"Yes, it was mad," Christian Langegger said the other day. The really insane part was the final segment when he and Christoph Biedermann crossed the Kaltag Portage from the Yukon River to Norton Sound, Langegger said.

The portage is famous, but not for summer crossings. In winter it forms a leg of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race before mushers reach the coast at Unalakleet.

But in summer, as the pair had been told two years ago by Iditarod race director Joanne Potts and locals in the village of Kaltag, the portage offers swamps, bugs and grizzlies.

Sure it would have been easier, if longer, just to keep paddling hundreds of miles down the Yukon to the Bering Sea, their ultimate goal, instead of hauling 250 pounds of gear over land.

"But we want some adventure," Langegger said.

Biedermann and Langegger are both 25 and will become medical doctors if they pass final exams in Austria next month. They were raised in skiing and mountaineering enclaves in the Alps and have worked as ski instructors and mountain rescuers. They met seven years ago as students at the University of Innsbruck.

They share a passion common to many who journey here: an image of Alaska that took hold in childhood, of a land of limitless exploits.

"Just the name fascinates me," said Biedermann. "Alaska means adventure." In Austria and Germany, he said, any public slide show of an Alaska journey sells out. Not for nothing did he and Langegger shoot 19 rolls of film.

In 2001, they and two friends paddled in two canoes down the Yukon from Whitehorse in Canada to the Dalton Highway. They had hoped to reach the sea by making the Kaltag Portage then, but their friends quit early.

Biedermann and Langegger decided to finish the journey this year. But instead of the Yukon, they would first travel more than 600 twisting miles down the middle and main branches of the Koyukuk River. They would give the Yukon only 54 miles, from Koyukuk to Kaltag.

"That's too boring to go down just the Yukon," Langegger said. Also, too many tourists, according to Biedermann.

They wanted to be "lonely" in the wilderness, said Langegger. And they wanted to live on a near-subsistence level, fishing and hunting for protein.

Most likely, they broke a few hunting laws along the way, said Sgt. Burke Waldron, a wildlife investigator with the Alaska State Troopers. The waterfowl season doesn't open until Sept. 1, and the Austrians likely wouldn't qualify as subsistence hunters. Instead, only a life-or-death emergency would allow someone to shoot waterfowl out of season, the wildlife agent said.

Langegger and Biedermann said they relied on the advice of people they talked to about their trip. "We shot some birds before the season started, but Native hunters told us that if you are hungry, you are allowed to shoot anything ... as long as you eat them. So we are sure that it was not against the law," Biedermann said.

They took little else in the way of food supplies with them. "The most difficult thing of our trip, or the most strange, is we just take rice and flour," Langegger said. "We want to bake the bread. We just want to eat fish."

On the first day, July 26, the rain-swollen Middle Fork of the Koyukuk flipped their inflatable canoe moments after they put in under a Dalton Highway bridge.

"It was very rainy. It was cold. It was not the start we wanted to have," Langegger said. Not an hour later they flipped again.

In the four weeks it took to reach Kaltag, the sun shone for only five days, they said. Headwinds held speed to about 2 mph. To keep to their schedule for getting back to Anchorage for their flight home Sept. 19, they stayed on the river up to 15 hours a day.

They reached the Yukon at Koyukuk on Aug. 23, a day they call "Black Saturday."

They had started out paddling in a storm four miles upriver. As Biedermann fought to hold the canoe into the waves, Langegger sliced bread, until his hand slipped and the knife pierced the canoe. They could not get it out of the river, however. The near shore was a cliff and the opposite shore was too far to cross.

A quick duct tape repair job slowed but didn't stop the leak. Langegger had to keep his finger on the hole for four hours to Koyukuk where they could finally fix the tear.

Later in the day, a reel on one of their two fishing rods broke.

Still later, as they paddled out on the choppy, rainy Yukon, both their shotguns -- used to hunt birds, porcupines and other small animals -- malfunctioned, and they lost three of the four barrels.

The pins broke off, they said, probably because the dampness had rusted the caps on their shells.

"So we have one barrel left for the most dangerous part of the trip," said Langegger.

Before the Austrians, very few parties were known to have made a summer crossing of the Kaltag Portage in recent years, according to Richard Burnham, a 55-year-old equipment operator, fisherman and trapper who has lived in Kaltag for three decades and knows the trail.

Two Norwegians crossed in the late 1990s, and a group of four people carrying two canoes did it about 10 years before that, Burnham said.

"Some individuals have tried to make it," he said. Three years ago, a man who had started trekking from Wales at the tip of the Seward Peninsula eventually crossed from Unalakleet to Kaltag and nearly died doing it.

Biedermann and Langegger talked to Burnham in Kaltag. They planned to go about 25 miles up the Kaltag River by walking the shore as they pulled their gear-laden canoe through the water. Then they'd walk the Iditarod Trail until they could link up with the Unalakleet River.

No one had tried the Kaltag River route before, said Burnham.

"I cautioned these guys," he said. "I kind of looked at them."

But he found them well-prepared.

"These guys handed me these (detailed) maps. I know they got the food, I know they got the gear," said Burnham. "But I told them it's lots of bugs and there's lots of brown bears on the Kaltag River."

Their first night, Langegger woke to hear a brown bear snorting outside the tent. He roused Biedermann, and they sang and yelled until the bear left.

Their real problems, however, lay in the Kaltag River. "It's a very small river," said Biedermann. "It's very fast, with beaver dams and so many trees, and rapids."

As one of the men worked in the water pulling the canoe up the creek, the other struggled through the brush with an ax in one hand and the shotgun in the other.

After four days, they left the Kaltag but couldn't locate the trail. They fixed their GPS device at the coordinates of a point they knew was on the trail some six miles away.

"So now we walk through the bushes," Biedermann said. Although it was only six miles, they had to walk a total of 18 -- carrying half their gear first, returning for the other half and then advancing again. It took two days.

Eventually they reached the Unalakleet River six miles above a well-known put-in for canoes. Those half-dozen miles, however, nearly killed them.

Again the stream was narrow, fast and swept by overhanging trees. They flipped twice. Once Biedermann got caught under a log beneath the water and had to fight to free himself. Langegger also went under and got trapped by the current between a sweeper and the canoe.

"I almost drowned," he said.

They reached Norton Sound on Sept. 15, after more than seven weeks of cross-country travel in the Alaska Bush, including 19 days on the portage.

"We're glad we're back healthy," Langegger said afterward. "We lost lots of things, and some things don't work anymore. But it's no matter. We are healthy."