As the snow clears away and we pack all our winter gear back into the garage until next year, and bust out the four wheeler to continue spring training, I guess it’s time to reflect back on what we’ve accomplished this season as a team.

We started out the year with a ton of dogs in training, eventually training just the best 16 dogs in the kennel, and having a hard time picking a team for our first races because the dogs we have are all incredible athletes. Our first race of the season was the Aurora 50/50, held the last two days of December 2016, starting and finishing at Martin Buser’s Happy Trails Kennel in Big Lake. I ran 10 dogs in the race, not comfortable with the snow cover to run more than that, and the first day discovered that several of my team had come down with a stomach bug – we ran the race very conservatively, just training all the young dogs in how to handle themselves when passing other teams, exploring new to us trails (they get bored running the same trails all the time!), and just having fun. We finished last in the race, but had some great training experiences, and ran the pace I wanted them to be running for our longer races this season, so I couldn’t have been more proud of them.

Another week of training, and the next weekend we started our second race of the season, and our second Iditarod qualifying race, the Knik 200. Again, I had a hard time whittling the team down to just 10 dogs (again, I ran 10 because the snow cover wasn’t the best at this point!), but I did eventually settle on a very solid team. We had a blast on this race, would up dropping 3 dogs and finishing with 7 very strong dogs who would run every race with me this season. We finished in 26th place if I remember right, right on our planned schedule! It was fun finishing a race on trails I knew really well, the dogs always feed off our emotions when we’re running and even though the dogs didn’t know how close we were to the finish line I knew where we were and could see them speed up and feed off my excitement. Sarah Jane proved what an exceptional leader she was when I asked her to run single lead from the last checkpoint to the finish line, and she did it with a smile on her face – I easily could’ve put another leader up with her, but I wanted to see what she’d do in that situation, and she far exceeded my expectations. She’s a superstar, and definitely the heart and soul of the kennel these days.

After just one more week, we were off on our next race of the season, the Copper Basin 300. Probably a mistake to try and run two races so close together, and not something we’ll be doing in the future – it was especially tough on the musher, trying to prep everything at once for the Knik and the Copper. I borrowed 5 dogs from Melissa and Jason Stewart for this race, because the sore wrists from the K200 weren’t healed yet, and I wanted to start with 12 solid dogs. We made it 100 miles into the race before we had to scratch – my sled fell apart about 100 miles in, after 30+ miles of unrelenting tussocks and bumps several things rattled loose and/or broke and the sled just couldn’t go anymore. We sat on the trail in the wind for over 5 hours waiting on a snow machine to come in and help get us out – the sled was in such bad shape I couldn’t steer it, and there were broken parts digging into the snow preventing the dogs from pulling it, so there’s no way we would’ve made it out on our own. Lesson learned, and next year I’ll be tackling the race with a much tougher sled!

Two weeks later, we set off on what would be our last Iditarod qualifying race, the Northern Lights 300. Since my sled had fallen apart during the CB, I borrowed a sled from my summer employers (Seavey’s IdidaRide Sled Dog Tours), and hoped that it could stand up to the punishment of a 300-mile race. I’d run the race last year, finished second to last, and wanted to improve on that placing this year – the trail was around 40 miles longer, and I trained about 1-1.5 mph faster this year, so I figured I’d finished pretty close to the same time as last year. I had an absolute blast on this race this year, had a very similar schedule to Ramey Smyth so I spent a lot of time talking to him and picking his brain in checkpoints (as he did to me as well, I showed him the Young Living Essential Oils I was using on my dogs!), and our teams moved at a very comparable speed so I ran a few parts of the trail with him as well. My favorite section of the trail this year was the 50ish mile loop out of Talvista Lodge, 14 miles on the Skwentna river, then 18ish miles up the Talvista river (?) in an awesome canyon. The 14 miles on the Skwentna was some of the toughest mushing I’ve ever done – the wind was gusting crazy hard, parts of the trail were so blown in I was directing my fantastic leaders (Sarah Jane and Chateau) where to run because I could see the markers and they were floundering in deep snow unable to find the trail base. The turnaround point was a little lollipop loop on the river, at most a half mile around, and by the time we got back onto the trail we’d already been on (with Ramey not a few hundred yards behind us) it was already completely blown in and I still had to direct the dogs with my voice to find the trail. Once we passed the checkpoint and headed into the canyon I was in heaven – some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen while dog mushing, and just technical enough to help me stay awake and enjoy it. There was a lot of head on passing on this section of trail, including a couple bad passes on tight sections of trail that affected Sarah Jane and Chateau later in the season, but overall it was a fantastic trip. I left the last checkpoint in 11th place, passed Kelly Maixner briefly while he was camped (and he passed me a little bottle of Fireball, which was much appreciated, lol), and he passed me again about 20 miles from the finish. I was having leader issues, Chateau had been running lead for over 200 miles and decided she was mentally done, so I tried Fusion up front but she had run lead for me all last season and wasn’t ready to try again this season, so again I wound up putting Sarah Jane in single lead, and again she excelled up front. Kelly passed us as I was putting SJ up front by herself, and we chased his team for over 10 miles, me standing on the brake behind Kelly, who was running and ski-poling up hills to stay ahead of us. He did eventually pull away from us, but we still finished within 15 minutes of him at the finish. Not long after Kelly disappeared into the distance, I started seeing Justin High’s headlamp behind us, and that gave me the extra oomph to run and ski-pole some more myself – we held onto 11th place, barely, and did our longest run of the season from the final checkpoint to the finish line (about 73 miles!). Couldn’t be more proud of my pups for being somewhat competitive at such a young age, and cannot wait for next year!

At this point in the season, my races were done (or so I thought) so I let other mushers borrow a bunch of my dogs for some races. Doctor, Rory, and Donna ran the Willow Jr 100 (Donna ran lead the whole race, and Rory finished the race in lead!), and those 3 plus Susan and Flounder ran the Junior Iditarod as well. I was the Junior Iditarod race marshal this year, and I had an amazing time overseeing the race and helping it run smoothly on the trail. Very excited for this next generation of mushers, I have no doubt that they’ll be challenging the top racers in the sport in the coming years!

I had an amazing request from the Seavey’s, they didn’t have enough dogs trained up for Larry Daugherty’s Iditarod team so they asked if any of my dogs could do the race – I sent 5 dogs down to Sterling to train with them, 3 of which wound up finishing the Iditarod with Larry (Sarah Jane, Chateau, and Fusion), and one of which went on an adventure with me (Jarvis).

The day after the Junior Iditarod finished, I started my next great adventure – guiding on a dog mushing tour across the state with 5 other guides, a support crew, and 10 guests who’d never been on a dog sled before. What an adventure it was – we spent two days teaching them how to run dogs, and the third day we left Deshka landing headed for Yentna Station Roadhouse. I had spent the most time running the river trails, so I was voted the leader of the pack for the day, and I had an incredible time watching these guests turn into actual mushers on the river. They drove teams down Corral Hill, something I’d done for the first time on the Knik 200 (and I’d been terrified to do it!), and they did it with a smile on their face and without tipping over or losing their team! We stopped for lunch at Scary Tree, then stopped for the night at Yentna – what a great night it was for the northern lights as well, I spent 15 minutes down on the river ice before going to bed, watching the green, red, and purple lights dancing all across the sky. The next day we headed up to Skwentna Lodge, with a lunch stop at Northwoods Lodge, and a photo op at the Skwentna post office. A great night was spent in Skwentna, with our plans for the next day dashed thanks to weather – we were supposed to mush up to Talvista Lodge, then the guests and crew would fly back to Willow and we would snow machine back to Deshka, but weather put a kibosh on that plan so we went with plan D – snow machine down to Eaglesong Lodge, mush dogs down to the Big Su river from there, then snow machine back to Deshka. So much fun was had on that leg of the trip, letting many of the guests drive snowmachines for the first time, catching lots of loose dogs teams on one of the most technical trails in Alaska, and enjoying ice cream on the river at sunset. The next day we flew out to Galena, and prepared for the next leg of the tour – first day we mushed to Koyukuk for the night, having lunch at a camp on the river. The second day we lunched at Nulato and camped out on the river (at -55 below 0, estimated because our thermometer bottomed out!). The third day we stopped for a few minutes in Kaltag, stopped for lunch on the portage, and camped at Tripod Flats cabin. The fourth day we had lunch at Old Woman cabin (probably my favorite stop on the whole trip, I read the log of people who’d stopped there since the 90s while other people were eating and relaxing), and spent the night about 20 miles out of Unalakleet off the side of the trail. The next day we mushed to Unalakleet, and the guests flew to Chena Hot Springs, and we began the snow machine trip up the coast to where we’d meet them at Solomon. This next part of the trip I basically got the personal tour from Danny Seavey and Christian Turner – they’ve both run the Iditarod multiple times, and pointed out all the spots where I’ll have trouble on the race next year, can’t thank them enough for stopping so often to let me know these things! The trail up the coast had a lot more hills than I was prepared for, and the trail we took didn’t even go over Little McKinley so I have even more fun to expect next year! We camped the first night at the shelter cabin between Shaktoolik and Koyuk, reading the notes on the walls from others who’d previously stayed at the cabin – tons of fun. The next day we stopped for breakfast (ish, lunch-ish, lol) in Koyuk, had a nice ride to Elim before realizing one of our crew wasn’t with us, waiting around for a few hours to get his machine running again, and heading back up the trail – passing Golovin, and White Mountain (which we passed around 11pm, when we were all ready to stop but knowing there probably wasn’t a place for us to stay the night), and making it all the way through the hills to the Topkok safety cabin (the only nice cabin we found that night, there were several that had holes and/or tons of snow blown in, but nothing that would’ve been comfortable at all). Danny and Christian both said how stupid it was to camp in Solomon’s Blowhole, but we did it and the wind wasn’t even blowing while we were there – a true miracle! The next day we took our time getting up, and heard the Nome-Golovin snowmachine race was going on, so we went about 10 miles, then stopped on the side of the trail to watch all the racers go by. Towards the end of the race we spotted a fox and a dog running near the trail, so I called the dog over in order to try and prevent it from getting hit – not knowing what else to do, I patted my snowmachine and she hopped right up on the seat with me, and rode with me until we found her owners! Just a couple miles later we reached Solomon, and got everything ready for our final mush the next day – also the first time I’d taken a shower in a week, you have no idea how heavenly that was! Our final day we stopped for lunch at Safety Roadhouse, then went up and over Cape Nome and finished under the burled arch on front street in Nome, same as the Iditarod does. The guests were truly transformed over the trip, and I was sad to say goodbye at our banquet that night – we had become like family over the course of the trip, as usually happens when you’re in close proximity to others for that stretch of time, relying on each other for survival. I stayed in Nome through the finish of Iditarod, randomly volunteering my time when needed – I helped care for Mitch Seavey’s dog team after he finished the race, I snow machined out to Cape Nome with a photographer so he could capture his musher coming into Nome, I cared for my 3 girls when they crossed the finish line, I helped at the businessperson’s race, I helped set up, serve food, and take down the finishers banquet, and I helped do some dog sled rides my last full day in town. It was a great experience all around, and I cannot wait to be back in Nome next year!

After Iditarod I came home and realized I still had enough dogs in shape to run the Alaska Excursions 120 (which was only a 100-mile race this year), so I signed up. I was the 8th person to sign up, so I left the starting line wearing bib 8 the first day, and I wanted to push my team a bit and see what they had in them – I decided to try and run at 10mph that day, even though we’d been training at 8.5 mph all season, and figured we’d do 8mph the second day because they’d be tired. Well, they exceeded my expectations again and we averaged 10.6 mph the first day, over a 46ish mile course, and they ran the last mile at over 14mph when I called them up. We still finished in 8th place for the day, so the next day we left wearing bib 8 again. We ran more conservatively, I held them back to around 10mph for most of the way, then asked a bit more of them for the last 7 miles or so, and we averaged 10.4 mpg for the day, hitting speeds of 13 mph near the finish line when I called them up. I could not be more proud of my team, they’ve truly turned into veteran sled dogs this year, and I expect great things from them in the future.

This past weekend Chugiak dog musher’s had their final events of the season – the junior spring fling, and the Easter fun run. At the junior spring fling the junior musher, Josh, that I’ve been helping to teach all season ran Doctor in the 1-dog class, and his little brother Timothy ran his first race with Sarah Jane in the 1-dog class as well. Proud to say Josh won the race, and Timothy finished 9th! Can’t wait for both of them to be racing again with our dogs next season.

Now, as the snow melts, we turn to puppy training, preparing the next group of dogs for racing. Over the next two weeks we’ll be doing short runs a few times a week to get the pups used to being in harness, I go on vacation for 3 weeks, and when I come back we start summer tours in Seward! So excited for what the coming year has to bring, and cannot wait to race my own team of dogs in the Iditarod – it will be the next great adventure for the kennel, that’s for sure!

I’d like to give a huge shout out to our sponsors for this season;
Mom and dad, who’ve always been there for me
Dylan, the boyfriend and the greatest support
Cayla, the best darn handler ever, for always taking care of the dogs
Seavey's IdidaRide Sled Dog Tours, for all their support and advice
Alaska Comprehensive Dental Center, for taking good care of the musher’s teeth, and supporting the kennel on top of that important job!
XTRATUF for their support, couldn’t get through spring breakup without my boots
Martin Buser's Happy Trails Kennel, who cared for and socialized McKinley’s pups for us this summer, and helped prepare them to be sled dogs next year
Paw Print Genetics and CanineHealthCheck.com, for helping ensure our breeding quality dogs are free from most genetic diseases
Andy Morrison, of Alaska Backcountry Access for being out on the trail with us for the tour, and choosing to support our Iditarod dreams after the tour!
And finally, the kennel support that chooses to remain anonymous, we thank you for all your support this season! We couldn't do what we do without these awesome sponsors :)

Happy trails!

Visit our blog archive at funontherundogs.livejournal.com

You can also check out Meredith's articles in the online magazine, The Sled Dogger, at www.thesleddogger.com - The Training column is written by Meredith each issue

Fun On The Run Kennel Blog

Summer is in full swing!

2016-17 Season in Review