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.