Category archives: Uncategorized

Hugh Neff has spent the last 15 years transforming himself. Gone is the rag-tag transplant from Chicago who showed up at races with no money, too few dogs and very little experience. In his place is a professional who has honed his craft through due diligence.Neff has helped start races…

You have to learn to walk before you can run.I was thrilled to get the chance to sit down and talk with Bjørnar Andersen at his home in Sørskogbygda, nestled in the pine forests of Eastern Norway. Like his dogs, Bjørnar is quiet and very calm, and it is easy…

By and large when it comes to mushing there are two ways folks enter into the sport. Some like to go from zero to 60 by hooking up a team of dogs and stepping on the runners with no previous experience or practice.Others take a somewhat saner, safer approach working…

Located in the heart of Fairbanks’ sprint mushing community lies the kennel of Dr. Arleigh Reynolds. Arleigh has been racing open-class sprints for less than a decade, yet has won some big races here in Alaska. This last year was perhaps the best for PileDriver kennel, having placed a close…

Featured in the Sept/Oct 2010 Issue: Some people don’t consider mushing a real sport. But it takes just as much skill and endurance as throwing a football or dribbling a basketball. With the wind in your face, the snow flying by the sides of the sled, the dogs making no…

When you think of southern California you probably think of Disneyland, Beach Boys, blonde girls in bikinis or hunky lifeguards and you probably don’t think about dog sledding! Well, there’s a park in southern California where on most Saturday mornings you’ll find between 40-50 dogs and 20-25 people “dog sledding…

I couldn’t take another minute of it, and I didn’t care about the blizzard coming, I just wanted to get away. The black arctic voles were everywhere. They were crawling in my sleeping bag, scampering across my dinner plate, tangling in my hair at night. Heck, they even took up…

It took me a very long time to write Ballad of the Northland. It first came into my mind to create ‘Ballad’ when I was eighteen years old (many years ago!) I had volunteered my services to the Iditarod as a checker, and the first place they sent me was…

In the spring and summer of 2009 I paddled over 1,000 miles around the Minnesota Arrowhead Region in a birch bark canoe with my companion Kitigan, a two-year-old female Alaskan Husky sled dog. I bought this dog as a yearling from musher John Stetson in Duluth, Minnesota in the spring…

There are places where it’s hard to travel. There is terrain that’s not easy to cross – deep punchy snow, glare ice, overflow, no trail, gravel bars, side hills, snowless frozen tundra tussocks. There are situational factors that make for hard travel: a small dog team pulling two sleds, an…