Summer Training

Welcome back! Matt, the dogs and I are in summer training right now, in beautiful Southeast Alaska. We're not only able to run our dogs all of the time in cooler temperatures, but we're also making a pretty darn good living here! We run dog cart tours in Dyea, which is just 9 miles outside of Skagway. Boy are these dogs strong! The dogs are pulling a 700 lb cart, not to mention the 6 tourists and two mushers on each cart. We run 16 dogs at a time, which is the same number that Matt will be starting with at Iditarod. We have two teams of dogs and each team runs 4-6 miles per day, 4-5 days per week. We are all having a great time, but we're ready to get back to Fairbanks to start doing longer runs. All of the dogs get a paycheck every month, and we're saving them all in order to purchase the 7 tons of food we'll need for the next seven months. We'll get 2-3 tons of kibble made specially for sled dogs (National CompX), 4-5 tons of whole ground meat (everything from beef, liver, salmon, chicken to turkey and lamb), and then approximately a ton of fats and oils. We're in Dyea for another month and a half, then the dogs, Matt and I will make the journey home, about 700 miles, through Canada and back into Alaska. We hope to get some photographs up later this week so stop back by! Something's always going on around here!