Dogsledding

Its warm, and the trail sucks, but damn it all we’ve started dogsledding anyways. We actually started a few weeks ago right after I got back from Christmas. It hasn’t been terribly exciting, I mean I love dogsledding but its mostly cruising along in the woods and trying to remember all the mistakes the dogs make so I can report them back to Don later. Enough about me being a tattle tail though and here are a couple of (slightly) more exciting short anecdotes from the past few weeks.

The first time I went dogsledding Don pulled me around behind the skidoo first for a bit so I could get used to the sled. It’s a fancy racing sled that steers a lot easier than any sled you’re likely to get at a touring company. I didn’t fall off so I guess I was ready, I have done this before… But anyways we get going, 5 dog team and it’s totally fine. Don’s stopped ahead and he takes some pictures and I go along and we’re maybe one and a half miles in. I’m going down this slight incline and there’s a turn at the bottom and I guess I haven’t totally gotten the hang of the sled cause I tip right over at the turn. Luckily there’s a lot of snow at this point in the trail cause it's an open field so I get to act as a snow plow which stops the dogs. I get up and we’re off again, so quick that Don didn’t even see me fall. The rest of the run was fine. 

A couple days later I’ve been dogsledding a few times and we’re headed out again. I get a six dog team, we go around the trail, everything’s totally fine, trails good, dogs are good. We’re headed back, Don’s ahead of me on the skidoo. We go around the last corner into the yard and there are some mushers visiting to use the trails. No big deal, the dogs are good at going by other dogs cause they’re racers and they’re trained that way. So Don goes by, we’re totally fine, and then one of the mushers, Mark, STEPS RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. 

Presumably to go talk to Don who just went by on the skidoo. 

So while the dogs are trained to go past other dogs completely fine, they aren’t quite caught up with “plow down any human that’s in their way”. So the leaders stop, and the team bunches up because I didn’t see it coming either. It's not really good etiquette to step out in front of someone's dog team so it was kindof unexpected. I have since been reassured however that Mark was on a decent amount of migraine medication, so I decided to forgive him. But back to the present, my team's bunched up, I throw the snowhook down to go untangle them, somehow my wheel dogs (in the back) are in front of my swing dogs (in the middle) and everyone's all tangled up. This next part happened in a bit of a blur because when you’re trying to fix a problem in a rush wearing a face mask its hard to retain precise memories. But Mark’s wife or daughter and neighbour or daughter (not sure which) came over to help me and we managed to get them all sorted out. Then I go back to my sled, pull the snow hook and we cruise the remaining 50 feet into the year where Don and Mark are chatting. Mark comes up to apologize and everything is fine, I guess.

Then it got warm. Like 10 degrees celcius warm, everything started melting a bit and getting icy and the dogs don’t run as fast and they bite snow like crazy and it’s a mess. So we went back to running dogs in front of the skidoos for a bit because when you can’t put down a snowhook in the trail cause there's no snow, it gets dicey. Its just not safe to not be able to stop the team. After a few days it gets a little colder and snows maybe a centimeter so we decide to start using sleds again. On this particular day we were running four teams. Me and Don were going to run two teams at once and Faye was going to drive the skidoo, and then Don was going to run the two big teams and I was going to drive the skidoo. So I was going to go first, and then Don was going to quickly hook up his team and follow me. I get ready to go, stood on the sled, took out the snowhooks and… its important to note at this point that the yard is still pretty slippery. We had actually been wearing this boots with spikes on the bottom… anyways. And I take off. I immediately move my foot from the brake to the drag pad to slow down the team (standard procedure out of the gate) and slip. I can’t get my foot back on, we’re going really fast, and instead of falling to the side I fall to my knees off the sled, while the sled is still upright. Its hard to picture and it’s also hard to describe since in the moment I couldn’t even tell what was happening. I drag a meter maybe on my knees while still holding on to the handle bars and somehow manage to jump back up and land on the runners and the rest of the run was fine. Don called it luck, I call it skill.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for now. Racing starts this weekend hopefully. First up is Preeceville, Saskatchewan. Apparently it rained there recently so if they don’t have snow, we’re not going to go, but hopefully they do. I was talking to Mark today (yeah, we’re cool) and he said that last year Don drove to the race, looked at the trail, and drove right back home. Mark ran the race last year and three of his dogs got injured cause the whole thing was an ice slick (reportedly). Here's hoping that doesn’t happen this year.