December 2016 Dog Training

Sebastian Schnülle · December 15, 2016 · 1 Comment

After the 2016 Glacier season came to an end, I did some traveling, giving in to my second passion: Sailing. Travels took me from Seattle, to sailing on the North Sea ( my old stomping grounds ) to a very nice trip to Spain. My goal was to wait long enough, till ATV training had some to an end, I could run sleds right away upon my return.

Well. The first part of that plan worked out well, the sailing part. The ATV part, not so well. It is December 14th and we are still sitting on the machines. There is very little snow outside, maybe 7 inches. Specially around Two Rivers, where there is very heavy dog sled traffic on the trails, that is not anywhere near enough for sleds to run any decent size teams.

Now lately the temperatures have taken a nosedive, well in to 30 below F, which makes using the ATV´s even less fun and also mechanically very challenging. That resulted in taking a bit more time off from training than originally planned. From the looks of it, the dogs do not mind one bit, as long as they can stay on the couch.

Lets hope for a bit of change in weather pattern. On January 14th I am signed up to run the 300 Mile Copper Basin and on March 4th Iditarod starts in Anchorage. It has been 6 years, since I did the run to Nome via Dogteam. Instead I followed along the trail on snowmachine, reporting for the Iditarod Insider. I am sure there will be times where I miss my iron dog, yet I am looking very much forward to spend some quality time with 16 of my best friends.