BZ Daze

Yep, thus far I've been very BZ (busy) this R&R. Yesterday I focused my attention on getting the kennel back in order and running dogs. We had a good run, a bit shorter than I would prefer this time of year with a couple of them getting pretty tired toward the end. It's been a difficult season for training the team while accommodating my work schedule.

It was a very interesting weather day. It started out cold and clear. I'm talking -22 degrees (F) cold when I watered the team. By mid-day it was 10 above, and by the time we returned from our run it was up to +24 degrees. That's 46 degrees of warming in less than 6 hours.

Today was spent mostly in town because of a doctor's appointment. Here's the list in more or less chronological order.
- Up and awake at 5:30
- Coffee, Emails, checking message boards, &c.
- Shower, shave and make myself more or less handsome for Dr. Kohnen.
- Watered and loved-up on all the dogs.
- Called my friend Terry Snow at Cooterbear Enterprises to arrange to have the snow plowed in my driveway. We got about 6 inches of fresh, beautiful new snow this morning. The undercarriage of my little car (basically an overgrown motorized roller-skate) was dragging when I left for town.
- Pulled 10# of black powder from the magazine for a Nor' West Company sale.
- Drove to town, fairly cautiously out of respect to the road conditions.
- Stopped in at Cold Spot Feeds for some dog collars and stainless steel feed pans.
- Ate breakfast at nearly lunch time.
- Deliverd the powder to the customer
- Was assessed and examined by my doctor (I've been having stomach troubles lately).
- Dropped off a new prescription at the pharmacy.
- Deposited a reimbursement check from work.
- Filled the tank on the roller skate car.
- Picked up my drugs
- Headed home
- Updated my Nor' West Company books.
- Fed the dogs and scooped the yard.
- Cleared off the truck and drove to my training partner's place to fetch home my "freight train" toboggan and some other gear that's been there most of the winter.
- Now, I'm updating my Blog.

Frankly, yesterday was a lot more fun than today. Heck, a bad day mushing dogs still beats a good day at work, hands down. Here's yesterday's report from my training journal:

Wednesday, February 18: First run on this R&R. 8.5 miles. Home to Swamp Trail to Little Chena River Rd trail to wood cutting road to Borough Trail to home.

Max speed 14.1 mph

Average speed 7.7 mph

Torus and Just

Seamus and Grace

Rose and Nels

Sheenjek and Beau

Torus and Just got tangled up just prior to launch, which caused some delay while I went forward to fix it. Torus also got tangled in his harness somehow as we were coming off the swamp portion to start climbing the Little Chena River ridge trail.

Grace was a real pain in the butt scotching at Seamus. Mostly I think it’s because Seamus is willing to tolerate it. I’ll run her next to Sheenjek on her next run and that should settle her attitude down a little bit.

Rose and Nels were awesome. I don’t think I had to speak one word to either of them the entire trip. They just ran and pulled and acted like real pros.

Sheenjek and Beau were well behaved and ran well. Beau was tired and came off his tug the last mile or so.

One highlight – we passed a skid-steer loader clearing snow on the wood cutting road (he cleared to hardpack and it was slicker than snot, hard to control the sled on). The dogs barely looked at the machine as we trotted past and only a couple of them even looked back when the operator triggered the back up alarm.