Sled Dog Party

We had a little Sled Dog Party out at Keyser Creek today as we met up with 4 other sled teams to run with on the trails.

Dog trucks, dog sleds and 20+ Siberian Huskies attached to the trucks getting ready to GO!
(Max & Zorro are in the foreground with Nancy inspecting the surroundings)

We intended to run just over 10 miles today and ran 15 by mistake. Oops :)

The party consisted of 2 6-dog sled teams, 1 5-dog sled team, 1 4-dog sled team and our 2-dog skijor team (most of the dogs on the 6 and 4 dog teams were from Sno-Magic Siberians). Our friend Gillian and her 5-dog team started out the day as they were hoping to go the furthest. Max, Zorro & I started second as we planned on doing the second most miles of the outing and the other 3 teams staggered start behind us.

Here is a great video of Max & Zorro shooting out the gates at the beginning of the run. They were sooooo ready to gooooo:

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

As I said above, our plan was to do a 10 mile out/back on the main Keyser Creek Trail. Well, we made it to the 5-mile turnaround point pretty fast yet had still not caught up with Gillian and her team. So, I said to my partners, "I see Gillian's sled tracks and dog prints, why don't we go until we meet Gillian and then run back with her?" Max & Zorro were in perfect agreement with this plan. Onward & upward we continued, but still never found Gillian and her team. After 7.4 miles, I decided we must have missed them on some side trail and told Max & Zorro we had to turnaround and head back (they were not in agreement with this declaration :)

It turns out that we took a different fork in the trail at just over 6.5 miles, so we never would have met up with Gillian and her team. But, it was a great time had by all, come along for some highlights:

Dead animal carcass on the side of the trail gets only a slight glance from Max & Zorro as they
cruise by (with a little vocal encouragement from me :)  Such good boys to "on by" a carcass!

Zoom, zoom, zoom we go!

Cool off snow angels rolled by all at our turnaround point of the day.
"I love snow!" exclaims giddy Max.
"Rub a dub dub!" states rolling Zorro.

Approaching the end of the run at still going strong after 14.8 miles - sled dog machines!

A great Siberian Husky sled dog party at Keyser Creek covering (an accidental) 14.8 miles with 1200 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 19 MPH.

2014/2015 Season to Date: 27 days on the trails covering 215.7 miles with 23,650 feet of elevation climbed.