A Look from the Inside Out

After living here in Seeley Lake for 16 years, I am FINALLY able to volunteer for the Race to the Sky dog sled race! Other years I had been busy volunteering for other things or my knees weren't so good. Now I have new knees and no other commitments and so off I went to volunteer.

I had volunteered at the Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska years ago at the Galena checkpoint. I had family living there at the time, so I combined a visit and on a lark offered to help out. No one ever says no to a volunteer, so it was there that I got my experience of checking in mushers, handling the dogs, caring for dropped dogs, being a pooper scooper and other miscellaneous tasks that need to be done.

IT IS the kind of thing that gets into your blood and you start having delusions of grandeur that you can do this, be the best musher ever, have the fastest times with the best dogs and oh yeah, be the best woman musher in the history of the sport. Then of course, you wake up, get your wits about you and come back down to earth. Bummer.

My adventure started in Lincoln at High Country Snack Foods, the start of the race on Saturday, Feb. 10. They needed someone to be a scribe for the vet checks. No one raised their hand when asked, but mine went up. Oops what have I done?

Ok, so grab this bucket and here is the clipboard with the forms and follow these two vets and write down whatever they say. Off we go.

At the start of the race, each dog racing gets a full physical. The dogs are used to being poked and prodded so good to go there.

Vets listen to their heart, check their feet for split pads, check wrists, shoulders and hind quarters. Vets also check for general condition of the dog. These dogs are surprisingly small, about 35-40 pounds or so and are mutts. No Siberian huskies here. People are surprised by that fact. The dogs are like marathon runners. Slim and trim. Larger dogs will finish but not in the front of the pack.

Here I am bopping between two teams and two vets, ugh. I gotta get the names right (of the dogs) and what the vets say about them-don't want to screw this part up.

The vets look at my notes and say, oh no, you can use this abbreviation for this and this isn't spelled right and I am thinking, jeez, I'm no vet, I don't know all this!

So I get my wits about me again and I am ready to rock and roll with the proper abbreviations. This took about two hours with five vets and more volunteers as scribes to get all 21 teams checked out. Figure about average 10 dogs a team, that's a lot of dogs!

That done, I got ready to help "handle". Handling is a term used to encompass many things. My job was to just hold onto the gangline (the main line coming from the sled that the dogs are attached to off their tuglines which go from their collars which are off their harnesses, got all that?). Essentially, my job was just to keep the dogs from running away with the sled! Real easy, right?

I wanted to help Cindy Gallea who is a former Seeley Laker, now residing in Minnesota. She ran in the 300 mile race.

I also wanted to help with Roy Etnire's team. He is a Seeley Lake resident who ran the 100 mile race.

These dogs are racers. When they start getting hooked up to the gangline, they get excited. Ok, maybe a better word would be WILD! So you have about 200 dogs getting hooked up to their sleds, yipping, barking, jumping, some howling and all are shaking with adrenaline. And oh, my job is to control Cindy's lead dogs! Good thing I have these new knees. Last time I did this, I was 20 years younger, oh jeez, what was I thinking!

The leaders got hooked up first, so for about 20 minutes or so I have to keep them from running off with the sled and dragging me with them! All the dogs are hooked up and Cindy is making final preps to her team and asking each dog, "Are you guys ready to run?" OMG, YES they are ready!

Now we are kinda walking/jogging up to the chute at the start line. Yep, I made it holding onto the dogs without falling and not letting go of the gangline. Check. Now they are really CRAZY! They want to RUN and NOW!

The countdown starts at 10, goes to 1 and you better make sure to let go and get out of the way and fast! The announcer yells GO and a switch goes off in the dogs heads and they are all business. No jumping, or barking, just running. Really neat to watch.

I stayed and helped other musher's teams as they came up to the chute and tried to keep their dogs from chewing on tuglines or each other and keeping them from getting tangled up in their lines. Quite the job. I will need a cocktail after all this!

Got home, got that cocktail and had a good sleep.

Next week, the race continues with the 100-mile finish in Seeley Lake and then I was off for another adventure at White Tail Ranch for the mandatory six-hour layover.