News

A Short Break On Their Trip to Willow….

Sarah · September 28, 2013 ·

The phone rings at 7:57 waking me. I answer my cellphone only to have it die. I guess the charger hadn’t been plugged in all the way. I jump out of bed because I know what will come next and before I have time to walk into the living room, the house phone starts ringing.

Great. I can’t find the handset and I know it’s Travis.

It rings half a dozen times before the answering system picks up:

Hi Honey! Uhhh….Anyways we got to willow…but we had an adventurous night.

We’re about to drop the dogs and go water them and then we’re going to find a spot to go run. But we had a very very adventurous night…long story short we are going to have to put the truck in the shop…we didn’t crash or anything but… THE BRAKES CAUGHT ON FIRE…I hope you are listening to this cause seriously…MY. BRAKES….CAUGHT ON FIRE…and for once Grayson failed, he wasn’t Mr. Fix-it like, he just sat there laughing. Anyways. We’re all fine. There’s a truck auction in an hour somewhere up here…Maybe I could go…cause my brakes. CAUGHT ON FIRE. Seriously. Yup. Uhhh…And with that news, have a good day.

Talk to you later!

By the end of the message, I’m laughing so hard I am on the floor. I know, I know, the transcript does not convey hilarity whatsoever but Travis’ tone of voice is right on the edge of laughter and its infectious. I finally find the phone and return his call.

“So I hear your brakes caught on fire,” I say when he picks up.

He laughs. “Yup. Grayson just stood there laughing. I told him you know, you could at least pee on them or something.”

I start laughing.

“Instead he threw the last of our coffee on them…That was the crappiest part about the whole thing. That was good french vanilla coffee! I mean it wasn’t a big flame or anything.”

I had envisioned a small fire, you know, the type that happens when you cook steak on the grill and all the fat drips off and the fire wooshes up suddenly but just as quickly disappears.

“Yeah. That’s good,” I say.

“It was only like four inches or something.”

“Oh. That’s pathetic! That doesn’t even count!”

He laughs.

“But how did your brakes catch on fire?” I ask when I can finally stop laughing.

“The truck was acting funny. I pulled over two times before. I checked the rims on the trailer and the truck but everything seemed fine. I thought I had a flat. Nope! Then the next time I pulled over they caught on fire. It’s like they just locked up or something. So then we just slept in the car for like 4 hours. It sucked. We were like right outside of Girdwood and had no cell service. So we just like let everything cool for awhile woke up at about 5:30 and started driving again.”

“And then they were fine?” I asked, skeptical.

“Yeah.”

“Weird.”

“It was an adventure. You would have liked it.”

I laughed. I probably would have. I have weird sense of “fun.”

“Anyways, I thought you should write about it, you know, cause well, my brakes caught fire and we had this adventure and stuff,” Travis says. He is trying not to sound too delighted.

“Ok,” I laugh.

“Hey honey, guess what?”

“What?”

“I can’t wait to go run the team!” Then, a long pause, “Also,” his tone of voice changes, trying to sound really sorry. ” you have to go do fish.”

Great. I think. “I guess I’m going to have an adventurous day.”

And they’re off!

Sarah · September 28, 2013 ·

They have left.

The houses, save a few, sit empty — their inhabitants now traveling northward in search of colder temperatures and longer trails. The dogs who were left behind, either too old or too young to travel, howl one at a time, never together, filling up the incredible black silence of night. It is a lonesome howl. It is a where-has-my-family-gone howl and a why-was-I-left-behind howl.

Fortunately, it won’t last long. In the morning I will tie up the younger dogs so that they are together. I’ll let them run loose for hours and tire them out. We’ll have fun. We’ll forget that the dog lot and house are empty. We’ll play games and go on walks and they will learn things they can’t learn when they are running with the team and they will think Life Is Good.

Life is good.

The puppies that were born this year are my future Iditarod team and school for them officially starts tomorrow.

The Hot and Cold Adventure

Sarah · September 25, 2013 ·

We woke to snow swirls yesterday morning. The grins on our faces were big and gawky as we looked out our window and took in the snow-top covered mountains. The day looked ripe with promise and we were on a mission: We invested in a 22′ enclosed trailer for training this year and we needed to start working on building the interior — so we thought a trip to Anchorage was in order

. There is something magical about the Seward Highway, no matter the time of year, but fall is my favorite: the mountains caked with fresh snow, the grasses and leaves shimmer yellow and red – nature’s sunset as we prepare for a long, cold winter.

Of course when you own sled dogs, nothing is simple. You can’t hop into the truck and just leave. You’ve got to feed dogs — we’ve been feeding mostly fish and kibble — and make sure things are in relatively good order before you leave, even if it is just a day trip. We had to get antifreeze and coolant. We had to check oil. We had to get gas and food. We had to put the house dogs out.

Finally, we were in the truck and on our way. Grayson was driving. Travis was reading an old issue of Mushing Magazine. I was simply excited to be on the move. The trip was slow. Just outside of Seward there is road construction and we were stuck for a half hour, waiting. Once we finally got moving, we crawled.

But it wasn’t long before our slow crawl came to an abrupt halt.

Our engine started over heating and we had to pull off to the side outside Summit Lake. I think it could have been really easy to get angry and frustrated at this point as what normally is maybe an hour long drive had taken us at least two hours, but instead we laughed and enjoyed the fact that it was a Monday and we were doing our own thing. We let the engine cool for a bit and turned home, afraid to trying going further down the road.

When the engine started heating up again, we stopped at a random trail head to let the truck cool down for awhile. It was the first walk we’d taken in a long time where I didn’t know where I’d end up. We hiked a short ways to a stream and watched the water run.

We never made it to Anchorage, but that was entirely ok; we got the adventure we wanted even if it was not the adventure we had planned.

Change is in the Air

Sarah · September 20, 2013 ·

It’s cold in the mornings. Travis wakes before the sun is done coming up, when its rays start splintering through our windows scratching at our eyes. “Get up! Get up!” The sun is saying. Travis pokes me a couple of times, realizes I am quite content to stay in bed, and kisses me goodbye. I sleep another hour; he heads outside.

There is the quiet barking at first. One dog here and there. Not the whole lot of them barking, just a few. It’s always just the excitable dogs at first who want Travis’ attention, his love that bark first. Then it invariably gets louder. Maybe he is throwing them a fish or shows a harness, it varies. No two things twice in a row. We aren’t organized enough for that.

It’s been a long, tough, summer for us all. We are young and filled our plates with too much stuff. Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs. We had a blast doing tours but there were so many new components to it this year — employees, managing a glacier camp, and a huge learning curve…Now we reveal in the quietness of our days, the way you sit on the couch after Thanksgiving Day Dinner and watch football. That’s how we are passing the days now, digesting everything we’ve accomplished, waiting until we feel less full.

When I finally leave the comfort of my bed at 8:15, the team is already gone and the lot is already quiet again. Sometimes, they howl — the dogs who are left behind — and sometimes I feel like joining them. I hate staying home. Still, there is something that feels so intrusive about interrupting Travis’ early morning routine by tagging along, like watching a magician practice his tricks before the show. Instead, I try to figure out where to start my day.

We have lived in our home on Exit Glacier Road for almost two years. Yesterday, I hung our first picture up. It was strangely gratifying. I will work on the house for a few hours and try to do the things your supposed to do when you move in that we never did because we started a business instead. And then, as if one wasn’t enough, we said hey! lets take on another one! So now, finally, a quiet lull, and we are moving in; painting walls and tearing walls down, adding furniture and cabinets, fleshing out our skeleton home. We are putting our roots down. We’re here to stay. This is not just a house; it’s our home. And we need it to feel that way.

Eventually, I get sick of working — wrapping up business paperwork and organizing our kitchen. We have 17 cans of kidney beans in our closet, in case you wanted to know. (Don’t worry, we have even more cans of diced tomatoes and chicken broth.) Travis comes back somewhere in the middle of all this and begins hooking up another team to head out on another. I put by boots on and go out.

“Get on,” he says. The team is already all hooked up.

“Ok.” I clamber up the four wheeler.

“You ready?” He asks.

“Always,” I say.

He grins and calls the dogs up. And just like that, we’re off on another adventure…

Rope Swinging

Sarah · August 3, 2013 ·

The days are slowly shortening. The last brilliant purple and pink fireweed petals hang to their tall, almost barren stalks and slowly, the weather is changing. It’s been a little cooler and a little rainier: fall is slowly weaving it’s way into the landscape. The beginning of the end of summer is slowly coming upon us. The 2013 Iditarod movie was released several days ago and Travis has already studied it half a dozen times. The fervor of fall training starts to eat away at him.

“I really just can’t wait to train,” He tells me. “These dogs are incredible.”

A few nights ago, we were dragged out of the house by our friends in an effort to beat the heat and have some fun. We headed out to Bear Lake, a few miles north of downtown Seward to go boating and swimming. The water was warm — and not “Alaskan” warm either. The water temperature was a balmy 64.7 degrees. The best part? We launched ourself off an amazingly built rope swing only accessible by boat for a few blissful hours.

It felt wonderful to fling ourselves like Tarzan into the water. When we splashed, we would sometimes see the red backs of spawning Salmon jump up and flick the surface. When I first let go of the rope, I thought I’d come up gasping because the water would be cold but it was absolutely wonderful. We stayed out late and swam and swung ourselves off the rope for several hours.

What fun.