Tyler Rhodes wins 48th Anvil Mountain Run

By Laura Robertson

The Anvil Mountain run is a time-honored Fourth of July tradition in Nome, a nearly half-marathon length race to from City Hall on Front Street to the White Alice towers and back. But this year, its 48th running, it almost didn’t happen.
Reba Lean had been training casually for the race since April. Her brother Andy was in town and she wanted to run it with him. The last time she’d done it was in 2017. Then, a couple days before the race, she heard from her friend Erika Rhodes that it might not happen.
Rhodes had been talking to Leo Rasmussen, who had organized the event for 47 years, when she had mentioned the race. He said he didn’t run it anymore. Confused, Rhodes reached out to City Hall to ask if the city was organizing it. Then she called Lean.
Lean jumped into action. She checked in with City Hall again, and to find out the city was not involved, but the racers were welcome to borrow a table and set up outside the building. Then, she visited Rasmussen at his fireworks stand on the Beam Road. He was “fully supportive of a grassroots effort to keep it going,” she said. On July 2, two days before the race, she made a Facebook post asking for volunteers and tagged 13 people who had run it in the past. One day later, she had a plan and about a dozen volunteers.
Crystal Toolie has won the women’s race several times in the past. She was initially planning to run this year, too. But when she saw Lean’s call to action, she decided to volunteer. “We need to have this,” Toolie said of the race.
The race is the second event in two weeks that has been organized at the last minute as people who had organized the events in the past had moved on. The first was the Midnight Sun parade. The second was the Midnight Sun mock Bank Robbery. Now it was the iconic Anvil Mountain Run. In all cases, the events did eventually happen after a community member realized that no one was organizing it and stepped in to keep up the tradition.
“Sometimes in Nome you assume something’s happening, so you find out it’s not and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?” said Rosa Wright, another volunteer.
On race day, 20 runners showed up at City Hall, pinned bib numbers on their shirts and lined up to run the nearly 12 miles. The race follows Bering Street to Dexter Bypass and up to the top of Anvil Mountain. After that, racers can come down the mountain any way they choose. The finish line is the telephone pole at the corner of Front Street and Division Street, no matter which angle you reach it from.
The race was tight as the runners headed north on Bering Street but spread out as the road turned into the Nome-Teller Highway. Many runners walked part of the hill leading up to Anvil. Most people came down the mountain along the trail, zigzagging back and forth to keep from sliding. Many finished the race by taking Center Creek Road all the way back to town.
Tyler Rhodes came in first, finishing the race in one hour, 27 minutes and 19 seconds. TJ Wright and Neill Toelle came in within ten minutes of him, rounding out the top three. Elizabeth Korenek Johnson was the first woman to finish the race, clocking a time of one hour, 50 minutes and 36 seconds. Reba Lean did end up racing and finished 13 minutes and one second after her brother. 
“If nobody had organized the checkpoint, people probably would have shown up at 8 a.m. ready to run and probably taken off on the trail on their own, which would have been fine,” said Lean, “but I think that having the checkers and the water stations were so nice, right?”

RESULTS:
Tyler Rhodes 1:27:19; TJ Wright 1:30:18; Neill Toelle 1:36:52; Harrison Moore 1:41:29; Tyler Johnson 1:42:28; Alexander Herring 1:43:15; Elizabeth Korenek Johnson 1:50:36; Perry Saito 1:58:56; Theresa Miller 1:58:56; Philip Rohrer 1:59:08; Nathaniel Olson 2:02:04; Andrew Rohrer 2:02:13; Erika Rhodes 2:02:55; Andy Lean 2:10:37, Darcee Perkins 2:13:01; Reba Lean 2:23:38; Jon Strickler 2:28:27; Codie Strickler 2:28:27; Krystal Hensley 2:34:14; Anna Lionas 2:46:50