Winter in full swing

Well here it is, almost December. Sorry about the lull in blog entries. I guess we have been slightly busy around here since we last wrote.  Fall training has gone awesome. We started with 30 adult race dogs training and 12 yearlings that are also running in harness, but at lesser level. We ran them all together in 14 dog teams until we hit the 20 mile mark in training, sometime in October and then we decided that the young dogs would be split out since we did not plan to race them this year, but rather allow them to mature physically and mentally. Our yearlings are going to get another year to have fun before things get real serious. We'll train them up for 30 mile camping trips, so this spring they can get into a camping rhythm and then next year they'll be in the groove. They are looking good.

As for the race dogs, we are still training around 26 dogs for the upcoming races and at this point in the season they are doing runs in the range of  40 - 60 miles. We are both signed up for the Sheep Mountain 150 in December and the Copper Basin 300 in January. After these two races, we will have a good idea who is tough enough to make the cut for the Yukon Quest team. Paige will only be able to take 14 dogs on that race. So we will have to look closely at which dogs make the best fit for a long cold 1000 mile run.

The video below is from a mini hd helmet cam we are playing with, watch for more videos as the season progresses. This video is just playing with footage from a typical training run on our local trails.. pretty close to being there, except this video is a little shorter than the real runs by about 5 hours.. I did speed up the video a bit at times. we like our dogs slow.

We recently had our friend Dorothy Olmstead come by to help out for a week and see what handler life was all about. She did a great job with the dogs and got to see what running dogs and doing dog chores at -40 is all about. Hopefully we didn't scare her away. Hopefully, we can get Dorothy, who is a writer, to do a blog entry on her experience here. ;)

Cody's dad, Sterling is now here helping out in the shop and helping with some training runs. He got his reintroduction to the dogsled yesterday and did 18 miles of technical trail without spilling his sled, so I think he is ready to go camping. We plan to get out this week and do a camping trip from our place to Minto Flats. Sterling is also an auctioneer, so while he is here, he is going to be doing the Yukon Quest, Hawg and Dog benefit Auction . Yukon Quest mushers will be serving hors d'oeuvres at this event at Cold Spot Fees on December 3rd. Don't miss the chance to see Paige in a tux with tails.

So that is what is happening here, we'll try to keep this more up to date, but our FACEBOOK page is public, meaning you can look at it without being a facebook member, and usually kept up to date on a more day to day basis. During races, it will likely get more updates than this.