Sledding with Friends

  The little virus that we had in the dogyard seems to have cleared up, so we are back to running dogs.  Marenisco got a couple of inches of snow on Christmas Eve, so the trails are in pretty good shape, not that they weren't in okay shape before, but the new snow makes them nicer and, hopefully not just because the holidays kept people too busy to drive their trucks out in the middle of the woods, traffic has been down on the trails.
  Jeremy and I did a nice 19 or so mile run on Christmas Day, and our friend Matt had called and said that him and his daughter would like to hit the trails with us today, so we loaded up fairly early and headed up to meet them in Marenisco so we could show off the trails we love so much, as they'd never been over there.

Before hookup

 

 

Dude and Pinstripe getting anxious to go.

Almost ready...it was pretty cool hooking up four teams.

Leaders Thunder and Aspen.

Leaders Scout and Cherry.

I took up the rear-Matt was ahead of me, then his daughter, then Jeremy.

  Unfortunately, Jeremy's team seemed to "poop out" early on in the run, and we ended up cutting it short, only doing about 10 miles.  The temps were in the mid to upper 30's, which may have had something to do with it, or maybe they just weren't ready today, yesterdays run was a later one, finished about 4:30 pm, so maybe they were still feeling it this morning, or maybe it just wasn't a good day, it happens.  Training has not been ideal this year, and our miles aren't quite where we had envisioned them being.  The weather is so weird this year and we could really use snow and colder temps.  42 degrees on December 26 just seems so wrong!  What little snow we have is deteriorating in this weather.  We have ground showing in our yard, luckily Marenisco has a few more inches than we do, but we really need things to change soon!
  All in all, with good company and healthy dogs, it was a good time.  We really enjoy getting to train with and spend some time with other dog sledding enthusiasts, and will hopefully get to do it again soon.  Maybe next time the weather will be more in our favor.

  Little update on how things are lately...
We've been getting sled runs in, but we have to drive to Marensico to do it.  Not that big a deal, I guess, but it amounts to a lot of extra time and fuel spent driving.  Maybe I shouldn't complain, as I know that there's other mushers around that have it worse as far as snow goes.  We only have to drive 60 miles round trip to get on snow, give or take a bit depending on where we get onto the trail system over there.  The trails are not ideal, we could use about a foot or so to make it perfect.  Right now, its maybe six inches, and there's still a bunch of trucks using the roads, so not much base, but we've been running eight dog teams with only minor troubles, like green leaders not taking turns, and not being able to hook down very well to make the corrections.
  Our local trails are still unusable.  Not so much because of lack of snow, though we could use more, but more because of loggers and people plowing to their hunting camps. We've also been encountering locked gates in places that haven't been locked in the past.  We have spent a ton of time just driving around, checking the trails, and its pretty depressing, to say the least.  Starting to look like we won't be able to use any of our usual trails nearby this year.  It gets pretty expensive with the gas prices to always have to hit the road for every single training run.
  To top it all off, it seems that we have some sort of virus starting to make its way through the dog yard.  Seems to hit suddenly, hard, with lots of diarrhea and vomiting, but it seems like the first dog that got it was feeling better after only one day, so hopefully that's how it will go, so far two dogs have been hit hard, with a few others showing milder symptoms, so we are going to be giving them all a couple days off to make sure everyone feels good before we resume training.  Maybe it will snow in the meantime, although the forecast doesn't look good.  All we want for Christmas is some of the white stuff.

Puppy Fun

Elliot and the pups-now about five and a half months-having a bit of fun yesterday. 

Learning to pull?  Tug of war, of course...that's Storm and Rain.

They all want the rope.

An update on training:  we've been getting out there with the sleds, but our local trails we like are in a bad way because of logging operations and hunters plowing the roads to their camps.  We really wish those guys would use four wheelers or snowmobiles to access the camps-or even just drive through the snow which is easily doable in the trucks they are using anyhow.  But I guess that's all just wishful thinking.  They usually stop plowing by the end of the month or so, we just have to be patient.
On a side note, today the temps in the low 40's.  Wrecking the snow we have.  Back to wishing for more of the white stuff...

Season's First Sled Run

We finally have enough snow to get the sleds out, so we loaded up two teams and drove over to Marenisco to check out the trails over there today.  We are a bit nervous about our local trails because of logging activities.  There is no real base under the snow yet, so we can't set a snowhook to hold teams, and we don't want to get into any situations where it would be needed.  The trails in Marenisco are really easy to navigate and safer with no base.  Jeremy took an eight dog team and I took a six dog team. 

The sleds waiting for the teams to be hooked to them.  Stimpy and Cherry, my leaders, in foreground.

Waiting and ready...

The trails over there are actually forest roads, so there has still been some traffic on them, which gave us a broke trail to follow, and we did pass one truck during the run, but there's easily enough room for us and them, so its no problem, the dogs barely hesitate when passing vehicles.  Good training. The roads do not get plowed, so soon there will be too much snow for trucks to drive on them.  Then the low snowmobile traffic will break the trails for us.

Jeremy way up there...

Jeremy's team is usually most of the better, faster dogs in the kennel, so he goes a bit faster.  He does have two more dogs than me, but his sled is much longer and heavier than mine, and he's heavier than me, too, so we figure it should come close to even in the end.  He wants to race and I don't, so I usually get the slower and/or weaker dogs in the kennel.  My usual main leader, Stimpy, is about 11 years old or so, tends to keep my team slower-suits me fine.

Breaking trail.

We also use a stretch of snowmobile trail, which is getting no use right now, so we ended up breaking trail for the last three miles.  The snow is about six to eight inches deep, not too bad, but its still more work for the dogs, and Jeremy's team really drove nice though it, leaving me way behind.  I was pretty happy he did-faster is better for racing, obviously-really looks like he might have what he needs.
 We did 10 miles and most of the dogs weren't tired yet.  Sure was fun and nice to get back to real mushing, no more mud all over everything!

Puppies in the snow!  Breeze, Storm, and Rain.  Cloud refused to pose for me! Age five months.

More Truck Training

  We are still training off the truck.  Its going well, the dogs are enjoying themselves and we've decided that there's a few good things about it.  We always have the trailer with us through the whole run, so if one, or more, dogs seem to need it, we can just stop and load them up and keep going with the rest of them without any trouble.  We can train without needing to look for places that loop, which we always do with the cart (and sleds) because having to turn around is not fun with a dog team.  With the truck, we can just stop when ever we feel the dogs have run enough miles and water, unharness, and load up wherever we are. 
  On Thursday, we took Salt out for her first hookup.  It took a bit for her to understand how things work, but she figured it out pretty quick.  She ran about four miles before we decided it was enough, and loaded her up, which was easy, because the trailer was with us.

We paired her up with easy going Sweet.  You might notice that we got another two inches of snow this week.

She was trying to figure out why everyone was so excited!  Scooby, Hail, Brian, and Hoodscoop behind.

In action-hard to get a good pic from the truck.

  Lara has been doing really great.  We had her in point, right behind the leaders, on Tuesday.  She was doing so good that we decided to put her up front with Thunder for a bit just to see what she'd do.

Lara is in point, next to Aspen, who's a bit bigger...

Lara up there with Thunder.

  Thunder did a great job showing her what to do, we had one big turn while she was up there, and he kept her basically in place when we stopped.  She lasted about a mile until she started to get distracted and goofing off.  No big deal, at eight months old, she's got lots of growing up to do.  She's very focused and driven in any other place in the team for at least 10 miles, which is the longest we've been running right now, and she never seems tired.
  On Tuesday, we also decided to try a couple other dogs up there with Thunder, with not too much luck.

Frost looked good at the start...

Pulled like a champ for a mile or so, before starting to act like a doofus.

 By the end of the run, we were back to the old standby duo Thunder and Cherry.  When we are done, we expect our leaders to hold the line out till everyone else is off the line.

Leaders with a job well done.  Gets pretty lonely way up there.