I know. It's been a long time since my last update. Sorry about that! So here's my attempt to update you on the last month:
Currently, I'm contently sitting in my little house with Christmas lights aglow, listening to the smooth jazz melodies of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" soundtrack with the wind howls of yet another storm as background while the snow flies around in the blizzard. I can't complain one bit :)
It wasn't until the week before Thanksgiving that we finally harnessed up dogs and started training them. In the early season, training is done with 4-wheelers or ATV's or quad runners, etc. (whatever you may call them wherever you may live). It's more about control. We keep at a slow pace and let them pull, pull, pull (of course we put the machine into gear and help them up hills when need be - don't want to injure them).
Thanksgiving day brought a lot of delectable foods, great friends, and my first dog sled race out here in Unalakleet. It was an adventure, that's for sure! Snow was lacking and temps were at -15 F.
6 teams were in the running.
The best way to describe my race was that I started well, and I ended well ... with my dogs. The middle? Well, that part is a different story. About a mile into the race, before the first hill I lost my team in an icy creek with a rather steep bank. Middy started the race behind me, so I jumped into his sled and the two of us "raced" after my team hoping to find them shortly thereafter.
4 miles later, with me getting out of the basket to help Middy kick the sled up the hills, we finally found my team. Another musher in the race had tied them off to a tree until I could get to them.
I jumped back onto my sled, took off with my 8 dogs and finished the race :)
I got 4th place.
Despite losing my team for a decent portion of the race, it was still a good experience. It was a great way to learn while I watched how Middy controlled the sled and listen to his tips about this and advice about that. So all in all, great learning race.
The next weekend we had another race. Same trail as the last, opposite direction.
This race went
much smoother for me even though the wind was blowing and snow was flying by the end (wasn't sure where the finish line was until about 100 feet from it - that blowing snow made it hard to see!).
Sitting in Middy's sled in the last race learning, and the training I had done in the week between the two paid off. My 8 dog team and I cruised right along and got 1st place out of 5, earning myself $500 to pay next month's rent and electric bill. Woohoo!
Photo taken by: Willa Eckenweiler
On top of V.O.R. hill during the second race.
Recently it's been storms, storms, and more storms. Meaning wind, wind, and more ... that's right, wind. Because of this, training has been a little on the sporadic side, but when we get a break in the weather, I'm out there training dogs!
I have now switched to training dogs with a snow machine or snow-go or snow mobile, etc. (again, whatever you may call it wherever you may live). With the wind has come major drifts of snow out on the loop that I am currently running the dogs on and a 4-wheeler would more than likely get stuck. We're still in the slow and complete control phase of training but will be switching to sleds soon.
Hope you enjoyed the update, and I will try to be better about updating more often (at least so they won't be so long and novel-like!)
