Ultimate Iditarod Update

Although the recent chinook (south) winds have threatened our wonderful snow conditions, we are still mushing away. We have had to scale back a little bit, though. On our last “truck” run we got onto a patch of glare ice and ended up sliding the pickup truck right off the road. After an hour of unhooking, turning around, untangling, and re-hooking, we were back on the road again, literally.

Mitch Seavey trains on the road that parallels the buried Kenai to Anchorage natural gas pipeline near Sterling, Alaska. The snowmobile is visible behind a small amount of brush. Snowmobiles are needed despite the apparent snow cover because the snow is not deep enough to safely control a sled pulled by a large racing team.

So now we are back to running the dogs on snowmachines and yesterday we ran two teams. My dad, Mitch, had 14 dogs on our larger Arctic Cat snowmobile and I had 12 dogs on our little Polaris (my Arctic Cat is in the shop getting improvements). The problem with the Polaris is that it is so small the dogs can drag it. In fact, they pulled me the first two miles before I could get the engine started. The brakes on the Polaris are marginal as well so I had quite the ride!

The whole crew, with the exception of my dad who is staying to train, is going to Anchorage today to set up for tours. We will be doing rides on a golf course right in Anchorage throughout the Thanksgiving week. Last week I snowshoed a trail along the course so it would be “set up” in time for the tour and I had a little run in with a pair of curious moose. They were browsing on some willows on the trail when I snowshoed up to them. They refused to give me the right-of-way so I turned around and headed back down the trail, and they began to follow me! I have to admit I was a bit nervous. They were just curious though so they wandered off after awhile.

Yesterday we purchased two thousand pounds of salmon filets for the use during the Iditarod Race. We will cook them and then freeze them in large trays. When they are frozen we will break the fish up into bite-sized pieces, put it in gallon Ziploc^TM bags and mail it out along the trail.

Dolphin (bottom) and her puppies (top). The puppies literally gather in a "dog pile" to keep cozy and warm in even the coldest of temperatures.

Dolphin’s puppies are six weeks old now, and they are unbelievably cute. They are living right outside of the back door so they are getting a ton of attention. All of this attention is making them brave so they are always under foot as they run around exploring things.