Saturday, February 15, 2014

Dog Sledding In Alaska

On my last day in Coldfoot, I signed up for dog sledding. My instructor was Jason, who has been living up in Coldfoot for 3 years. He was a social worker in New York, hated what he was doing, and decided to get away from it all. What better place then the top of the world!

When we first drove up the dogs went crazy!! Jason said they new that something was going on. Juno later told me that after Jason and I took off, they all got super quiet. 





He feeds them a mixture of high protein kibble as well as warm water with oil from the fryers in the kitchen. They need as much fat as they can get since they live outside and are highly active.

Juno playing with one of the pups. 

This dog went crazy with excitement!

The sled has 3 different brake systems. In the middle is an upside down snowmobile tread. This is a soft brake that you would step on to get the dogs to slightly slow down. The second is the long sliver metal bar to the right. You step on this which has to spikes on it to stop them. Then once they are stopped, you place the black brake on the left of the photo into the snow by stomping on it with your foot. This is to make sure that even if the dogs start pulling they can't go anywhere. However we stopped once for Jason to get a photo of me and while he was taking it the dogs started to run and ripped it out of the ground......Jason had to jump onto the back of the sled as it sped by. 


Dog Harness

Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!!!

Jason working on getting the last dog onto the sled. 

And away we go!! So much fun!!

Some of the dog's can multi-task while running and pee or poop on the go. Our lead dog hadn't learned this trick quite yet. Notice toward the end of the video the back dog on the left eats some snow. Jason and I were talking about this and his theory is that it helps to cool them down. It takes awhile to break down snow in your mouth for it to become liquid and you really don't get very much. 



I'm so happy!!! 

Hands down this was one of the coolest things I did in Alaska!!

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