I can’t believe mushing season is over. It ended so abruptly. This winter was the warmest winter I’ve spent in Fairbanks. The cold air arrived late, it only snowed a handful of times, and most of the time the temperature was 20 degrees Fahrenheit– which is very warm for my dogs. Unless we get a surprise snow storm, it looks like my last day of mushing was March 15th, 2015.
For several reasons, it was difficult to put a lot of miles on the dogs this year:
- Due to the warm weather, I didn’t start fall training until October 6th! I didn’t get onto the sled until Dec. 3rd!
- With Greg out of town, it was hard to get motivated to stay out for long runs. By mid-Dec I was doing 26 mile runs– which isn’t many miles for the time of year. But after Christmas vacation, going out of town for a week in January, and the weather being so warm, I was only doing 11-15 mile runs.
Below is the total mileage for our running (and some non-running dogs) for this season:
- Siren: 772.5
- Medusa: 772.5
- Wayne: 736.5
- Stella: 732.5
- Moe: 696.5
- Spike: 678.5
- Bear: 651
- Phanty: 644.5
- Recluse: 620.5
- Nikki: 609.5
- Zeus: 580
- Shrek: 564
- Dru: 484.5
- Kraken: 466.5
- Capella: 366
- Maya: 279
- Rattles: 139
- Simba: 139
- Lasher: 120.5
- Maude: 114
- Roo: 45.5
- Bruno: 4
- Red: 4
- Musher Ilana: 864
- Musher Greg: 49
Compare that with last season where the core gang had around 1111 miles on them.
While I was looking at the stats I noticed the ages of our dogs and they are old! We have 16 dogs that are ten years old or older. Nutok is leading the group at 17 years old!!
Below are some pics of our March runs. Enjoy.
