FAIRBANKS — Alaska State Troopers believe the 23-year-old woman found dead Tuesday in Fairbanks froze to death.
Blog readers: All my blog posts up until this point have been nonfiction, so you should know that this posting begins with a recent news story from the Fairbanks Daily-News Miner as a prompt for launching into a fiction story I'm experimenting with. Comments are welcome, since this is a first for me.
Fairbanks Woman Found Dead Tuesday Likely Died of Exposure
March 5, 2011 Fairbanks Daily News-miner
Kimberly Marie Rychnovsky was not dressed for the weather when her body was reported outside a home at 11:33 a.m, trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said. Foul play is not suspected.
Troopers are doing a toxicology study, which would determine if Rychnovsky was affected by drugs or alcohol when she died, Peter said. As best as investigators can tell, Rychnovsky was outside on her own will, she said.
The temperature at the Fairbanks airport was 14 below zero at about the time Rychnovsky’s body was found, according to the National Weather Service.
Rychnovsky was a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the time of her death and worked at the campus post office, university spokeswoman Marmian Grimes said.
In reading this article, I was reminded of a similar story from 20 years ago. I always wondered what led up to this woman freezing to death. I heard little bits of her story third- and fourth-hand from friends of mine that I skied with. You see, when I lived in Alaska, I had a social life that revolved around cross-country skiing in winter and bicycling in the summer. In my 20s, planning to meet a friend (or friends) to ski on a Saturday was as much about socializing as getting a workout.
Meeting up at the ski hut on West Ridge was a common plan because then no one had to wait in the cold for the others to show up. We'd wax our skis in the hut, drink some water--"filling the internal water bottle" as it was called, then when the group was together, we'd head out. We agreed to get going without talking until we were warmed up, and then we'd ski side-by-side, chatting about life. By the time we had started up the road leading to the T-field, we'd be all warmed up, our internal engine now producing enough heat to balance the heat lost to the elements. The entrance to the T-field was a great place to stop and talk for a few minutes. From there, one could survey the whole field except for the steepest part near the top, but if you waited a few minutes, if anyone was on that section of trail, he or she would emerge at the top of the trail.
We'd lean on our ski poles there, looking around and talking until the cold reminded us to keep going. Another stop at the top of the T-field was de rigeur, both to catch our breaths, enjoy the view, finish our conversation, and also to decide who would go first on the descent; the first 90-degree turn to the right didn't lend itself to side-by-side skiing.
It was in the T-field that I first met Anna, though I didn't know her name at the time. She was skiing the inner loop of the T-field at a good clip.
"Who's that?" I asked. No one knew.
I scrutinized her technique and pace without even realizing I was doing so. I was what some people might call "competitive," but I didn't think so. My reaction was subconscious. If I had been alone, instinct would have kicked in, and I would have found myself gradually speeding up, reeling her in, without even intending to. That's just the way I was then--I couldn't help it.
I didn't understand that about myself until years later when I got my own dog. We skijored together. He loved to run & I loved to ski, so we flew across the snow. It wasn't so easy at first, though. He went crazy when he saw a rabbit or a squirrel and just had to chase them. His instinct took over, and there he went. Watching him, I realized that is just how I was back then when I saw another skier on the trail--I had to chase them.
But this time I was with my group of friends, and the call of the pack was stronger than my individual need to chase. We regrouped near the bottom of the field, not stopping to talk this time because we were chilled a bit from the descent. Instead, we entered the narrow that led to Smith Lake. I loved this part of the trail because it was surrounded by black spruce. Sometimes I would catch a whiff of the mouldering bark and memories of my grandmother's basement would be triggered in my brain. I felt at home here, connected to relatives, perhaps even some more ancient than my grandmother.
Later, in the spring, when the snow was melted off of the roads and trails, but still lurking in the woods, I met Anna on a bike ride. She was dating a mutual friend by then, Ben, and my boyfriend, who was friends with Ben had a arranged an weekend bike outing near the mountains to the south of Fairbanks. Anna was tall, and blond, with icy blue eyes that narrowed when she looked into the distance. I wondered if she would be racing this summer--but she didn't say much. She was agreeable and friendly and smiled, but she was not talkative, and one had the sense that her thoughts were elsewhere at times--maybe back where she came from, maybe further down the trail.
In the fall she was gone (or so I thought), and I forgot about her. I was busy with classes--reading Milton and Chaucer were challenging. Chaucer, especially, because it was almost like taking a foreign language--so many words to look up. Frustrated, I grabbed a newspaper in the student union on my way to the upstairs cafeteria, where I heated up my bowl of rice and beans. I read the newspaper as I ate hungrily, barely chewing. I now lived 13 miles from campus, and in the colder weather I really burned up the calories on my bicycle commute to school. We had had our first snowfall on October 1st, and now that it was early November, the temperatures had been plummeting to twenty below on some days.
I paused mid-bite, when an article caught my eye. "Died of exposure . . . West Ridge . . . Anna . . ."
Could this be the Anna I met last winter? I felt sad--a young woman, strong and beautiful, just gone, like that. How could it happen? She seemed outdoorsy--how could she die in the birch trees on a hill so close to campus?"
A couple of years later, I was on a multi-day ski trip in the White Mountains with a couple of friends. On the third night we had made it to the furthest cabin, and we were exhausted after sleeping out in the twenty below weather the previous night. We made a fire in the woodstove, enjoyed a meal of hot food, and then lay on the bunks telling stories.
"Remember Anna?" asked Scott. "She told me the weirdest story once."
Scott told us the story. Anna decided to ski all the way to the Colorado Creek Cabin and back in one day. Alone. She had two bottles of water in her fanny pack--a liter bottle and a half liter bottle. On the way out, she drank all of the liter bottle. We nodded. The way out to Colorado Creek involved a steady uphill climb to a ridge just before the descent into Colorado Creek. At the top of the ridge, she decided to head back. It had taken her a few hours to get there, and the light was already fading. She didn't have a headlamp. It was her first winter in Alaska, so she wasn't used to the short days.
The descent from the ridge is trickier than the ascent--there are a couple of tight turns lined with trees. In the dimming light, Anna didn't quite make the first turn and ended up clipping a tree, which caused her to take a tumble off the trail into some deep snow. In the struggle, she didn't realize that her other water bottle had fallen out of her fanny pack. Her attention was on her knee, which must have been twisted in the crash, for when she put her weight on it, it nearly collapsed.
To make matters worse, it had started to snow. She had been sweaty when she had fallen, and the falling snow was chilling her. She stopped to take a drink of water, and then realized she did not have her other bottle. She calculated--turning back she would lose a half hour, but if she didn't have any water, she could become dangerously dehydrated. She turned back. The spot where she fell was easy to find because of the major turn in the trail, but finding the bottle in the deep snow was difficult. She dug with increasing panic--where was it? Finally, her hand found the hard surface and she lifted it up. It was so hard to open the lid, though--it had frozen shut. She shook the bottle, not sloshing. Of course, she realized--it had frozen. This bottle was smaller, and froze more quickly than a larger bottle would have. She threw the bottle down in disgust and resolved to begin the long trek back to her car.
But by then, enough had accumulated to make the skiing much harder going than it was on the way out. She followed her tracks, until they began to fade from view in the near darkness. She blinked, holding her eyes shut for a second longer than necessary to try to melt the snowflakes accumulating on her lashes. When she opened them up again, her tracks were gone, and she saw enormous paw prints in the snow. She gasped, stopped, and examined them carefully. Wolf tracks, she thought. But they were headed toward her, and she had not seen the wolf.
The long winter twilight was nearly at its end, she skied on, mesmerized by the wolf tracks. When she got to the point where she had turned back to get her water bottle, the tracks abruptly stopped. She skied on, but begin to scrutinize the shadows. When she felt a chill travel up her spine, she quickly twisted around to look behind her. There was nothing there, but strangely, the tracks were right behind her and were now pointed in the same direction in which she was skiing.
A shot of adrenaline sped through her body, and she sprang forward at thrice the speed she had been skiing. She could no longer see in the darkness, so she quit trying to see the trail and just let her feet feel the trail. Her mind shut out the hurt knee, the deep thirst, and she just flew. When she arrived back at the trailhead, she suddenly collapsed and found herself crawling the last few yards to her vehicle.
Fortunately, her thermos still contained a few ounces of now-cold peppermint tea and she gulped it down. She started up her truck, and when the headlights came on, she saw another vehicle--her boyfriend, Ben's blue Subaru. What?! She got out and went over to it. The hood was still warm--he couldn't be too far away. She lifted up her chin and screamed as loudly as she could, "Ben!!!"
She waited, then heard a returning shout. After a few minutes, Ben emerged from the same trail she had come in on.
"Didn't you see me ski by?" she asked.
"No," he answered, puzzled, "But I saw the most amazing gray wolf run past just a few minutes ago."
Meeting up at the ski hut on West Ridge was a common plan because then no one had to wait in the cold for the others to show up. We'd wax our skis in the hut, drink some water--"filling the internal water bottle" as it was called, then when the group was together, we'd head out. We agreed to get going without talking until we were warmed up, and then we'd ski side-by-side, chatting about life. By the time we had started up the road leading to the T-field, we'd be all warmed up, our internal engine now producing enough heat to balance the heat lost to the elements. The entrance to the T-field was a great place to stop and talk for a few minutes. From there, one could survey the whole field except for the steepest part near the top, but if you waited a few minutes, if anyone was on that section of trail, he or she would emerge at the top of the trail.
We'd lean on our ski poles there, looking around and talking until the cold reminded us to keep going. Another stop at the top of the T-field was de rigeur, both to catch our breaths, enjoy the view, finish our conversation, and also to decide who would go first on the descent; the first 90-degree turn to the right didn't lend itself to side-by-side skiing.
It was in the T-field that I first met Anna, though I didn't know her name at the time. She was skiing the inner loop of the T-field at a good clip.
"Who's that?" I asked. No one knew.
I scrutinized her technique and pace without even realizing I was doing so. I was what some people might call "competitive," but I didn't think so. My reaction was subconscious. If I had been alone, instinct would have kicked in, and I would have found myself gradually speeding up, reeling her in, without even intending to. That's just the way I was then--I couldn't help it.
I didn't understand that about myself until years later when I got my own dog. We skijored together. He loved to run & I loved to ski, so we flew across the snow. It wasn't so easy at first, though. He went crazy when he saw a rabbit or a squirrel and just had to chase them. His instinct took over, and there he went. Watching him, I realized that is just how I was back then when I saw another skier on the trail--I had to chase them.
But this time I was with my group of friends, and the call of the pack was stronger than my individual need to chase. We regrouped near the bottom of the field, not stopping to talk this time because we were chilled a bit from the descent. Instead, we entered the narrow that led to Smith Lake. I loved this part of the trail because it was surrounded by black spruce. Sometimes I would catch a whiff of the mouldering bark and memories of my grandmother's basement would be triggered in my brain. I felt at home here, connected to relatives, perhaps even some more ancient than my grandmother.
. . .
Later, in the spring, when the snow was melted off of the roads and trails, but still lurking in the woods, I met Anna on a bike ride. She was dating a mutual friend by then, Ben, and my boyfriend, who was friends with Ben had a arranged an weekend bike outing near the mountains to the south of Fairbanks. Anna was tall, and blond, with icy blue eyes that narrowed when she looked into the distance. I wondered if she would be racing this summer--but she didn't say much. She was agreeable and friendly and smiled, but she was not talkative, and one had the sense that her thoughts were elsewhere at times--maybe back where she came from, maybe further down the trail.
. . .
In the fall she was gone (or so I thought), and I forgot about her. I was busy with classes--reading Milton and Chaucer were challenging. Chaucer, especially, because it was almost like taking a foreign language--so many words to look up. Frustrated, I grabbed a newspaper in the student union on my way to the upstairs cafeteria, where I heated up my bowl of rice and beans. I read the newspaper as I ate hungrily, barely chewing. I now lived 13 miles from campus, and in the colder weather I really burned up the calories on my bicycle commute to school. We had had our first snowfall on October 1st, and now that it was early November, the temperatures had been plummeting to twenty below on some days.
I paused mid-bite, when an article caught my eye. "Died of exposure . . . West Ridge . . . Anna . . ."
Could this be the Anna I met last winter? I felt sad--a young woman, strong and beautiful, just gone, like that. How could it happen? She seemed outdoorsy--how could she die in the birch trees on a hill so close to campus?"
A couple of years later, I was on a multi-day ski trip in the White Mountains with a couple of friends. On the third night we had made it to the furthest cabin, and we were exhausted after sleeping out in the twenty below weather the previous night. We made a fire in the woodstove, enjoyed a meal of hot food, and then lay on the bunks telling stories.
"Remember Anna?" asked Scott. "She told me the weirdest story once."
Scott told us the story. Anna decided to ski all the way to the Colorado Creek Cabin and back in one day. Alone. She had two bottles of water in her fanny pack--a liter bottle and a half liter bottle. On the way out, she drank all of the liter bottle. We nodded. The way out to Colorado Creek involved a steady uphill climb to a ridge just before the descent into Colorado Creek. At the top of the ridge, she decided to head back. It had taken her a few hours to get there, and the light was already fading. She didn't have a headlamp. It was her first winter in Alaska, so she wasn't used to the short days.
The descent from the ridge is trickier than the ascent--there are a couple of tight turns lined with trees. In the dimming light, Anna didn't quite make the first turn and ended up clipping a tree, which caused her to take a tumble off the trail into some deep snow. In the struggle, she didn't realize that her other water bottle had fallen out of her fanny pack. Her attention was on her knee, which must have been twisted in the crash, for when she put her weight on it, it nearly collapsed.
To make matters worse, it had started to snow. She had been sweaty when she had fallen, and the falling snow was chilling her. She stopped to take a drink of water, and then realized she did not have her other bottle. She calculated--turning back she would lose a half hour, but if she didn't have any water, she could become dangerously dehydrated. She turned back. The spot where she fell was easy to find because of the major turn in the trail, but finding the bottle in the deep snow was difficult. She dug with increasing panic--where was it? Finally, her hand found the hard surface and she lifted it up. It was so hard to open the lid, though--it had frozen shut. She shook the bottle, not sloshing. Of course, she realized--it had frozen. This bottle was smaller, and froze more quickly than a larger bottle would have. She threw the bottle down in disgust and resolved to begin the long trek back to her car.
But by then, enough had accumulated to make the skiing much harder going than it was on the way out. She followed her tracks, until they began to fade from view in the near darkness. She blinked, holding her eyes shut for a second longer than necessary to try to melt the snowflakes accumulating on her lashes. When she opened them up again, her tracks were gone, and she saw enormous paw prints in the snow. She gasped, stopped, and examined them carefully. Wolf tracks, she thought. But they were headed toward her, and she had not seen the wolf.
The long winter twilight was nearly at its end, she skied on, mesmerized by the wolf tracks. When she got to the point where she had turned back to get her water bottle, the tracks abruptly stopped. She skied on, but begin to scrutinize the shadows. When she felt a chill travel up her spine, she quickly twisted around to look behind her. There was nothing there, but strangely, the tracks were right behind her and were now pointed in the same direction in which she was skiing.
A shot of adrenaline sped through her body, and she sprang forward at thrice the speed she had been skiing. She could no longer see in the darkness, so she quit trying to see the trail and just let her feet feel the trail. Her mind shut out the hurt knee, the deep thirst, and she just flew. When she arrived back at the trailhead, she suddenly collapsed and found herself crawling the last few yards to her vehicle.
Fortunately, her thermos still contained a few ounces of now-cold peppermint tea and she gulped it down. She started up her truck, and when the headlights came on, she saw another vehicle--her boyfriend, Ben's blue Subaru. What?! She got out and went over to it. The hood was still warm--he couldn't be too far away. She lifted up her chin and screamed as loudly as she could, "Ben!!!"
She waited, then heard a returning shout. After a few minutes, Ben emerged from the same trail she had come in on.
"Didn't you see me ski by?" she asked.
"No," he answered, puzzled, "But I saw the most amazing gray wolf run past just a few minutes ago."
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