When motors fail.. drift busting the old fashioned way...

All winter long we have been begging for snow.. and we finally got it. In fact, we got a whole winter of snow in less than a week. We received about 2 feet of snow in 3 different storms in less than a week. The first storm left some nice fluffy snow for the dogs to break through and was very enjoyable for all of us. The next storm left deep snow which was still passable, but also was quite windy leaving some challenging drifts. Cody decided to use the snowmachine to break through some of these drifts to make things easy on the dogs, but a mile into it, the dang thang broke down as motorized vehicles do. Dog teams however rarely completely break down if you take good care of them, so we broke out a bunch of trails, only to get them all filled in again by another substantial snowfall and 50+ mph winds. This last storm brought down many trees on the trails and has placed some human chest height drifts on our local trails. Armed with a chainsaw and some bad ass dogs, we have been slowly opening up the trails. Between the Karsten and Laurie's teams, Clint and Sarah's teams and ours, the trails are now back in order around here. The video below show a little of what the dogs have been doing...

Elizabeth Taylor (ET, the swing dog on right) is actually responsible for leading both teams through this in single lead with an assist from the free leader Stout. Elmer, the dog pictured in lead was just put their as a line holder because he does such a great job at that.. Good dogs!

After about a week and a half, most main trails are back to normal. Last night we decided to take a little side trail that wasn't broken. So there we are at 9:30pm with headlamps and the Husqvarna clearing trees off trail and then busting through drifts lke this again.. are we crazy? maybe so, but we sure love this life!