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[fladogfan]

Sorry the photos did not come through, but seems like a road trip to Maine would be interesting. This is from the Orlando Sentinel today, with a New York Times by-line.




‘It’s a lot like sailing’
Mushing is a canine-human bond that was centuries in the making
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Dog-sledding Jan. 28 across the snowy white canvas of Lake Umbagog in southern Maine. Erik Freeland/The New York Times photos
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Dogs are loaded into trucks in Newry, Maine, that take them to the starting point of the sledding trips.
By Nina Burleigh The New York Times

Our dog-sledding guide had already released three sets of dog teams hauling gear and inexperienced tourists into the Maine winter wonderland. It was my turn. I felt clumsy in my multiple layers and a bit worried that I wouldn’t remember the recently shared instructions about how to handle my team of dogs.

As the guide unhitched my sled, he issued a final warning: Remember the brake!

And then we were off. A sudden jerk, a crunch as I released the brake. Except for the faint hiss of sled runners on snow, the whole world went silent. Twelve paws padded soundlessly on the snow ahead. There was the white-and-black leader, Olga, surprisingly small for her big job, followed by Teslin and Layla, both bigger and brown and black.

For a few hours, our little band of dog-sledders carved a canine- human calligraphy across the snowy white canvas of Lake Umbagog in southern Maine. A line from “The Night Before Christmas” came to me: “As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly/ when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. /So up to the house-top the coursers they flew/ with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.”

My coursers, they flew.

Anyone who has watched a dog rolling in fresh snow must agree with 19th-century social reformer Henry Ward Beecher’s observation that the dog is the god of frolic. Who doesn’t need more of that particular god in the plague season? During the long lockdown months last winter, I mainlined canine joy by getting my Border collie to pull me around on my skis, unaware that this is an actual Scandinavian sport called hundjoring.

It turns out that dogs and humans have a long history together in the snow. Some scientists argue human survival in the Arctic would have been impossible without them. Dogs were crucial to human migration to the Americas, over the ice between the Siberian peninsula and what is now Alaska 25,000 years ago. Sled dogs probably evolved in Mongolia between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago, according to the American Kennel Club. Archaeologists have found dog remains with harnesses in Siberian sites from 6,000 years ago.

The snowmobile has largely replaced the dog in Arctic zones. Climate change is diminishing the icy territory of many Arctic inhabitants, from polar bears to walrus to Indigenous people. Sled dogs are now mostly bred to race (the Iditarod is the most famous, although even it is melting away) and for recreation. Tourists can hire outfitters in Alaska or the Yukon who run seven-day mushing trips under the aurora borealis. More kid-friendly, afternoon sled-dog excursions are available in New Hampshire, Vermont, Quebec and Maine.

In early January, my husband, Erik, and I opted for a mushing middle ground — a two-day, out-and-back camping trip by dog sled near the town of Newry, Maine, which is on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest.

Driving seven hours north of New York City, we arrived on the frozen shores of Lake Umbagog. Gusts of wind lashed the frosted lake. Ghostly snow devils, hundreds of feet tall, twirled down the sides of the piney mountains nearby.

If you want to go dog-sledding, you have to get good and cold. Parking, we noted the dashboard exterior temperature had dropped to 4 degrees.

Our Maine guides, Kevin Slater and Polly Mahoney, the owners of Mahoosuc Guide Service, went north as young adults, and have decades of expedition experience in the Yukon and eastern Canada, north of Baffin Bay. Since the 1990s the couple has been breeding and training sled dogs on their farm in Newry. They keep a kennel of active sled dogs and another for their retirees. A cemetery with wooden markers near their farmhouse commemorates the lives and personalities of dogs that have “walked on,” as Kevin put it.

Sled dogs are large — on their hind legs, some stand, eye to eye, at 6 feet. They’re also surprisingly soft and cuddly, with an inner coat of fur, which they shed in summer. They seem to live to have their ears and backs stroked. Affability is no accident: Mushers select dogs as much for responsiveness to humans as strength.

“It’s a lot like sailing,” Polly explained, as she arranged the complicated rope-and-harness system on the snow, and we started latching the dogs. The dogs were clearly anticipating takeoff. Even harnessed, they were rolling over, coating themselves in the cold white powder.

Before we set off, Polly unloaded a rapid-fire mushing primer that could be boiled down to “never, ever take your hands off the sled.” Many a selfie-snapping recreational musher has fallen off and lost the team while Instagramming.

Eventually, we pulled into our camp, unloaded and hitched the dogs to low posts in a circle around the campsite. We laid fresh hay for each one. Curled on their nests, two dozen pairs of eyes watched us walking back and forth collecting buckets of icy water from holes in the lake, cutting wood, starting fires in the stoves.

As we settled in for the night, the Mahoosuc Mountains, across the lake, turned pewter against a pink sunset.

It was only 8 p.m., but I was ready to ignite my borrowed mukluks. We retreated to our surprisingly elegant tents with white canvas walls and a thick carpet of soft pine boughs on the floor, packed wood into the little stoves and zipped ourselves into double sleeping bags. I woke up once during the night.

I thought of the dogs, cryptic, soulful, loyal animals, warm in their pelts, just outside. Tamed by and allied with humans, but wild enough to know better than we what lurks in the dark.

[Breeze]

Don't, fer the love of all that is real, believe anyone who tells you that Lake Umbagog is in southern Maine. Just no.

Polly Slater and Kevin Mahoney have their kennel in Newry, just up the road a piece from Bethel. Upton, which is at the southernmost shore of Umbagog, is about an hour north of Newry by roadway, and on the same latitude as Pittsburgh NH, which lies next to the border of eastern Quebec, and is the last border crossing between Maine and Canada until Madawaska/Fort Kent. Polly and Kevin have been doing sled dog expeditions from Newry into the way back and beyond of western Maine longer than Brent Sass has been doing the same thing from Eureka AK to the arctic circle.

What a hoot that the NYT considers Umbagog " southern Maine." It's a lot like saying that Niagara Falls are right next to New York City.

[fladogfan]

Always helps to have local perspective teaching the rest of us. Thanks Breeze

[flowerpower]

[flowerpower]

In case you haven't been following the story of Ryan Reddington's dog, Wildfire. Ryan was run over by a snowmachine (he said it appeared deliberate) and his dog Wildfire sustained a serious leg injury. https://www.missionah.org/post/wildfire?fbclid=IwAR2fOAMvDRd8gUxT4MaBE-ZUj_oLsp8oWscMpNeuTmOJPWfz7IeWqPPinUA

[fladogfan]

Thanks for sharing this FP. I did not know of it. What a vet and her team. Keep getting well Wildfire.

[braider]

Good to see that Ryan appears to be making such a good come back.

[flowerpower]

Mitch’s Decision
This is Mitch Seavey’s 28th Iditarod race including 3 wins and 18 top-10 finishes. But despite Mitch’s experience, he’s facing a new challenge this year: his team is as green as it gets.
After the 2020 Iditarod, Mitch decided to take some time off to see if there was life outside of mushing. He gave his entire 2nd-place-finishing-team to his son Dallas, and sold the rest of the racing age dogs in the kennel. All he had left was puppies and retirees.
Hal Hanson ran those puppies in the ‘21 Iditarod, and they finished their rookie run looking great, but three days behind Dallas’s combined monster team.
Fast forward to the present and Mitch has decided there’s nowhere he’d rather be than the Iditarod trail, and he’s racing those grown up puppies now. He loves them, thinks the world of them, and truly believes they can win. But he doesn’t KNOW they can win. Unlike his usual teams that have an experienced mix of 3 to 8 years old dogs with impressive racing resumes, there is only one dog - Prophet - in this year’s team who has finished a competitive race. Ever.
Meanwhile he’s racing against Dallas, who is racing 8 of the dogs Mitch gave him a couple years ago mixed with his own best dogs.
Despite the rather major disadvantage, Mitch isn’t willing to acquiesce just yet. It goes against any competitor’s nature to say they don’t have a shot, no matter how slim. But therein lies the dilemma. How do you beat someone who likely has a better team than you? And it’s not just Dallas, there are at least 6 other teams that are perfectly capable of winning and have much more proven teams than Mitch. Several of them also have some of Mitch‘s old race dogs. Objectively it’s hard to say Mitch is even on the list of ‘contenders.’ But don’t tell him that.
Further compounding the issue are his lead dogs. He has some wonderful three-year-olds, but again they have no idea what they’re getting into. Lead dogs are as important as quarterbacks. Did you just draft Patrick Mahomes or the guy that doesn’t even make the team? Obviously you THINK they’re good, but you don’t really know till you’re out there. Who’s going to lead him through the inevitable storms on the Bearing Sea Coast?
He considered laying back, running conservatively and hoping to pick off the champion level teams that falter. It’s a proven 2nd place strategy, but requires giving up on any chance of winning. He could race them straight up, but that’s like saying an NFL expansion team with one draft is going to beat the defending champions. That’s a lot of faith in some rookies.
So this years team is Mitch’s hardest to assess since 1995. I have no idea how well he’ll do, and he’s kind of shooting from the hip. He has a schedule he wants to run, but he’s having to rely on his minute by minute assessment of his team rather than counting on the dogs experience to get him through. Should make for a fun one ~ Danny

[elsietee]

Iditarod officials seek help finding loose sled dog in Anchorage
By Morgan Krakow
Updated: 4 hours ago
Published: 6 hours ago

Jimbo, a dog from the team of Richie Diehl (bib #18), escaped out of the returned dog area in Anchorage Thursday morning when an Iditarod veterinarian was performing an hourly check. (Photo provided by Iditarod)
A dog in Anchorage that had been dropped from an Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race musher’s team escaped Thursday morning, prompting race officials to ask for the public’s help.

A veterinarian was doing an hourly check on Jimbo, who belongs to Aniak musher Richie Diehl’s team, around 7:15 a.m. when the canine escaped from the returned dog area at the Lakefront Anchorage Hotel, Iditarod officials said in a statement.

The dog’s contacts, plus the race marshal, Anchorage Police Department, local animal shelters and the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport police, were all notified, Iditarod officials said.

Officials are asking anyone who sees Jimbo not to approach or attempt to capture him, but instead report where he was spotted by calling 907-248-MUSH (6874). He’s microchipped and is wearing a red collar with a red tag that says Iditarod #18.

It’s not the first time an Iditarod dog has gone missing in Anchorage. For example, one of Norwegian musher Lars Monsen’s dogs escaped before the ceremonial start in 2018 and was found hours later, and a dog that belonged to Lachlan Clarke was killed by a car after getting loose in 2015.

[libby the lab]

https://www.alaskapublic.org/2022/03/10 ... snowstorm/

Nice back of the back story