Seward

Where’s the Snow?

Sarah · December 12, 2012 ·

November seemed to come and go without any real excitement and, more importantly, without snow. It’s been cold the last few weeks but the skies have been mercilessly clear. Over the weekend we had our first snowfall. Unfortunately, it wasn’t significant and it rained after so Travis went north. At this point he’s spent more time in Knik training with fellow musher (and good friend) Wade Marrs than in Seward.

The Team out at Kenai Fjords National Park

I stayed in town and managed to put on about 70 miles on my team over the weekend and do some oddball projects. As we move into the heart of mushing season, we get less and less time to ourselves, to our families, and to each other so we’re doing all that we can now to make life simpler later on. Over the weekend I prepared a bunch of freezer meals for our crockpot. If you live in Seward and want to help the kennel out, this is a simple & cheap donation that makes our lives easier, healthier, and tastier. I made these meals for nights when we’re too busy or tired to cook. Simply thaw and throw in the crock pot. My type of cooking! I’ve started working on some pasta dishes — and no, I haven’t gotten around to making a lasagna yet — to bring up north with us when we train out of our friends house.

I’ve also started making burritos. They’re good trail snacks and easy to eat one handed. We like every sort of burrito: breakfast, bean, chicken…they’re all delicious! I feel like I’m slowly winning the battle, but I’m not convinced that I’ve won the war just yet… Lots and lots more to do but slow progress is still progress.

The dog runs went well. It was our first trip out to Kenai Fjords National Park with the dogs and I was excited to get out there. They close the road to the park in the winter so people can mush, ski, and snowmachine out there. It’s such a beautiful place in the wintertime. We love seeing the mountains covered in snow and there is usually wildlife to be seen. We’re excited to do our first season of winter tours out there — what a beautiful place to share with our guests.

Travis took all the dogs contending for his Iditarod team with him North so I had mostly puppies and no real lead dogs. It made for an interesting run, especially because to get out to the park you have to carefully navigate the dogs through a gate about 3.5 feet wide — barely wide enough for my fourwheeler. I was impressed. We went out a total of 4 times and they did it flawlessly all but the first.

On my first run, I saw 5 moose including two bulls. When we see moose they’re almost always in the same spot: right by the park entrance. In heavy snow years they can present a problem but with so little snow they’re happy to stay away from the dogs and don’t try to hold there ground quite as much. We also ran into some cross country skiiers and the puppies on my team were terribly frightened by the strange humans with large feet. By the end of my trip, all but 1 dog had learned that the skiers didn’t present a threat. They all passed exceptionally well.

Travis did a similar trip up north with his dogs — though he camped out on the trail.He said the dogs did great but he was quite sick and is currently fighting the flu. Still, he went out and trained because that’s what is needed. “I only got real sick a couple of times,” he told me. He broke trail most of his run which made it tough for the dogs but was excellent training.

Today, I tied the puppies up to their houses. It’s always bittersweet — it means they are growing up and becoming real sled dogs and losing that cute puppy charm. They whine and protest loudly at first, yanking on the end of their chains trying to get their collars to pop off their heads. Archie ran around while they were screaming and tried to calm them down. Today they were greeted by our neighbor, a large bald eagle who has made it a habit to come sit in our dog yard during the morning. His nest is in our yard and for the longest time we were afraid that our dogs would scare him away — but I think if anything, the dogs have become a source of entertainment for him and his young. He often sits and watches them and occasionally we leave a frozen fish out for him. You can bet he enjoys that.Today he came when the puppies started screaming and he started screaming back at them. It always interesting to watch different species interact and there was no doubt in mind that they were trying to communicate with one other. The puppies would whine, the eagle would screech and the puppies would whine back. On and on it went. Who knows what, if anything, they said to one another. The eagle’s son came and sat in the tree to for a while, though he was less vocal.

The last week we’ve been busy with events. On Wednesday we went to the Seward Elementary School and did a short Q&A on dog mushing. It was a blast. The Student Leadership Team, one of our sponsors, helped set it up. The team is composed of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders — they’ve been far too kind and it’s been great working with such a young, talented, enthusiastic, group of kids. They sure make us feel special and have been a wonderful sponsor to work with.

On Thursday we hosted a Family Night at the Seward Brewing Company. We played pin the booty to the dog, had dog mushing themed coloring, brought Archie and Bonnie to meet all the kids, and had hot cocoa. It was really fun to take a break from the lonesome dog trails and to get out and be a part of the Seward community. We feel really blessed to be part of such a wonderful town and we’re really happy to be able to do something for the kids.

The week before we delivered Santa Claus to the Alaska Sea Life Center’s Tree Lighting Ceremony. We drove the dogs through a parking lot (no obvious trail) and through a crowd of people. It went flawlessly. We were thrilled to see how well trained our lead dogs are. It’s quite impressive and I have to think that our summer dog sled tours really helped. Our tour is SO COOL because we use it as real training: our dogs are constantly listening to commands. We used it as an opportunity to fine tune their abilities and to train a few new leaders. We’d like to thank the Alaska SeaLife Center for sharing their photos with us and for letting us be a part of their holiday celebration. What a blast!

In other news, our first race of the season, The Sheep Mountain 150, was cancelled yesterday due to lack of snow. While we are disappointed, we are not devastated. We have many other races to look forward to and are hoping that the snow will get here soon.

Well that’s it for now. We are looking for a few homes for some of our dogs who aren’t quite cut out for competitive mushing / life as a sled dog. If you are interested in adopting one of our dogs or know someone who may be interested, please email us at Info@TurningHeadsKennel.com All are friendly, good with kids, and are loved tremendously by us so we’d like to see them put in a good home. We’ll post more on this later with pictures and descriptions of the dogs but please keep us in mind if you know someone who is looking. These are AWESOME dogs.

Happy Trails.

Volunteering with The Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association

Sarah · October 11, 2011 ·

One of our sponsors is the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association. Every year they kindly donate us fish after they have taken eggs from them and in exchange we try to help them out when they need it. They use the eggs they collect to stock the hatcheries. They also monitor how many fish they get as it is critical to fish and game for determining when they can open up to commercial fisherman in the beginning of the season. They have to let so many fish return to their spawning grounds so that the salmon population will stay stable before they can allow fisherman to start catching them. Good idea, because they sure are tasty!

The Bear Creek Weir, which is where we get our fish from here in town, has two big salmon runs. In the spring, they have the Sockeye Salmon, also known as the reds (for salmon illiterate folk like me) and here in the fall they have the Silvers.

Not really knowing a whole lot about salmon, I found coming down to volunteer some of my time pretty interesting. The whole idea is that we are helping the hatcheries and keeping the salmon stock healthy. To that extent, we’ve collected about 140 silver salmon eggs and fertilized them so far. It’s a pretty interesting process. First, the salmon swim up to the weir. It’s approximately a 7-mile swim from the ocean to the weir and takes the fish about 5 days. Then, the fish are forced to swim up into the fish trap.

identifier?continue=https%3A%2F%2Flh3.google — Salmon Fish Trap: This is the only opening in Bear Creek so the fish are forced to swim up into the holding pens.

Once in the fish trap they are sorted male/female. For every 3 females the weir takes 1 male. I’m still not exactly sure why they don’t do a 1:1 ratio, but I guess they have their reasons!

When enough fish have been captured, the weir performs an egg take. That’s when we go in and help them. Although no one part of the egg take is particularly difficult, when you add it all together if you don’t have enough people it can be a lot of work.

The first thing we do is kill the fish. We only kill a few at a time so that everything stays fresh. I ended up helping bleed fish on one of the days I helped for the first part of the morning. Essentially, I cut near the tail so that the fish would bleed out. It makes it easier to take the eggs and, more importantly, to get a kidney sample later on.

They put the eggs of three females in one bucket. Then, they take a male salmon and (this is kind of gross) they essentially squeeze the sperm out of him to fertilize the eggs. Once this is done, the eggs are put in a salt water rinse.

The fish, both male and female, are then taken and kidney samples are taken to ensure that they don’t have kidney disease. I guess it is a pretty prevalent disease among salmon and they are trying to ensure a healthy stock. From what I could tell (I mostly bagged kidneys) it seemed like the fish were healthy. If the findings show any of the fish have the disease, however, the eggs will be tossed out.

2011 10 10 11 04 18 291 — Kidney sample from the 80th female. This will be tested for kidney disease. If it’s positive, the eggs from this fish will be thrown out.

After all that has been done, Travis and I get to take some of the fish and the rest goes to other local mushers. It’s really a great set up and we’re really happy we have such a cool way to spend our time and to help out. We are extremely grateful that the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association helps us feed our dogs tasty salmon all winter long and that they provide us with such an interesting volunteer opportunity!

July 4th

Sarah · July 5, 2011 ·

This year marked my first 4th of July in Seward. Travis, well, he’s been doing 4th of July here for pretty much ever. Because of the late setting sun, the fire work display was actually held at midnight. Travis was driving down from Anchorage and ended up missing it but didn’t care. The morning of the 4th he hemmed and hawed about whether or not he actually wanted to do the race — he hadn’t trained a bit — but ultimately he decided (with a little poking and prodding) that he should do it.

In the end, Travis beat his time from last year. He finished the race 15 minutes behind the leaders. It took him 1 hour and 1 minute to get to the finish line. The Mt. Marathon race is described as “a climb and descent on Mt. Marathon – a mile and a half up and a mile and a half down, complete with cliffs, scree fields, waterfalls, and a spectacular view.”

It was pretty cool watching from down below. Although I couldn’t pick Travis out of the hundred of people up on the mountain, it was interesting watching them scurry up! up! up! As soon as the racers made it to the top, the descent was done with lightening speeds. Apparently, it only takes about 10 minutes to go down the whole mountain.

Travis’ trick for the whole thing was to never stop moving. It was a pretty amazing feet of athleticism on his part…but he sure will be sore the next week or two, I’d bet!