As you can see, it is still a little cold and bracing, as we would say in the North East of Scotland. We did have a warm day, when I say warm, I mean it got above 0 F – by a degree or two for a few hours, but we’ve slid back into the negative double digits again this week.

It’s not so bad, provided you dress appropriately, which usually means lots of layers and good quality base layers make a big difference too.

Which is a rather roundabout way of trying to explain why I was out in the dogyard last night at 2.00 in the morning at -32F in just my pyjamas. It’s not smart, it’s not clever and it was very cold ! Fortunately, the few remaining common sense brain cells I have, took over and demanded that I put on a jacket at the very least. Which was followed a minute later by a hat, and then after another few minutes outside, I came in for some warm trousers.

And that, my friends is the reason for the nightwear clad excursion. We are fortunate to get to see the Northern Lights on quite a few occasions over the winter and they never cease to astound and amaze. Sometimes, there’s just a green shimmer on the horizon, usually we get bands, either horizontal or vertical  swages of light, dancing in the sky. Last night was probably the best display we have ever been lucky enough to see. Our very kind friends Dave & Tc phoned us at silly o’clock to tell us what a wonderful Aurora was out and that we should get up and have a look (hence the PJs).

I know from speaking with friends and neighbours today that lots of people were out watching the display, but people weren’t the only ones out. Quite a number of our dogs braved the cold to come out of their houses and could be seen playing with their neighbouring dog. Every now and then, they would burst into a group howl, which when combined with the outstanding aurora display seemed very primitive and visceral. We weren’t the only dogyard singing, quite a few other kennels could be heard at differing times, which all added to the other-worldly ambience.

The light display last night was far too dramatic and large for me to even get close to properly catching on camera. At times, it was truly breathtaking. It is at those times, that I catch myself wondering what the Inuit and First People’s made of these wonderous exhibitions. What we now boringly call solar flares, really should be considered as spirits dancing in the sky.

I was full of good intentions about keeping a fairly regular update going about the puppies and their progress. It is an amazing thing to watch those newborns change on a daily basis. Sometimes you could swear they are bigger at night than they were that morning. Anyway, like many of my intentions, that one too, fell by the wayside.

So, here’s the latest on the Gang of Four. They have just turned 10 weeks old and are really starting to display their characters and traits that they will have as adults. So far, we’ve not seen anything that marks any one of them out as a bully or thug – they all take their turn at the bottom of the wrestling heap with good grace. The communal feeding is still in full swing, for all of the 2 minutes it takes them to demolish the entire bowlful of food. There has been the occasional grumble about a shared bit of ground beef, but it’s no more than a ” hey that was mine” passing comment.

They had been getting outside to play and explore, but this past week with the temperatures dipping so low, we’ve kept them inside and let them play in the relative warmth of the garage, rather than tearing up and down the front yard.

This week has been quite the week of experiences for the pups. They got meet Hop -  who has many nicknames, including Hop The Terrible, Hop The Impaler, Hop the Merciless and my personal favourite, Grumpy Hop. Fortunately for the pups, they were all safely enclosed inside an airline crate and Hop was on the outside.  It was a bit like one of those shark experience cages – dangle a limb outside the bars, and you could be left wishing you hadn’t. Anyway, Hop was actually incredibly well behaved, didn’t bother the pups at all and during the whole journey, which we feared she’d spend tormenting the little ones, she was more concerned about the view out of the front windshield.

The purpose of the journey was a trip to the vets. We could do the puppy shots ourselves, but it is nice to have a professional check them at this young age and also, if the puppies felt hard done to for being stabbed by a big needle, we weren’t the ones doing the wielding. Additionally, I’m pretty sure I don’t need another distemper shot after stabbing myself in the thumb a couple of times doing the “big dogs”.

Today, the pups got to come and visit some of the house dogs and spend the afternoon in the living room. They were a bit tentative about leaving the security of the garage and their known surroundings, but with some coaxing from their mum, Cuchi, the bravest little explorer soon emerged. Brooks was first to venture out into the big open spaces and took off at a great pace onto the rug only to come to a screeching halt when she noticed Ciobair standing in front of her.  It has to be said that Ciobair is probably the softest natured dog we have, as well as being an excellent guard dog, she adores pups and always wants to round them up and make sure they are ok. I’m sure she must look like Godzilla to the little ones, but she soon wins them round. Old man Bhu was the other adult left inside to meet the pups, an experience he seemed to enjoy less than they did, and after a few minutes, he politely asked to be allowed to go outside.

Cuchi appeared quite happy to pass on some of the mothering responsibilities to Ciobair and had a fine time, playing with puppy toys and getting people attention, without having her 4 babies hanging off her.

A quick pen picture of the pups would probably go something like this -

• Dawson – king of the toys, that boy loves his toys and everyone else’s too.
• Braeburn – the athlete, he loves running and jumping.
• Tess   -   the speedfreak, likes to be ahead of the rest when running around outside
• Brooks – the lover and the explorer. She’s nearly always first up for a cuddle.

As we huddle around the woodstove, drinking hot tea and warming our toes, I discovered something quite surprising about our blog.

Today, we had our 20,000th visitor !

So, to each and every one of you who have made the conscious effort to read any of my ramblings, I thank you. To those of you who stumbled across the blog whilst looking for something rather more interesting, I thank you too. After all, a reader is a reader, whether they wanted to read this or not.

Alaska winter weather update – it is still cold.

While dog sledding friends over on the east coast of the USA are complaining about mild temperatures and a distinct lack of snow, we have almost the exact opposite issue.

The snow levels are already way beyond anything we have experienced in our first couple of winters here and that has meant a lot of digging and moaning about it. It has also made the trails hard work for the dogs. It seems we have had very few runs where the trails have been groomed and are hard packed and fast. Most of our runs have either been plowing through several inches of fresh powder, breaking trail or during that warm spell in December, a spot or two of swimming.

However, as we’re not training for any races this year then speed is not an issue and we’re happy to see that the dogs continue to work hard and keep their steady pace going, despite soft trails and heavy loads.

The recent cold spell has seen us take shelter from the trails bar the odd outing. With no mileage targets to meet, it’s nice to be able to look at the thermometer and decide that it really is too cold to be out there running  when if the temperature at the house is -25F, it’s usually 10 or 15 degrees colder down on the swamps.

The dogs have been enjoying extra rations, fresh straw and can be seen soaking up the pale winter sun for the few hours it shines. There’s not much heat in it, but they seem to be making the most of what there is. Ciobair has a disadvantage to all the other dogs in that she doesn’t have the same double coat as our huskies do. That woolly undercoat really helps the dogs stay warm and as she doesn’t grow an undercoat, we have to give her outside assistance. She has also been having trouble with her feet this last week. With it being so cold, well below -34 F in the mornings, she has been having pad issues, so again, she gets special help. We have also told all the other dogs that they are not allowed to laugh at her big clown feet.

I’m wondering if I may attract a few non-regular readers with the title of this entry. Perhaps a few leaf-lickers (as Robert, our builder, calls anyone who portrays any kind of “green” leanings) will stumble upon this blog and read it, fearful of more bad news about the African Black Rhino or the Indian White Rhino. Actually this entry will be more about that possibly rarer creature, the silver Yamaha Rhino.

Like a lot of mushers we use 4 wheelers for many things, mostly training the dogs, but they are pressed into service in a huge variety of roles, as well as for the occasional bout of frivolity. Our Rhino however is pretty much a one task tool. It’s main job is to push our big snowblower about so that we don’t get stranded down our road. Surprisingly enough, it snows quite a lot in Alaska. To date, we have already had about the same total snowfall as we had for the whole of last winter (very unscientific guestimate disclaimer inserted) which has meant a whole lot of snow shovelling, snow blowing and lots of other things involving snow and moving it around.

The Rhino and the big Berco snowblower do the vast majority of the big areas, the front yard, our driveway and our road. Unfortunately for us, the town plow guy doesn’t cover our half mile road, so if we want to leave our place during the winter by something other than dogsled or snowmachine, then I have to clear that road.

As you can see from the photo, it’s a pretty big machine and does a good job of moving the snow a fair distance into the trees. And that’s where the good news ends and the story begins. To be fair to the Rhino, despite the title of this piece, it isn’t actually at fault. It is the Berco snowblower that is the real villain in this tale.

I’ll admit to not being the most mechanically sympathetic person. I have expectations that machines should just work like they are supposed to, without the need for cosseting, tweaking or generally needing pampered.  I accept that I’ll need to refuel them and maybe even occasionally add oil, but really, that’s about as much attention as I want to have to bestow upon them. The snowblower had seemed fine with this treatment last winter, but was obviously harbouring a grudge.

On the first day that it was put into operation this year, it started up fine and all was going well, until I tried to manoeuvre the chute that selects the direction of the snow throwing. It is supposed to work via a couple of little electric motors and a control box. I know, it does seem a bit over-engineered and complicated and no amount of jiggling wires or whacking things with hammers made the slightest bit of difference. However, the blower still worked, it just could only blow the snow in one direction, so I had to do a lot of reversing, to make sure it was always pointed the right way. Not a huge problem, a little inconvenient, to be true, but manageable until we could find a weather forecast that indicated a period of clear weather when we could arrange to have the machine looked at and/or fixed.  With fixed obviously being the preferred outcome. Which leads us nicely back to the copious amounts of snow we’ve been having here and no signs of it not snowing.

Then things took a turn for the worse. I knew something was up, as the snow leaving the machine no longer travelled impressive distances clear off into the trees, but rather weakly huffed and puffed a few feet into the air. On occasion, it didn’t even make that, barely leaving the chute and just about flopping into the snow beside the machine. I really knew things were not going well on the afternoon that smoke started billowing from the blower, accompanied by a high pitched shrieking noise. My usual reaction would be just to carry on, hoping it might stop soon, but the augers (the blades that push the snow through to the chute and propel it outwards) had stopped turning too, so I figured that there might be something actually needing properly fixed. Long story, slightly shorter version – the drive belt that makes the whole kit and caboodle work has stretched and needs retensioned, but the control box that lets you do that is the same one that directs the chute – yes, the same one that stopped working earlier in the year. To make matters worse, the belt was also missing a couple of its rubber teeth, causing it slip on a fairly regular basis, leading to more of that high pitched shrieking and less of the actual snow blowing. Until the day that it just gave up ghost completely. That day, would of course be the day that we got 16 inches of snow.

With a great deal of effort and much digging of snow, we managed to  extricate our big trailer from the snow bank it was almost buried in and hooked it up to the dogtruck.

Having done what we thought was the hard part, it seemed a simple task to run the Rhino up the ramp onto the trailer and then head down to the repair shop.

Much discussion ensued. And few bad words too. Faced with the reality that no matter how much we wanted it to fit, there was no way it was going to, we enlisted the help of friends, as much for moral support as anything else. Our friends were truly great and came up with a further two trailers for us to try.

Incredibly, our outfit didn’t manage to fit on either of those trailers. One of the trailers could fit the Rhino and snowblower, but we were unable to actually load them onto it, because of the approach angle and height. The other trailer was much lower and wide enough, but not long enough.

We even briefly considered driving the 30 miles down to the workshop in the Rhino, but it’s limited to about 7 mph with the snowblower attached and besides, I’m not sure how happy the State Troopers would have been with that.

Eventually, after deciding that some of our other options, such as setting fire to it or moving it by forklift (a forklift which we don’t have), weren’t particularly helpful or productive, I contacted the repair shop who offered a couple of very sensible possibilities. And thus, we hired a bigger trailer from them, one that the Rhino and Berco would fit on. Happiness all round.

Of course, to have the tale finish at that point would be too easy. It turns out that the trailer we hired had been sitting outside all winter. It has a layer of ice on the deck about 3 inches thick which meant that the Rhino could just about get up but had nothing like enough traction to do so when weighted down with the Berco attached. In the end, in the best traditions of men everywhere, a bit of brute force and sheer power got both bits of kit up onto the trailer. Yes, there’s nothing like “just taking a run at it” to overcome a wee bit of ice.

At the moment, we’re still waiting to hear when it will be ready to be collected. And in the mean time, the snow hasn’t taken pity on us and continues to fall at quite an amazing rate. We do have an alternative plan of action, one that every time I use, makes me pine for my comfortable Rhino and my big 6′ blower.

Actually, even when someone else is using it, I still wish we had the bigger one back. Today’s weather forecast calls for another 4 inches of snow tonight.

Not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week. At least that is the way it seems most of the time here. Or it could simply be that too much time is being spent enjoying life, visiting with friends and drinking coffee. I am very much in favour of all of these things, so it’s not like I am complaining about them. However, in the unlikely event that any of you have actually been waiting on a blog update, then those are the main excuses reasons I plan on hiding behind to explain the lack of productivity.

The Dogs

Our dogs continue to be the most wonderful part of living in Alaska. To be able to look outside and see them all playing, sleeping, eating or just fooling around is truly one of life’s greatest gifts. To make it even more fantastic, we then get to run them in harness and explore the local and not so local trails. The last few weeks have seen us get further out than we’ve managed in previous winters, and run on some trails we’ve never been on. The dogs have done very well and have also greatly improved their head on passing. They no longer collapse like an accordion, but now move smoothly over to the far side of the trail – although on many occasions, that can mean a shift of merely a few inches which will take them almost into the deep soft snow – and cruise past the oncoming team, with barely a glance in their direction. To say this makes me happy, is an understatement.

The dogs also excelled themselves when we had a spell of milder weather that led to some of the sloughs opening up and the appearance of open water, called overflow, on some sections of the trails. Our first couple of encounters with this unpleasant phenomenon caused a few unsettling moments for some of the younger dogs, but Oscar was unfazed and just ploughed straight on through it. That seemed to be the positive reinforcement those more cautious dogs needed and by the end of that day’s run, they were charging through 18″ deep water with barely a second thought, even one puddle that Lily nearly had to swim across.

One of my ambitions for this winter had been to enter a mid-distance race or two. Sadly, it looks like we’re not going to be ready to do that, but on the positive side, it means we can concentrate on running the dogs without the additional pressure of trying to meet mileage deadlines.

The Puppies

Cuchi’s puppies are continuing to grow at a great pace and are a constant source of fun and joy. They were successfully and easily weaned onto solid food and are always happy to see us appear with the “flying saucer” filled with their meal. I think Cuchi is pretty happy when the food arrives too as it means she finally gets a break from the voracious little monsters. The pups are 8 weeks old on Wed 4th and Cuchi is pretty much finished letting them suckle, and given the size of their teeth and strength of their jaws, I for one, can’t blame her. She’s started doing a bit more disciplining of them too, whenever the playing gets out of hand.

We’ve also started taking the pups outside for short play periods. I guess one of the drawbacks of winter puppies is that whilst they are nice and cosy in the garage most of the time, going outside to play when it’s -10F is a little bit of a culture shock for their wee feet. The first afternoon, it was a contest between the cold and the snow as to which surprised them the most.

The People

This winter we’ve had our friend Lizzy staying with us to help out. Part of her plan was to go back to Scotland for the Christmas holidays. Having got used to working with that extra set of hands, we were delighted with the news that our friend Lisa had somehow managed to convince her husband to let her spend 4 weeks with us in Alaska over Christmas. So, Lisa arrived, just a couple of days before Lizzy left and very quickly slotted into our routine. She’s been a great help and hopefully has enjoyed her time with us and our dogs and getting out on the trail.

We also had a wonderful Christmas Day, a little hectic maybe, preparing dinner for 12, but the end result was worth all of the time and effort. It was quite an international gathering with our American friends, us and Lisa from Scotland, Mille from Denmark, Joar from Norway and Michael and Nikolay from Russia. I think everyone had a good time and judging by the empty plates, the food was well received too.

So, from all of us involved with Gealach Mor, best wishes to every one for 2012.

Oh dear, there seems to have been a bit of tardiness in my blog entering. So, for that, many apologies and I do promise to be a more regular and committed blogger this year. Agreed, that is a promise or New Year’s Resolution I made last year as well, but hopefully, I will be a bit more successful this year.

There has been a lot happening here in the last few weeks and I will go back and do an update with some of the more memorable moments, but for now, I just wanted to wish everyone a slightly belated Happy Hogmanay and a very prosperous and joyful New Year for 2012.

I’m also going to continue my New Year’s Day “family” photograph tradition.

Looking back at the New Year’s Day photos from 2010 and 2011, we have a whole lot more snow this year. Although, I didn’t need the photo to remind me, as the blisters and sore backs from all the shovelling we have been doing is reminder enough. Still, it makes for great sled trails and very picturesque scenery.

Ugh, what a horrible couple of days we’ve had. After my last post about our weather, I’m loathe to make it the subject of this entry too, but needs must and all that.

Since my last effort, we’ve actually had some fine weather, some very cold spells, down under -30 F for a day or three and the trails have really settled well. We’ve been out running dogs quite a lot and explored some new (to us) trails, thanks to Dave for acting as tour guide.

It’s been quite an experience to run under the main Highway by dogsled and head out into the unknown. It seems I’m not quite the intrepid explorer that I fondly imagined, as I have discovered that I like to know the way home. I have also discovered that my lead dogs are pretty darn smart and require me to pay more attention. It seems one run is enough for them to figure out which way we are going. This led to a couple of “discussions” between me and them during the next run on the trail as I wanted to go a different way from the previous day’s travels. We do now seem to have reached some degree of understanding, they won’t anticipate turns and I will keep taking us alternative routes.

I’m sure I have previously mentioned that one of issues we have with our dogteam is a certain lack of discipline when it comes to passing other teams. In the spirit of getting your excuses in early, I have always wondered if our loose living dogs think it’s perfectly ok to socialise with passing visitors. We have done some training using our own dogs in different teams and they always behave and pass in an exemplary manner. However, throw a team of strangers in our path and it’s a whole new ballgame. It is interesting enough when using the 4 wheelers for training to get past, on a sled, on the much narrower trails, it becomes a much more harrowing experience. It seems that most of our dogs are a little intimidated by the sights and sounds of the oncoming team and tend to shy away from what, I’m assuming, they perceive as approaching conflict. Of course, as we stop moving forward, the team naturally spreads out sideways a bit and fills the trail, making passing even more of a process. So, we’ve been working on trying to keep the “forward focus” of the leaders, getting them to trust us and to believe that the other teams aren’t really interested in them. Which in most cases, is true. As part of this ongoing training, we managed to convince friends and neighbours to provide the sacrificial teams for us to practice with.

“Passapalooza” was set up with Dave, TC, TJ , Lindsey and I all hitting the trail on Friday on a 10 mile, figure 8 looped run that would give each of our teams several head on passing opportunities. My report card for my 5 passes reads -

• Good,
• Shambles but funny,
• Very good,
• Unacceptable
• Not good but not bad either.

Could do better, but shows signs of potential, just needs to apply himself more, as my school report cards had a habit of reading, but also applies to my review of our efforts on that run.  Thanks to all who took part and hopefully we can do it again, and again……

Intending to get back onto the trails to follow up our good work, whilst it was still fresh in their minds, the next day’s run got called off because a big dump of snow meant that I had to finally clear our driveway before we got stranded. A task I had been putting off as there always seemed something less onerous and more interesting to do. So, no sooner had I spent a few hours moving snow around than it started to warm up quite dramatically. The snow turned to rain which proceeded to fall for the next 20 hours. We got temperatures well above freezing and are now in the middle of that horrible wet mess refreezing, with the ruts and footprints offering numerous opportunities for injury to human and dog.

Those couple of warm days have played havoc with the trails, rumours abound of open water and punchy trails, full of moose holes and now, with a couple of colder nights, a harsh abrasive ice layer. I’ve decided to be safe, cautious and sensible. Our dogs can wait another day or two before going back out. Hopefully it will snow soon.

The only good thing about not getting out with the team is the chance to spend more time with the puppies. They will be 4 weeks old tomorrow but they seem so much bigger than that. We’ve started the process of weaning them onto food, figuring that Cuchi will be grateful for the help in feeding 4 seemingly insatiable not so little puppies.

We’ve also finally agreed on names for them all. Dawson and Braeburn for the boys, Teslin (Tess) and Brooks for the girls. I’m truly thankful that we don’t have a lot of litters, goodness knows how long it would take us to pick names if we bred every year.

It wouldn’t be a musher’s blog if the weather didn’t feature quite prominently.

Obsessed as we are by what nature is providing for us, it has been quite a week of interesting weather contrasts. Hard on the heels of the 3 feet of snow we got earlier this month, snow for which we are always grateful, even if it was all fluffy, powdery, bottomless and baseless, we got some lovely coldness. All was well with the world, except we can always find something to want more of or better of, and so if I had a wishlist, it would have been for the snow to be a little less of the fluffy powder and a little more of the wet, heavy kind.  Not all wet, heavy kind of course,  just a nice mix to make walking on it/in it a bit easier and a bit less like man’s first steps on the moon.

As previously mentioned, the trails looked pretty good and ran nicely as long as you didn’t wish to plant a snowhook and get off for any reason. However, with the number of teams running on them and the bit of grooming that has been done by the wonderful guys that have groomers, I did actually get a team to stop and stand – albeit very briefly.

Things were looking good, all the dogs were doing well and the temperatures started dropping nicely, we got down to around – 25 F a few nights and it felt like winter was properly here.Then one evening I went out to feed the dogs at 7.00 PM, as normal, and checked the thermometer on my way. It read -21 F.  Nice. I came back in an hour or so later and it read – 1 F,  how odd.  In the next 20 minutes, it went up to +7 F.  I was so confused (easily done, I know) that I went outside to see if one of the house dogs had stolen the sender unit, as has happened before, and had hidden it in one of their boxes. No, the unit was still on the wall and the air definitely felt warmer and then the winds started. Quite gently at first but building until for the next 36 hours or so, we had blizzard like conditions. During feedtimes, the dogs had to chase their bowls as the wind would catch them and blow them away. Of course the power went out too, just to give us that complete wilderness experience.

Now that has passed, we’ve been out trying to dig out our gateways and groom some trail, as there’s been so much wind drift, some sections have been almost completely obliterated. Downed trees haven’t helped either, although it seems that the previous storm, earlier this month, got most of the trees down that felt the need to return to earth.

After the winds too, we’ve seen the temperatures drop back down again. A pretty chilly night last night saw us at -23 F, although that seems almost tropical compared to the -55 F that our friends up in Two Rivers saw. It really isn’t that bad, as long as you dress appropriately and don’t lick any metal posts.

Lizzy, our friend/handler has been of great help and I’m determined to give her the full Alaska and kennel experience. Accordingly, and purely so that she gets maximum enjoyment from her trip, I’ve delegated as many of the things I don’t like doing, as I feel I can get away with.

Cuchi’s puppies are continuing to grow well, at just over a week old, they have all more than doubled their weights and are now starting to move around their box with quite a degree of vigour and a lot of puppy squeaking.

At the end of an anxious 9 week wait, we were delighted to be able to welcome the latest arrivals to Gealach Mor, yesterday.

Cuchi of Seppala whelped 4 puppies, 2 males, 2 females.

We’re not very experienced breeders. Despite having had dogs for over 23 years, we’ve only had one other litter, so it’s always a worrying time. We had all the emergency supplies we could think of, at the ready and out of hours vet phone numbers on speed dial. I did draw the line at having the car’s engine running, just in case.

It turns out that Cuchi had it all under control and quite honestly, didn’t need or want any assistance from me. Not only that, but she very graciously decided to have them in the middle of the morning, just as I was drinking my coffee, and equally conveniently, she picked the dog crate in our living room, the one that masquerades as a coffee table, to be her delivery room. Incredibly proficiently, she then proceeded to produce her perfect little bundles of joy, without a whimper or fuss. She had the first pup at 09.30 and was all done with her fourth, by 12.30, just in time for lunch. She declined both the brandy and cigars, preferring instead to get on with her mothering duties.

Wishing them long, fruitful, fun filled lives as hard working sled dogs and much loved pets.