Beautiful Day

It was a beautiful morning with perfect conditions to skijor the trail to Buffalo Park atop Rabbit Ears Pass. Wheeee!

What incredible conditions! Is it really March 31st?  :)
Love the "snow poofs" behind Zorro and Jack's feet.

The prior photo exemplifies the trail conditions we had most of the day. If you look closely you can see that we are on a groomed trail with an inch or so of fresh snow over the groom. There was the occasional snowmobile track on the trail too (as you see above) but we were able to ride on the untouched sides of the trail almost all morning. Perfect conditions for the human to let the sled dogs go as fast and far as they wanted :)

A little further along and same conditions:

Zorro & Jack riding the freshies on the side of the trail with me as Rudy flirts in & out of
the snowmobile track going down the middle.

For today's video highlight, we feature Jack and his now patented "high speed, high degree of difficulty and high precision" lane changes. Typically everyone maintains their current position when we are going fast. But, Jack has become our team expert at changing lanes. Sometimes he just wants to be in a different lane and he executes the "lane change" with perfection: back off, change lanes and then launch back into the sprinting pack. Nice work Jack!

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

It's fun to note Jack giving me a few glances as he does the lane change. I give him a "yes" head nod whenever he does. He just wants to know I am ok with the maneuver - of course I am, he is so good at it! The "head nod" comes from his therapy dog training as this is a positive reinforcement I give him when working and I do not want to talk and interrupt his therapy work.

Time to turnaround and head back and...

"They are both doing it again, aren't they?" asks Zorro.
"We stop, I roll!" demonstrates Jack who has rolled at least on snow angel on every skijor
outing of his young life.
"I'm following suit too!!!!" adds goofy Rudy who has recently started rolling snow angels
almost as much as Jack!

After following the main trail most of the morning, we decided to abandon the set track at one point and skijor the "spring crust" covering the meadows atop Rabbit Ears Pass. This was young Rudy's first ever skijor on spring crust - a fun time of year when you can abandon trails and simply skijor any direction you want atop the solid crust!

Freshies on the Spring Crust! Wheeee!

Not the best "triple face shot", but you can still see the happy & satisfied expression on everyone's face when I paused to check our distance and ask how they were doing:

"Perfect, let's keep going!" declare the happy & satisfied trio.

A beautiful morning with perfect conditions: 7 miles traveled with 600 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 21 MPH.

2018/2019 Season to Date: 86 days on the trails covering 475.5 miles with 42,600 feet of elevation climbed.