Friday February 28, 2014 A Visit to a Professional Racing Dog Kennel

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Today we got to go on a tour of the kennel one of the premier young dog sled drivers, Dallas Seavey.  Dallas won the race in 2012 at age 23.  He and his wife have a kennel near Willow Alaska. He is also on a reality TV show for the National Geographic channel called Ultimate Survival: Alaska.  The show is about life in Alaska and this young man is one of the stars, .  We have only seen some parts of show on the Internet, but they are really quite good. (See this video to see more of the kennel and hear more from Dallas: Seavey video)

He is now so busy that he rarely can promise to be there for a tour, but was able to meet with us the day before the Iditarod start.  Wow!  He is a true professional, but also very clever and funny.  We enjoyed all of the parts of the tour: riding up to Willow from Anchorage with our young enthusiastic guides, from the Salomon Berry Tour Company. The chance to spend a chunk of the day with one of the premier dog mushers in the world the day before a major race was wonderful.  He was relaxed, funny, factual and very much in control of his kennel and his dogs.   It was great seeing and meeting the dogs (including playing with some of his 2 month of old puppies), and hearing from Dallas about the race. 

But the most wonderful part was getting the chance to ride on an real life dog sled.  They didn’t let us actually steer the sled.  Probably a good idea.  But Patti rode on a “tagalong sled”, while

Dick rode on a chair in the basket of a sled due to his post shoulder surgery healing status. Both had a terrific time.   

Those dogs love to run and can go fast. And the sled drivers were very nice and informative. We were out for over 45 minutes as we rode across frozen lakes and through some woods.  What a total treat to be able to get a small taste of what it means to race behind dogs.

Altogether, we spent a number of hours seeing what a working kennel looked like.  An added bonus was having the chance to meet Christian Turner, a young musher from Australia who is working with Dallas and will be running one of his dog teams in the race.  It was actually Christian’s dogs that we got to ride behind, so we rode on a sled pulled by dogs that will on Sunday begin a 1000 mile sled dog race.

We arrived back at the hotel tired and hungry.  After a dinner at a Thai restaurant, we walked back towards our hotel, only to find that the dump trucks were arriving to put the snow on the street for the race.  We raced back to grab some more clothes, and then watched for the next hour while 30 trucks  brought over 350 loads of pristine snow to be spread out on the street.  Down the main street, it would go about 14 feet across, making a good path to drive the dogs down.  On the side streets where they line up, the streets must be covered from curb to curb needing much more snow.  This will all stay in place until around six on Saturday when they will come in and scrape up any of the extra snow that hasn’t melted by then.  This whole process needed many workers and volunteers.  We had some great conversations with those involved and gathered a lot of info.

Finally it was time to go back to the hotel and try our best to work on photos and do some writing.  The life of a traveler/reporter is a hard one…but very satisfying. What a wonderful day.