Rogues Gallery Kennel Blog

Well, as most of you know, Cole and the team are on the Yukon River now. She surprised me yesterday and made the run to Ruby in one long push. I asked her about this when she called breifly last night and she said despite what the temperatures are reading in the villages, down on the rivers and valley bottoms is has been much colder. It was minus 20 with numerous pockets of minus 30 and she felt it just wasn’t conducive to good resting for the dogs. If they’re shivering the whole time, then they aren’t resting. At the checkpoints they have thicker beds of straw and she sent out coats and blankets for all of them to sleep under.
Not stopping, she took a little extra rest in Rube, only an hour more compared to nearly all her omcpetitors and this was enough to know her back 3 places in the standings. She was pretty bummed about that, but is hoping to put together a long run somehwere else later in the race and make it up a bit. This race only pays out the top 30 and really only top 20 pays enough to cover all the race expenses, so she is a little worried about racing the dogs this hard to not end up with anything.
One of you asked about what is humane in terms of running, it’s no so much the speeds you have to look for, but the distances they are running without rest and then how long teams are resting after those distances. a few years ago everyone wouold run equal run-rest, and six on-six off was considered the norm. In recent years you are seeing people run 12-14 hours on, rest 3 to 4 hours, and then run 12 to 14 again. This is what it takes to win and place in the money, which is why this will probably be our last 1,000 race. We don’t feel like that is humane, even when you’ve trained toward doing that. No dog wants to run that much over and over again, so we won’t do that and by not doing that we won’t ever beat people who will, and this is entirely too much work to do yearround to end up in the middle of the non-paid pack. Mushing has never about a purse for us, it’s been about adventure, but at some point you still have 40 dogs to feed and that costs money, so it has to come from somewhere.
In other news, all the dropped dogs made it back safely yesterday late in the evening. Our friend Kevin went and picked them up for us and he got more than he bargained for. He got Keno, but then had to wait overrnight for Cyder and Woobie to be flown out. He stayed at a family memeber’s house who lives there and I forgot to mention that even though Keno isn’t racing now, his metabolism is still processing like he is. Kevin has helped us before so he knows we drop/walk the dogs about ever six hours, but following all the food Keno had just had, six hours was a long stretch. Kevin said he had Keno’s kennel in th house and when he opened it to walk him, Keno made it about two steps out and then promtly dropped a huge piled in the living room.
He’s good a good sense of humor about these things, so he wasn’t made. He just cleaned it up and then joked with his kin that they could no proudly claim an association to the stain in the carpet: “That’s the place where one of Coleen Robertia’s lead dogs pooped!” I’m sure it will be a bit hit during the next cocktail party. All for now.