News

Dog Of The Week: Shark

Sarah · August 1, 2015 ·

When you first come into our dog yard, the dog that won’t stop barking is shark. Her excitement never stops. She wants you to know hey! I’m right here! Come see me!

Inevitably, whenever you do go see Shark, however, she is coy.
Oh me? I was just kidding! Her shyness never lasts long but she is often timid when approaching strangers.

Shark has been one of my socialization “projects” this summer. We like all of our dogs to be happy and comfortable around strangers. Having dogs comfortable around strangers helps them relax better when being examined by vets out on the race trail. It also reduces anxiety when coming into a busy checkpoint full of race fans.

Shark, however, still gets jittery around people she doesn’t know. It’s a nervous excitement and one that’s fun to work with because she is so eager to please. I know this nervousness won’t last much longer.

Ok, I guess I’ll let you pet me. As she finally saddles up along side you. She has a long back and is absolutely gorgeous. Her build is sensational — long, lean, and born to run.

Shark ran and finished in her first 200 mile race over the winter. We’re happy to see her so successful. As a bigger female in our kennel we are anxious to see what great adventures she has in store for us!

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Fun with Goblin’s Puppies

Sarah · July 31, 2015 ·

We are homebodies. Our family is big and often we find that simply taking time to enjoy one another is enough. With so much going on sometimes it’s easy to get lost in what to do and when.

But our dogs root us and remind us of what’s important. Time together. Slow time. So we take the evenings and we play with the puppies, teaching them how to come when their called and to overcome obstacles. At this age, even simple things are hard: walking through tall grass that obscures their vision and downed trees seem like impossible hurdles. Inevitably, the puppies overcome and we sing them praises. We have fun together and they learn how much we love them and how much we enjoy seeing them have fun.

Sometimes we stick to the trails. Sometimes we bush whack. The puppies enjoy the maze of ferns, alders and Devils club and how it temporarily hides them.

Oh the joy in our voices when they come to our feet after wandering through the under brush. They learn quickly that all we want is for them to wander with us and be our pack mates. They’re more than happy to oblige.

Travis Beals under a sled dog puppy pile

We find the quietness of our life calming. We free run several sets of dogs and walk them around the trail. Some are anxious to show off their speed and others are all too eager to show us their love and affection, not wanting to wander far.

We just got extra batteries for Travis’ new obsession: flying drone helicopters. We’ve had several at this point. None expensive but are slowly looking at buying something nice. We think it would be fun for mushing. Don’t you?

We’ve started getting fish from the weir at Bear Lake again. Having Cook Inlet Aqua Culture as a sponsor is huge and the fish they donate is a huge asset to our feeding program. Evenings have been spent putting fish in garbage bags to freeze. Mornings are spent putting fish into cook pots to make a meal for the dog. We recently had to purchase a new fish pot because we burned a hole through our last — Travis used it as an opportunity to “taste test” the stew. It got his vote of approval and, more importantly, the dogs!

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We will try to post more regularly about our day to day adventures.

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– Sarah

These Summer Days

Sarah · July 30, 2015 ·

When we aren’t mushing our days are filled with other adventures. Still we get out with a team 2-3 times a day depending on our tour schedule. The dogs are always great and our guests equally excited to partake in Alaska’s state sport. These days the dogs are settled in and guests are often able help us hook up or unhook the team.

We’ve been having so much fun.

At night we let the dogs run loose in their new run pen. On hot days, the girls who have houses in full sun are put in their to beat the heat. Everyone gets along. Everyone has wagging tails. We laugh at the games the dogs play together. Tag and chase and digging, always digging, hole after hole after hole.

We all are so happy.

Travis and I fill the few holes in our time by hiking and biking and doing art so each day is always perfectly full, occasionally even spilling over.

We yearn for fall to come and bring with it the colder weather of winter.

We already crave snow and trails and night. But for now we rest and enjoy the last few weeks of summer. Perfectly content where we are.

How To Host A Paint A Dog House Day For A Sled Dog Kennel

Sarah · July 29, 2015 ·

We are writing this article for our fellow dog mushing friends who are looking for ways to incorporate more local outreach into their kennel. After the Sockeye Wildfire devastated the mushing community of Willow, many mushers and non-mushers alike banded together to help the displaced sled dogs get new homes. Operation Doghouse became a community-wide effort dedicated to rebuilding houses for sled dogs that were lost in the Sockeye fire. Working together with #Operation DogHouse we thought it would be great if we could write about our own success as a kennel in hosting Paint-a-Pooloza and give advice on how to host a similar event.

It’s important as mushers and mushing fans that we work together to increase accessibility to our sport.

Paint-A-Pooloza was an event hosted at Turning Heads Kennel in May of 2015 as a way to involve the local community of Seward, its artists, and its children in our kennel. Running the event was a blast and we hope by publishing how we did this event that more kennels will be able to follow suit.

We added our event to our local community event page, for Seward we have two local online places to submit events: www.SewardEvents.com and www.SewardCityNews.com. Seward City News is an online publication and we used this platform to promote our event in the three weeks leading up to it.

In addition, we created simple eye-catching flyers for our event and posted them throughout town with permission from the owners or managers of the property. Some high visibility places that we posted in our town included our local grocery stores, gas stations, and our public library. We also connected with key community leaders who were involved in boy scouts or girl scouts to help us promote our event and would ensure that families would know we were doing something. We advertised sled dog rides, because we are a tour kennel, but most children would be happy simply to meet sled dogs or learn about mushing. Children also love puppies so If you (or a neighboring kennel that wouldn’t mind sharing) have puppies, consider advertising that. We advertised hot dogs and root beer as well.

Preparing for our event, we choose several bright colors. We have always been a fan of bold “loud” colors because we feel like they make our dog yard a very happy place. In general we have found that a gallon of paint covers about 4 or 5 houses. We bought paint but also put out advertisements saying we were looking for old paint on local websites and our local Seward community Facebook groups. People are more than happy to get rid of their unused paint!

We then purchased the supplies we needed for our event. We estimated an attendance of anywhere between 50-100 people and realized unused supplies could be used later in the summer or for other events, as we frequently do staff barbecues throughout the summer. This may not be the case for every kennel however. We purchased 96 hot dogs and buns from costco, ketchup, mustard, relish, paper plates, plastic silver, and plastic cups. We also bought otter pops and ice cream as we were going to serve root beer. We also bought napkins, baby wipes, and purell.

For painting, we purchased 6 gallons of paint. We also picked up several different sized foam brushes as well as 4 brush sets (containing 11 brushes each) from Home Depot.

To prepare for the event we scrubbed our houses with a wire brush. Then we power-washed our dog houses to remove any old paint and dirt. We washed some houses the day of and during the event as we ran out of time. This didn’t prove to be a problem because they dried quickly.

We poured paint into plastic cups for painters to use. Each cup of paint came with its own brush. People were encouraged to share, swap, and be creative as possible. We provided painters tape to those who wanted more geometrical designs.

The day of the event we closed our dog yard off but took turns taking small groups of people into the yard. Our dog yard is fenced. If you don’t have a fence around your dog lot consider getting plastic fencing or roping it off. Put up signs as well. We have a sign outside our dog yard that says “Not all dogs have good manners. Please do not enter without a guide.” Our dogs are used to guests and small children. If your dogs aren’t good with strangers, explain that. Every musher’s kennel is different and our dogs have lots of exposure to people they don’t know.

Another thing that you could do would be to set up a display of your winter gear to let kids try on or to see. It’s always nice to have an interactive element of some kind — just make sure everyone has clean paint-free hands before letting them touch your $800 parka!

To make sure your event goes smoothly, make sure you have plenty of volunteers on hand able to help. We had two people dedicated to grilling during lunchtime hours and other volunteers who helped refill paint cups. Additionally, make sure you have two or three trash cans available. Hot dogs and baked beans were easy and were a big hit. The root beer and ice cream proved to be a nice, easy treat for a sunny day that the kids loved too.

We set a time limit for our event and advertised it lasting from 11-4pm. The last visitors left around 5pm because they wanted to finish their design; we knew that it would probably last longer than advertised and didn’t have a problem with that.

Don’t forget that some people are willing to help clean up. You can set up stations for washing brushes and disposing of leftover paint. We let our houses dry for 24 hours before moving them back into our yard and in with the dogs.

If you have any more questions, please feel free to email me at: Sarah@SewardHelicopters.com

Dog Of The Week: Hoover

Sarah · July 27, 2015 ·

If you told me last summer that Hoover would be running lead, I would have laughed at you. Hoover? In lead? No way! She barely pulled! To me, Hoover’s success this season just goes to show how putting time into our dogs and developing each of them individually has really paid off.

First of all, Hoover has great parents. Her mother XENA was a 3 time Iditarod Champion with Lance Mackey. Her dad, PILOT, was an incredible dog who always gave his everything. Great lineage is always a good indicator that a dog will be a good sled dog but it certainly doesn’t guarantee it. Pilot and Xena both led, so seeing Hoover lead really shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is.

And here’s why:

Last year, Hoover was a total flake in training. She would pull and look incredible and then she would stop pulling. She was a dog who habitually had to look around. While her teammates heads were focused on the trail ahead of them, Hoover was bobbing around looking side to side. She was, it often seemed, more interested in the scenery we were passing by and less interested in running.

We thought she was going to flunk out of Sled dog 101. “Maybe we should find her a pet home?” We talked about it on and off. She seemed like she had so much promise.

Why wasn’t this strong, happy female interested in pulling? Was she not having fun?

And then, it seemed, sometime Mid-May something clicked. We hooked Hoover up and she was running. Not just running either — she was pulling hard. Over the winter it seemed, our little catipillar had found her wings.

She loved running. And, more importantly, she excelled at it. In early July I made the decision to hook her up with our tried and true lead dog Zema. Hoover took to the front flawlessly, following Zema’s lead.

Now, she’s run lead half-a-dozen times. Her time up front totals close to about an hour of running time and during that she’s probably had to respond to GEE or HAW nearly 70 times. She’s slowly starting to get it!

We are so excited to see this great dog starting to succeed. She and her sister SHARK will be doing some pretty amazing things for us. Their mom had quite the legacy, we are excited to see the legacy they will create for themselves!

Thanks Hoover! We are glad to have such a quirky dog like you in our kennel.