pass. The second big mistake was taking a Triangia alcohol stove. If I had tried it before the race I would have discovered that it’s totally impractical to melt snow with this stove, but that would have required planning ahead, something I’m not so good at.
