The Winter of Adventure

The Winter of Adventure

Sept 2004 - March 2005

Gealach Mor Siberians

Working sleddogs - just for the love of it..............

It started as a simple " wouldn't it be fun to.." dinner table conversation between my wife and myself one October evening a couple of years ago. One of those things was to run our own dogs in a mid distance race on snow.

Well, nearly three years later, that evening's chat has led to this, the culmination of a great many nights of talking, planning and hoping, the trip that has become known as the Winter of Adventure.

Geographically, Alaska is traditionally known as the mecca for dog sledders, but we already had a lot of musher friends in New England, we had been over several times and they had all been most helpful and generous. Plus, it is a much shorter transit time to the east coast from the UK . Thus it was decided that New Hampshire would be our likely base, given its place in sled dog history, it's good snow coverage and the decent number of mid distance races within reasonable travelling distance.

As you may have seen on some of our other web pages, our small kennel increased in size in 2002 with the arrival of 2 Seppala line Siberian Huskies from Tay Marr Kennel in the US. The decision to buy these two dogs was the first step on the path and signalled to my wife just how serious I was about this. Plans were hatched and contacts made, ideas thrashed out, suggestions good and bad flowed and slowly, steadily things seemed to be falling into place. Beth was due to come into season, but failed to do so at her expected time, so we arranged to buy another Seppala line pup from Tay Marr in the spring of 2003. No sooner had "Harry" been picked and we could look forward to his impending arrival on a Pet Passport, than Beth decided that she was going to do her bit for the adventure after all and she provided us with rather more than we were expecting.

A litter of 8 !

So now it seemed we would have plenty of dogs to select a travelling party from.

To move those dogs around we would need a dog truck - and thanks to Sleddog Central, we were able to find just the right one. The exceedingly long list of things needed included having somewhere to stay - and again the internet came to the rescue, providing us with several possibilities and a huge selection of the plainly unsuitable. Eventually, we found just the right place, close enough to civilisation to have a fair sized town within 30 minutes but rural enough to have no difficulty with placing a kennel of sleddogs in the yard.

And so, after much last minute panic and reorganising, we landed at Logan Airport, Boston in late September and a day later our 11 huskies arrived safely in Boston. Little do they know what they have been "volunteered" for - their first year has been rather more relaxed than I suspect the next 6 months will be.

The plan is for this website to follow us on our epic adventure. If you have any questions, then please feel free to ask away.