It is finally fall!

It's official, it is fall in the northlands again. The leaves turned yellow and a couple days later they are already stacking up on the ground. There is nothing like cruising through the birch forest while on a puppy walk or with the team and quad... The trail coated in leaves like a yellow brick road.

So Paige brought the dogs back from the glacier last week and introduced them to their new dogyard and the new pups and dogs that appeared here this summer. This week has been exciting running teams mixed with all our old and new favorites. They all look so good that it is hard not to contemplate 2 full Yukon Quest teams, but as the season progresses we will likely have only enough SOLID dogs for one good quest team. However we should have two really nice teams for all the mid-distance races this year and Cody may run the Quest 300 while Paige is running the full Quest. The dogs are strong, but here in the hills with our thicker coated dogs that have been running on ice all summer, it is still to dang warm to go more than 2-3 miles without them getting to hot., especially when doing some hill climbs. Colder temps, please come!

The pups are all doing great. Smoke's pups (grisman songs) have taken to the excercise wheel and love it. Lucy's pups are getting more active and are showing lots of personality these days. We are going to take Laurie's suggestiong and name them after lyrics from the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

Besides the running of the dogs and puppy walks, we have been having a multitude of friends helping us out with projects that must be finished before it snow and we forget about everything except running dogs. Cody will be taking some sleds to the Hakadal sleddog symposium in Norway on Tuesday and then the Willow symposium the week after, so he has been in the shop up to his elbows building dogsleds... with lots of help from Thomas, Tom and Paige of course. We also have been working on new 4 wheeler training trails and have a great new out trail, thanks to Jessie's help. The last big project is getting a roof on our rental/handler cabin. Megan and Thomas, who worked with our dogs on the glacier all summer will be staying there this winter. However there still is no roof, but the rafters are up and we are confident that they will have a warm home soon! Thanks for all the help! One more month of working hard and then we can just train hard! can't wait.

Extreme Doggy Home Makeover

This summer has been the summer of extremes.. extreme projects that is..  One of these major projects was to take our pretty little forested hobbit dogyard, which was actually quite treacherous when covered in snow an ice, and turn it into something safe for dogs and mushers and efficient for hooking up and feeding the dogs.

Our yard is on a pretty good slope and used to be completely forested. This was great for providing shade for dogs in summer, but after a couple years the dogs had dug up the roots killing most of the trees and creating a very unsafe surface for mushers hooking up teams. Trees started to fall last winter and Paige had back surgery so we decided it was time to do something while the dogs were away on the glacier.

So we cut down all the pretty little trees and called in the dozer.

Yogi was the foreman as usual, but John from Heavy Horse construction, a fellow musher, made 3 terraces out of hour hillside with paths for trails to shoot through each level of dogs.

We then put down some small gravel to keep the yard from being mucky when wet.

Voila' ... the dogs enjoying their new level home. the treasure at the end of the rainbow and at the other end... the finished feed shed that used to be a wall tent platform that we lived in when working on the house.