High Season Crowds

Max cooling off in beautiful "snow angel" form - what
long back legs you have Max!!!

You know it is "tourism high season" in Breckenridge when the trails are packed early on a Tuesday morning! Time for Max, Zorro and I to stick to the lesser known trails for the next 4-6 weeks.

We were planning a short, one hour outing today. We ended up taking 80 minutes to skijor 60 minutes - a whopping 20 minutes of stoppage to avoid crowds of people and loose dogs.

We spent 3/4 of our outing on a very busy Sally Barber Mine trail - lots of stop, wait, start, sprint and repeat... We spent 1/4 of our outing on the lesser known Trail of Tears - nobody around, just the 3 of us.

Once we got on the uncrowded Trail of Tears section, I was treated to a Siberian Posturing Event from my cute little partners. If you have read some of our recent posts, you know we have been frequently skijoring in "single file" mode on skinny (one Siberian wide) trails. Well, today Max & Zorro decided they were "in control" and declared the trail too skinny to skijor side-by-side (see the images below). Oh those crazy Siberians - the trail was perfectly wide enough to skijor shoulder to shoulder. But, instead, they kept alternating chipping & nibbling at one another every time they got even shouldered. This would cause one to back off a bit until I corrected their form and then we'd start over trying to keep shoulder to shoulder until one started the chippy nibbling again. A battle of wills - will I give in and let them go single file or will I hold steady that I am the top dog and we do what I say? Every Siberian owner has had these trying moments of "hold steady, establish control"... Silly boys - that Siberian will trying to gain the upper hand :-)

Vital Stats: 6.1 miles; 80m total time; 60m skijoring time; 22 MPH top speed; 900 feet of elevation gain. 20 minutes of "stop, wait, restart" on the crowded trails.

Skijoring along on the Trail of Tears - a fun "2 Siberian wide" trail that we
usually cruise "shoulder to shoulder" at nice speeds. Usually....

Zorro starting one of our "posturing moments" today. Notice how much room
he has to his left; but he's trying to squeeze Max off the trail so I'll allow them
to skijor in single file configuration. You could fit a whole another Zorro in the
space to his left! This trail is closer to "3 Siberians wide" and is definitely "2 wide";
but the Siberians tried to play me today... I held firm with the crazy 2 and they
finally gave up and agreed to skijor shoulder-to-shoulder.