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.