Winfield man seeking votes to win trip of a lifetime

Bob Chase has backpacked in the Colorado Rockies. He's gone white-water rafting in Idaho. And he's spent eight days dog sledding in Minnesota.

But to embark on his next great adventure, the 62-year-old Winfield man must overcome his biggest challenge: Getting thousands of votes on Facebook.

Chase is a contestant in the Fjallraven Polar 2018 contest and is hoping to be one of 20 people from around the world chosen to go on a dog sledding trip in the Arctic wilderness.

Fjallraven - a Swedish-based outdoor equipment company - organizes the annual expedition to show that ordinary people with proper training and the right gear can do the six-day, 186-mile trek from Norway to Sweden.

Two people from North America will be selected for the April expedition. The first spot will go to the person who gets the most votes via Facebook. The second will be hand-picked by the Fjallraven Polar jury.

As of Friday afternoon, more than 210 people from the United States and Canada had entered the competition. Chase ranked second in the region with 2,362 votes, but he was more than 2,400 votes behind the leader.

People can vote for Chase by visiting polar.fjallraven.com and hitting the "vote" link.

Chase said he's hoping to keep his second-place spot until the contest ends Dec. 14. The hope is his vote count and back story will impress the jury enough to pick him.

While he believes the expedition would be fun and cool, he said he entered for his three daughters and seven grandchildren.

"I want to serve as an example that they should embrace life and try to tackle challenges," he said. "If their 60-some-year-old grandpa can do this, they can do it."

The physician at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield has been testing his personal limits since his wife, Jean, bought him a bicycle in 1998.

"She was so nice about it, I decided to ride it," Chase said. "And I really liked it."

He soon was doing long-distance bike trips.

In the mid-2000s, he went backpacking for eight days in the Rawah Wilderness in Colorado, which helped him forget the daily pressures of life.

"In the wilderness like that, all we were focused on was getting from point A to point B, finding water and finding a flat place to sleep" Chase said. "The stuff that was so important before wasn't important anymore. It really clarified your thinking. And it was beautiful."

Over the next decade, Chase did more outdoor journeys, including a 16-day backpacking trip in the Scandinavian Arctic and dog sledding in the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Ontario.

So he says he knows what to expect if he's picked for the April expedition and he's prepared for the freezing temperatures and physical demands.

In addition to cycling 120 miles a week, on Sundays he jogs 4 miles with a backpack containing 100 pounds of bird seed and free weights.

"I am not worried at all about the physical aspect of this," he said. "I've done worse. I've done harder than this."

Still, he needs thousands of additional Facebook votes to have a chance. And Chase says he's a rank amateur when it comes to social media.

His wife and daughters are doing what they can to help, but if the effort falls short, Chase said he's still happy because of all the support he's received.

"I've got people I haven't seen since 1969 who are trying to help out online," Chase said. "It's been a rewarding experience to see people come together and try to make this work."