24 ALASKA SPORTING JOURNAL AUGUST 2019 | aksportingjournal.com
trip that had been traveling 55 mph and
not paying attention to anything. Didn’t
see the red light, and without even put-
ting on his brakes he hit me at full im-
pact while I was in a dead stop.”
The point of impact most affected
Grimes’ left shoulder, which was pulled
by her seat belt and caused severe
nerve damage. She would lose 40 per-
cent of usage in her left arm. And the
news gets worse when you consider
that Grimes is a natural left-hander.
“So with that lack of sensation and
that nerve damage, I can’t fire a hand-
gun anymore so I can’t keep doing po-
lice work, because that’s kind of a criti-
cal aspect of being a cop,” she says with
a sheepish laugh. “I was not ready for
that to happen.”
It got worse. While she was eligible
for disability, it just didn’t pay as much
as she made working for the force. It
became too expensive to raise her kids
in Wasilla. So she settled on the home-
stead in Eagle, hard on the Yukon River
just west of the Canadian border. She
was able to build a house on the proper-
ty, but it wasn’t the easiest of transitions.
Grimes felt alone. She’d spent most
of her savings in a desperate attempt
to save the Wasilla home (she’d lose
it to foreclosure).
“I lost my house, my job. I lost every-
thing, so it was like you were at the bot-
tom of the bucket and everything looked
grim,” she says. “All of your friends kind
of shied away from you, because cop-
wise, you were kind of the leper now.You got hurt and, holy crap, they could
get hurt too. So it was in the forefront of
their minds that this happened to this
person and could happen to them too.”
One thought was constantly in the
back of her mind: “I’m not ready to be
done being a cop.”
So what next?IF THERE’S ONE MOMENT in Grimes’ Na-
ked and Afraid appearance – her epi-
sode, brilliantly titled Baked Alaskan,
premiered in March – it was that damn
tarantula. After Discovery Channel pro-
ducers found out about her story and
offered her a chance to participate,
Grimes took it.
She and partner Jon Hart, a Pennsyl-
vania endurance athlete, were dropped
off in a southern Mexico coastal forest,
where the heat index – even in spring –
can rise to as much as 130 degrees.
“I went from Eagle, where I think it
was 20 degrees outside and snowing,”
Grimes says.
Climbing a steep ridge to get to a
drinking water source was as difficult
a task as she would face upon the
partners shedding their clothes and
studying a map.
Over what would become a success-
ful 21-day stay, Grimes and her cohort
caught elusive crabs from the beach –
“We figured out that you couldn’t catch
them by yourself. One would find them
and the other would come up and stab
it with a stick,” Grimes admits – gath-
ered fruit and berries and finally got afire started to help fend off flesh-eating
sand fleas and ants. They made the duo
miserable over an entire fireless night.
“I was covered from head to toe. I felt
like a meth addict. I had scabs all over
my body. It probably took six months
to heal from all those,” she says. “That
was the hardest part. Just constant ach-
ing pains.”
But it was another insect friend that
would define Grimes’ three nude weeks
south of the border. One night of sleep
was interrupted by a tarantula’s bite.
“Son of a bitch. That hurt. Something
just bit me,” Grimes, channeling her in-
ner Forrest Gump, called out in the mid-
dle of the night.
Grimes, who was also temporarily
sidelined when she severely stubbed
her toe earlier in the challenge, enacted
her spider revenge when her stomach
was rumbling for protein – any protein.
Granted, when they found a big, hairy
arthropod hanging on a tree branch,
there was no way to know if it was the
same spider that hanged its fang into
the Alaskan. But why not conclude it
was so you can play out the ultimate
eye-for-an-eye result?
And then, hungry and not picky
about foraging for a food source, they
ate the tarantula.
“It was so nasty. Just like burnt ass,”
Grimes says of the taste. “The thought
never crossed my mind to eat a tarantu-
la until one bit me.”
They were so close to completing
their challenge as day 21 beckoned. ItGrimes (with her boyfriend Nate and fellow Alaskan Naked and Afraid participant LeeAnn Duncan) has finally found peace
after the shoulder injury that made it impossible to continue her active-duty police officer career. (GWEN GRIMES)