The calls are few and far between from Travis, so I know things are going well and he is having fun. The dogs, he said, are enjoying the trails which are mostly soft clay. “Good for their feet,” he told me. “I can run them further.” 
He’s been putting on longer mileage, slowly taking the dogs further and further. It sounds like he’s camped quite a bit and has run in to many other mushers out on the trails. That’s the nice thing about Willow known as “the dog mushing capital of the world” there are mushers everywhere. It’s fun running down the trails and passing other teams rather than just passing cars. 
They’ve mostly been running at night, using the lights of the four wheeler and a head lamp to light the way. The weather is still pretty warm and with the longer runs he’s been doing it doesn’t do the dogs any good to run them during the heat of the day. These pictures look like they were taken early evening on a somewhat rainy day. I’ve had a few calls around 10:00pm just before he heads out to run though. I hope the weather there is as nice as it has been in Seward! 
Mostly, It sounds like it’s going well. When he isn’t running dogs he’s been visiting with friends in the area, no doubt talking dogs and the upcoming race season. 
And that’s how things go. One run and then another and then another. 
Back at home I’ve been staying busy catching up on projects. I finished painting our living room which I started during Iditarod and also somehow found time to paint my office. It’s amazing what a little bit of color can do to a room. The puppies have enjoyed plenty of play time too. It’s been fun letting all the dogs here run loose for an hour or so each day. Anyways, back to work for me!
2013
A Day at Turning Heads Kennel in Pictures
A picture is worth a thousand words. I apologize in advance. I didn’t take pictures very regularly and often times started a project and forgot to show a finishing picture. Whoops! The things you learn…Anyways, without further delay…
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In the morning when Travis is gone, I wake to Max. He never goes on the bed with me while I am awake but always climbs on after I’m asleep. Strangely, he never wakes me although our bed sits maybe 3.5 feet high.
I also wake to this handsome fellow. Although he does not like having his picture taken. Usually he is either cuddled in my arms like some weird alive teddy bear or he is cuddled up with Max. Midnight is a strange cat and so is his girlfriend Noon. Don’t worry Cat Tales: Stories Of Cats in Dog Land is going to be a series of blog posts when I can get around to writing it. You won’t believe half the stuff I tell you though. Fact really is stranger than fiction. In the morning when I wake up it’s sunny so I go outside. We have four puppies: Bruce, Marlow, Flo, and Aldawin who I need to tie up. Bruce is very, very unhappy with this decision. Growing up sucks Bruce, believe me, I know! At least you have someone who brings you dinner and cleans up after you. The pained look on his face is nowhere near as bad as the pained look on my face…this dog sounds like nails on a chalk board. If he tried out for American Idol they would show his video because it’s hard to imagine a sound like that actually existing. Yes, it’s that bad…he is very cute though! After I tie them up, I let my younger puppies loose to play. The little puppies come over to say hi to Bruce. Bruce got to run loose shortly after this and play too. I had all the dogs loose. It was great! Bruce is pretty popular. Marlow! He’s so happy. That’s Posey (TBD) playing with him. Max is always a crowd favorite. Travis calls at this point and tells me that their are fish. Great. I end up putting the puppies away (they protest) and heading out. We’ve been getting fish recently from the Bear Creek Fish Weir and the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association. They routinely help us fill our freezers and our dogs bellies with salmon. In return, we do our best to help them. Here are some pictures of us at work, gathering and freezing fish from the weir. We would like to thank both Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association and Resurrection Bay Seafoods for their help. We rely on these fish to help lower our food costs and as valuable food for the dogs throughout training and racing. Many of these fish will be cut up and sent out in our Iditarod drop bags as they are one of the dogs most favorite snacks. The salmon start off in this holding pen and are then taken out and are used for SCIENCE. When we get the fish, they are fresh out of the water. Sometimes they’ve been cut open. They are slimy. They are stinky. And you have to throw them. The tote below holds 197 fish. I know because we have to count them. The Weir writes us a ticket for the fish in case we get pulled over by Fish and Game. Also big thank you to Adventure 60 North and Rick Brown for letting me use their truck while ours is up in Willow! It was fun driving an old ford stick shift. You can see the fish below have been cut open. They were used to make baby salmon. They take the males and females, fertilize the eggs and then bring them to different hatcheries. They also have to check their kidneys to make sure they don’t carry a genetic disease that can be lethal to the young fry (what baby salmon are called). You can see that I have an empty tote in my truck. Unfortunately, the only way to move the fish is by hand. So I put on fish gloves and start huckin. It’s not long before I am knee deep in fish slime. The worse part is the closer you get to finishing the slimier you get because you have to reach in over the sides of the tote. It is pretty gross. It is daunting work. I come home to find the dogs relaxing in the sun, a tote of smelly fish in the back of the truck. They are not able to freeze them right away at RBS. The puppies are happy to see me, though I wake them from a very cute nap. And no, not all these puppies are from the same mom. They were born within 3 days of each other however and I like my dogs well socialized. Eep more fish! I had to go to RBS to drop them off for freezing…and you know what that means? Slime Fest 2.0! We have to take the fish and put them on trays to freeze. We freeze each fish individually. Pretty nice. It makes chopping them into snacks for the dogs a breeze! Then we have to take some of our already froze fish home…to do that we need a big box! We take all the frozen fish and put them in the box we made: That’s Kris, Travis’ brother-in-law. Without him it would be really hard to do this! His cousin Andrew is also a huge help. It really helps lower our dog food costs! Then we take the big box home: And then we get home and Sarah realizes there is no room. Anywhere…and I spend the whole day cutting fish up so I can fit it all in the freezer. Cut up fish takes up way less space then whole fish. A big thank you to Ian Beals, Travis’ younger brother, for coming over and helping me. Together, we probably cut up some 700 or 800 pounds worth of fish. Intense! What’s crazy is if I were to take a picture of my day tomorrow it would look NOTHING like today. I wasn’t very good at taking pictures at regular intervals. Maybe Next time I’ll do that…but I’m more of a writer anyways.
The Ebb and Flow of Things
It should be obvious enough that we are dog people. Our life revolves around our dogs: In the morning we wake to water and feed them, Then there is scooping the yard, running them, feeding them again, and if we can, running them again. At least that’s how the days go by this time of year. In the heart of winter it’s different, the days go by slower and longer, and in the spring it’s different too, perhaps more relaxed, but it’s not much different. Still even so time passes, not so much in the changing of the seasons but in the life cycle of our dogs.
We watch the puppies transition, first away from their mothers, then into the dog lot, and then, finally into harness. We watch their goofy progression as they learn how to manage their lines in the team and how not to chew on the gangline or their neckline and finally we watch as they come into a steady, rhythmic gate, their legs moving so swiftly and effortlessly you could balance a glass of water on their back.
The playful puppies Travis had when we first started dating now have the look of hardened athletes who know what competition. They are steadfast. They give their heart and soul on each and every run. They are more disciplined this year — and so are we. As they grow up and learn the rhythm of training, we grow up and learn how to train and live and balance running dogs with running a home and managing two businesses. I am honestly still not sure how we do it. I guess the way you do anything hard: one step at a time, then another, then another, then another. Progress seems slow but we are always moving forward.
The older dogs who once ruled the dog lot — Pilot and Hope — have gone on to help a neighboring musher and have left our yard for the winter.
When we dropped Pilot and Hope off Travis said few words, his sadness greater than my own for as many times as they had come to my rescue, I knew they had come to his more. Together they have travelled countless miles not only across the frozen wilderness but also across his childhood; Pilot and Hope had run almost every junior race with Travis and had helped him qualify for the Iditarod.
Last year, when picking out his Iditarod team, Travis choose to take Pilot despite the fact that he thought Pilot wouldn’t finish. “He always has my back,” Travis said when I questioned the decision. Pilot, sure enough, ran 700 miles with Travis and then broke out of the checkpoint when Travis left him behind. “I guess he wasn’t as tired as I thought,” Travis told me. “Some guy from the checkpoint had to go out on a snowmachine and bring Pilot back. He wanted to keep going with the team. I thought he hadn’t been feeling well. Guess I was wrong.”
As we drove away from Pilot and Hope’s new home, my eyes were full of tears. Travis told me, “Pilot and Hope are teachers.”
I nodded, thinking of all the fantastic dog runs I’d had with them both and everything I’d taken away from my time with them. How do you measure what a dog has taught you? Pilot and Hope got me through my first 200 mile race, The Tustumena 200. They were the old solidified backbone to my otherwise young, rookie dog team. They encouraged not only the young dogs who would later form the core of Travis’ Iditarod team to keep going, but they also encouraged me: I was intimidated by the intensity of what I had undertaken — two hundred miles of unending hills, without sleep, with only my dogs.
He continued, “They need a new musher, new dogs to teach. They know they are getting old. Would you rather sit around remembering all the awesome times you had when you were younger or would you rather keep having them? They aren’t fast enough to keep up with the young dogs they’ve trained anymore. I think they will be much happier here feeling like they are still A-team stuff.”
We’d seen this throughout the summer on tours and we’d seen it last winter too, especially with Hope. They weren’t running in the front anymore and though excited to go anywhere in the team it was always obvious to me that lead dogs, even when not up front, never stop leading.
Our dogs grow up and grow old and one day, we always hope its a long ways off, they pass on. We measure our lives by our dogs presences and their subsequent absences. Pilot and Hope are not gone; they have simply moved on to another kennel but I can’t help but feel that we are growing up and growing older too: we are no longer uncertain in ourselves or our young team — we are confident in what we have built.
A Short Break On Their Trip to Willow….
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.”
Change is in the Air
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…