Deep snow today! Snow and Snow which made the trails slow and hard pulling for the puppies.

 That's just fine, though.  So for this year we have had fast trails almost all the time and the dogs have been moving quick steadly going faster and faster as they have grown older.  It has been on my mind to start training them to pace themselves better.  The deep snow has made this easier.

 The deep snow made for slow, steady work and I have no complaints about how the pups did.  Though, I have a lot of females in heat and that did make for some distraction.  Anyway, the slow speed let my mind wonder and I started thinking/firming up my dog plans for next year.

First thing is a big trip down the Yukon River to at least Unakleet but likely to Nome.  That will be in the spring.  But I also need to race 500miles to make sure I am qualified for Iditarod the following year.  I will likely run the Knic 200 and the Don Bowers 300.  With the pups I would run those f=very conservatively with lots of rest and short (hopefully) fast runs.  But in Dec. there are a couple of tune-up style races of shorter length, for those I would like to race as hard as I can and see just how competitve these new pups are.

Well... that's as far as I got in my dog-run-mind-wonder.

Well we just finished our first camping trip with our young puppies.  They are around 10 months old now so we ran out about 12 miles, made camp, spent the night, and then 12 miles the next day.

The goal was to load up the sleds with all our gear- get the kinks out of our own camping routines after a year off- and give the pups their first night out away from their houses.  It went pretty well.

All the dogs loved the extra attention they get while we are camping- extra pets, deep massages, their feet rubbed, etc... Plus lots of extra snacks and shiny new dog coats!  But some dogs seemed to miss their houses a bit more than others.  Lost was probably the most home sick but Rogue was right there with him.  All the other dogs settled right in and rested without any problems.

Lost and Rogue will just take a little more work and a little extra loving while they are out until they learn that camping on the trail is what we are all about.  They will get there though!  And they loved both runs!  So it will just take time.

The importance of the pups learning to camp so young is critical so- first, we can go camping for years with them and they will enjoy it, and second, because on the race trail they have to be very comfortable sleeping outside so that they can recover between runs.

All in all it was good first experience and a nice foundation to build upon.  We will be headed back out this comming weekend and just about every other weekend from now until the snow melts in late April.

We have had some fantastic runs over the winter break and also spent a fair amount of time putting in and re-putting in trails!

And it has been COLD!  Well, not Fairbanks-cold but very cold for around here.  It all started around Solstice when we got a lot of new snow.  Then things turned windy and all that fresh snow blew in deep over our trails, burying them completely.

We have a snowmachine, for the first time, this year to help keep our trails open and so out we went to open back up all those freshly obscured trails…. And promptly we stuck it!  Which meant we then had a buried trail AND a buried snowmachine.  And promptly we burned out the snowmachine belt trying to get it un-stuck (a belt on a snowmachine is a lot like a chain on a bike- without it you aren’t going anywhere!).  Boy, I sure do hate those things!

What could we do?  Well, first we walked home, had a nice warm drink around the wood stove, slept in a soft and warm bed, and forgot all about the mechanical beast freezing out there in the wild five miles from home!  Then we woke up, got a new belt, and tromped back out into the woods.  But, by that time, it was dark again and so there we were in the dark pulling and pulling and pulling on start cord until finally it roared to life and away we went!  Yahoo!

But it didn’t take long, with the wind blowing as we rode home to realize that with all that pulling we had worked up a huge sweat.  We were soaked!  And when we looked down at the thermometer we keep tethered to our survival bag we saw it was bottomed out!  As low as it would go… and way below the last marked temp of –25F!  Yikes.

If we had been any further out we probably would have had to stop, build a fire, and dry out.  But so close to home we just pushed on and got indoors and out of our wet gear.

Ofcourse, now, after letting this post sit on my computer for a few days, it dumpingrain as I write!  So, you just never know about the weather!