Road Trip Aug 12 – Seaveys Iditarod

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Today’s adventure was learning all about an event that draws mushers from around the world, the Iditarod. We visited Seaveys which is a family owned operation that has been participating in the race for many years. In 2004 Mitch Seavey won the race and in 2011 his son won the race and his grandson won the juniors competition. The family property, training ground and kennel contain about 85 dogs where are used to race every year. The biggest myth that was busted for me was that the racing dogs do not look like Siberian huskies. They are thin but man are they strong and have a strong desire to pull. They tolerate the cold very well. They did have one Siberian Huskie but they don’t’ use him much for pulling.



To give you an idea of how strong these dogs are when we were performing a ride around the property the musher stopped to take pictures of us on the sleigh. He had to place a rock in front of the sled because two siblings next to each other were eager to go0 and kept pulling while the other dogs stopped. They were so strong they were moving the sled a few inches while it was loaded with six people.



We got a small demo of how the dogs and mushers are dressed to tolerate 40 below temps. I got pulled for the musher demo. Now my sister has blackmail images to hold over my head for years to come. When it gets to 40 or more below the mushers will dress up their dogs to protect their paws, legs, main body and for the males they get a fur lined cuff to protect their bits from frostbite.



Their were puppies for to play with and I should have know better having raised a puppy myself but I stuck my hand in the pen with my gloves on and got into a tug of war with the puppies and ended up with a big hole in my glove.



The winner of the race gets $50,000 but the funds quickly get swallowed up to cover the cost of participating, transportation of the musher and the dogs and caring for the dogs.



Overall impression was money well spent to learn about the race and I got to play with puppies.



Next stop – 6 hour drive to Valdez.

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Photos

Dog Race Protection
Used when weather gets 40 below