July Skijor

Our first ever Skijor in July!!!! Woo Hoo!

Happy sled dogs, nice views and skijoring in July!!!!

If you have been following along, you know that we had near record snowfall this past season in the Colorado High Country. The season was highlighted by a super May which dumped a ton of snow on the already solid snowpack in the mountains. This lead to our best June of skijoring in the last decade (Yes, Zorro & I have been skijoring for ten years!). I had secret hopes that we would actually get our first ever skijor in July. With a hot last week of June, we were anxiously awaiting July 1st to see what snow was remaining for us to enjoy. Well, as you see above - SUCCESS!!!!

How do you skijor in July? Well, you find a snow patch long enough to skijor back & forth again and again and again :) We found a beautiful patch of snow on Peak 8 at Breckenridge Ski Resort to do just this - skijor back & forth and back & forth, repeat, repeat, repeat, .... :)

Cruising across a perfect patch of snow on Peak 8.

Come along for today's video showing one "back & forth" across the snow patch on Peak 8. We ended up doing 11 "back & forths" across this snow patch. Skijoring in July - wheeee!

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

It was short with a non-standard sequence of repeated "back & forths", but it was skijoring in July. Great time, right guys?

"We'll go back & forth all day to be on snow & skis in July!" says the happy & focused trio.

Today was our final run of the 2018/2019 season. As you see from the small snow patch in the video, it is getting hard to find any contiguous patches of snow to string together a real skijor outing. There are still plenty of snow piles on the mountains, so we will switch to "hiking to roll in the snow" for the remainder of summer.

It has been quite the interesting season. We started back in October with Jack entering his first season of "skijoring without limits" while young Rudy was on short & tight limits to start the season. Zorro, Jack & I dropped Rudy once a week to get in a long skijor. Rudy started with 30 minute skijors with 2 mandatory long breaks along the way (so we were only running about three 7-8 minute intervals). As far as the trio could run within the limits is what we did. Each month we removed one of the mandatory breaks until we were running 30 minutes straight as a four pack. We then added 5 minutes a month to the "Rudy limit" and it was amazing how far my three partners could travel in 30, then 35, then 40 minutes, etc.

Finally mid June arrived and we were able to skijor without limits. In a normal year, we would be done skijoring by mid June; but we were graced with an incredible season of snow and got to see three sled dogs skijoring without limits for the last half of June (and 1st of July). Wow, what a year!

Today's outing was short, but it was skijoring: 0.5 miles traveled (in 11 back & forths) with 100 feet of elevation gain.

2018/2019 Final Stats: 137 days on the trails covering 803.8 miles with 75,250 feet of elevation climbed.

That is a pretty impressive season given it was Jack's first full season and we had "Rudy limits" on the team almost the entire year. What a season of snow!!!!

We'll be back with skis on snow in October and, who knows, maybe even September!

Pray for Snow!