On Wednesday night we delivered the Christmas cookies we'd baked for our neighbors. They put up with a lot throughout the year with our kennel in the neighborhood and it was our small way of saying "Thank you."
To our surprise, or the impressive lying skills of every one of our neighbors, they not only don't mind the noise they like it and enjoy watching us train the dogs. I hope the novelty of sled dogs doesn't wear off!
Thursday night was a real adventure! Sonya came over to run dogs with us! She is running 3 of our dogs with her boy Sepp in the West Yellowstone race so we thought we'd do a few runs with them all together. This first one was by ATV. The conditions weren't great. We'd had freezing rain that morning that I thought would melt but didn't. We hooked up our older ATV to my 7 dog team (Okie,Tank, Flier, Whip, Jig Tensaw and Isis) and Sonya's team (Paluk, Sepp, Buzz, Buck) to our standard ATV. Things went smoothly heading out for the run but at about the 1 mile mark Tank decided to chase the scent of something (marmot maybe) down an embankment. Okie tried her heroic best to keep the 7 dog team on the trail but when 6 of the 7 decide they're goin to kill a rodent, there's not much 1 dog can do. Thank goodness for ATVs in this situation (and not the old 3 wheeled cart we used to run) because miraculously it didn't budge and I was able to take be careful and calm about lining the team back out. Sonya arrived and helped me get things straightened out. There we decided what was goin to be a 5 mile run was shortened to 3 given the conditions and the events (always good to have a plan but be flexible).
The rest of the run went smoothly and it was a great training run on many fronts and well worth it. I had a blast and I Sonya did.
Until next time, love your puppas!
(Also, (little musher) Keegan wanted me to write his name in this post, so there it was).
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