Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Winter is a coming fast..

Winter is finally upon us. Snow is slowly starting to accumulate and we are itching to get off the bumpy, noisey 4 wheeler and onto a smooth, quiet, peaceful ride. The big dogs are looking good, super strong and ecstatic to be out there. The following is a little video from our training run yesterday.


Today with help from our part-time helper Uli, we will start running a larger team 14 - 16 dogs and rotate them around so that each dog runs 2 days and get one day off. It will be great to try out a bunch of new leader combinations. Be sure to check back in December and see what races we have signed up for. These dogs are going to rock this winter.

Pups are doing great. The oldest pups from Lucy and Ruger are more like dogs now and are enjoying romps in the free run pen. Kanuti and Coldfoot are loving the dogwheel and are really opening up like races horses at the kentucky derby. Unfortunately for us, these two are going to Aaron soon, but they are all awesome, so we can't lose. Here is a picture of them trying on their future wardrobe of harnesses.




The medium pups (the mustelids), Fisher, Marten and Sable are free most of the time and help us with all our daily duties and hang in the house most nights with us. They are fitting right in here and they are going to be superstars for sure.


The smallest pups have just started to get out of their house and show some personality. We finally sprung some names on these guys this week and being that I sometimes pretend to be an archaeologist, Paige decided to let me classify the pups after different archeaological traditions from the arctic. We have Ipiutak or "Ippy", Thule, Denbigh, Choris, and Norton. These are all hearty groups of people that knew how to survive in a harsh arctic land so hopefully the pups will live up to their names. Some even used the ancestors of these dogs for travel.






Thanks for checking in.. For family this is the time of the year where you might not be able to find us besides on here... we only come inside to eat and sleep and when we do, there are usually between 3 and 8 dogs in the house with us...