by Katharine Sandiford -- The fit and the frumpy come out in throngs for the annual Kluane Chilkat bike relay – a race in which winners, losers and those who couldn’t care less revel in the shared love of cycling.

A man dressed as a pink flamingo rides his bicycle straight toward a hunchbacked grizzly bear – a real one – on the shoulder of the two-lane highway. The garish bird squawks, flaps one feathery wing and scares the bear back into the bush so a long line of waiting cyclists can pedal safely past.

“Wow, thanks dude,” says a lanky teenager as he rides by on his mountain bike.
The bear, no doubt, is confounded – 364 days of the year the Yukon’s Haines Highway is so quiet that most animals mistake it for a strip of rock upon which to sunbathe. Hours can go by without a single vehicle plying this epic high-mountain roadway. But for one day each year in late June, the road fills skinny-tire-to-skinny-tire with a veritable parade of bikes.

It’s a two-wheeled mob scene: At the 16th annual Kluane Chilkat International Bike Relay there are over 1,200 cyclists, hundreds of volunteers and throngs of doting supporters who drive alongside their riders shouting encouragement and slipping them bananas and bottled water (and, in one case, playing bagpipes at the top of the steepest, most discouraging hills). Piercing some 238 kilometres of wilderness, the race starts in Haines Junction, Yukon, climbs across mountain passes and alpine meadows, and finally coasts downhill to an oceanfront finish in Haines, Alaska.

It’s 8 a.m. at the start-line in Haines Junction. Bike-toting cars emerge from the parking lots of the tiny village’s sole campground, gas station and bakery to join an unmoving line of big-city-style traffic waiting to get through the blockade. Nervous cyclists pace back and forth along the highway to warm up in the chilly, five-degree air. Teams of eight, four or two – plus a few solo riders – start in staggered heats, the fastest first, a flashy peloton of colourful spandex and shaved legs effortlessly climbing the 10-kilometre-long hill rising out of the valley. The last heat to go, the eight-person category of recreational riders, is a critical mass of cyclists in baggy sweatpants and flashy costumes on bikes that creak and have throne-sized gel-pack seats.

When the first rider whizzes across the finish line in just six hours, the last team will still be 100 kilometres back and won’t wobble into Haines until late that evening, clocking a time of 12 hours.

Up and down the road, there’s a near-even split of Americans and Canadians, most hailing from Whitehorse or from Juneau or Fairbanks in Alaska. The cross-border rivalry is intense: Many of these leggy, small-town heroes use it for motivation. Juneau physician and Tlingit beauty Janice Sheufelt has competed in the race seven times, never leaving without a medal. This year, though, she finds herself tire-to-tire with chiselled Yukon cyclist Jillian Chown, both completing the last half of the two-person mixed category. “Usually the race is so unpredictable,” says Sheufelt. “You never know where your competition is. But this year, it was right with me the whole way.” Riding up and over the pass together, the women take turns pulling and drafting, fighting the elements. But as they sweep down the steep descent and shiver in wet spandex along the Alaskan tidal flats to the final stretch, the goodwill of co-operation quickly dissolves. “Jillian and I raced the whole way together, through the rain and cold, but on that last hill, I just dropped her.” Sheufelt and her partner bag the gold with a time of 7:11, Chown’s team comes in 30 seconds later.

A good 20 kilometres back, Jonathan Kerr runs along the roadside near one of the eagle-viewing pullouts. His high-boned cheeks still rosy from his ride, he’s trying to pass a fresh bottle to his teammate, Gord Puddister, but the rain and slope of the road make the handoff slippery. He drops the bottle and laughs. “Just open your mouth!” he shouts to Puddister, who’s taking a faceful of dirty road-spray in the draft. Finishing 11th in their four-person men’s category, Kerr later comments over dinner, “This isn’t a bike race, it’s a bike festival. I do it for the clam chowder.”

Indeed, the event doesn’t end at the finish line. While most of the top racers hit the sack early, tucking into one of the hundreds of tents set up across the huge grassy lawn in the centre of Haines’ historic Fort Seward, most others use their biking effort to justify hours of revelry. With a Red Bull and vodka in hand, boyish Yukon mushroom biologist Sam Skinner perches on a barstool at the crowded and noisy Fog Cutter Bar. “I just put one leg forward and down, and then the other leg forward and down – 10,632 times,” he says of his ride on Team Pirate Convention, a costumed eight-person crew. The bar reeks of spilled drinks, body odour and, surprisingly enough, cigarette smoke. A neon Pabst sign hangs in the steamed-up window. Skinner shouts over the din that he loves the race because he gets to ride every year with his closest friends. “When I fist did the race in 1994, 80 per cent of the people did it on old mountain bikes and 10 per cent had jeans on. It’s sad. You just don’t see jeans anymore.”

Maybe years of practice has made Skinner’s team too fast to see the jeans at the back. If you ask Bill Horsey, the event’s most cherished volunteer, he’ll tell you he saw plenty of denim, even this year. Horsey and fellow Haines Junctionite Mike Deatsy drive the sweep vehicle that creeps a few paces behind the last rider all the way from the start to the international border, where Alaskans take over the job for the last stretch. “You’re following one bicycle all the time,” says Horsey. “Sometimes they walk. Sometimes they go so slow the speedometre doesn’t move. I can describe to you each rock on the right-hand side of the road going south.” Since the race’s inauguration in 1992, Horsey has followed the ass-end of the race, sitting for over eight hours in his truck over a distance of 170 kilometres.

His green Chevy half-tonne has flashing yellow lights, a giant wooden sign that reads “Caution: Bike Race Ahead” and a gas-powered hibachi barbecue built into the back of his truck bed. “We eat like pigs,” he says. On this year’s multi-course menu: escargot, salmon fillets and king crab. While one man drives, the other cooks out the back window. “What I like best about this job,” says Horsey, shovelling potato salad into his mouth, “is that you get to witness a whole different side of the race that doesn’t normally get recognition. One year we followed a blind grandmother on a tricycle. This year it was a mentally challenged guy. Those are the kinds of extra-special things we get to see.”
Early the next morning, race officials post final results on a board at the finish-line. Emerging from their overheated tents and out onto the sunny field, quad-stiff cyclists crowd around the tattered papers. Most are still in their pajamas, yawning and stretching, gazing dreamily out at the glittering ocean below. It’s fun to check out the results, but on a morning like this, after a day like yesterday, most will agree, race times don’t really matter.