Hi all, We returned last weekend from another amazing trip to the artic north slope of the Brooks Range. We spent a little over a week living with the dogs out on the tundra, following the great caribou herds while we exploring the mountains and valleys. What a blast. We had several friends come out and share camp with us and had some amazing weather.. especially if you forget the 24 hour wind storm whiteout that kept us in the tent for a day. We came home with two lead dogs that stepped up to the challenge of breaking trail day after day and two caribou that gave themselves to us to feed our family for the year. Both were awesome gifts that make these trips so worth it. It is awesome to be able to get such wonderful, organic, free range meat and do the entire process from tundra to freezer by ourselves. Nothing goes to waste and the dogs get anything we can’t use.. Happy dogs. As for the dogs, Stout and Okie have stepped up to take over the main duties of off-trail command leaders. They have shown that they have the skills to break trail day after day when there is nothing but white in front of them. The terrain in the area we traveled could be quite steep and sometimes hairy, but the dogs were awesome at listening and going the way we wanted…most of the time anyways.. a real bonus when you are 350 miles north of Fairbanks and help is far away. All 14 dogs we took were rock stars. The yearlings stepped up to show that they were great campers and great in harness for sometimes very long days. We sometime only ran a couple mile from camp and then they would have to sit and rest for long periods of time while we looked for caribou. This is awesome training for them and they acted like they have been doing it for years.
Breaking trail into camp the first night at about 11 pm.. still light out! We ran 14 dogs with two very loaded down freight toboggan sleds. We found that a large team with 2 sleds works better for heavy loads to and from camp with no trail. We run smaller teams when we are just traveling from camp.
