Location: McCarty, Alaska
Occupation: Front Desk at a historic hotel, and dog musher
Next Race or Adventure: Buying some land and moving and then hopefully starting a tour business.
We spent the day in McCarthy, Alaska with Kenna and her partner Aidan, talking mushing and living close to one of the country’s largest national parks, Wrangell St. Elias. We spoke about living the mushing lifestyle and much more.
Did you know her favorite piece of gear is a Bluetooth headband? “So you can have a headband instead of headphones for music. And it’s so comfortable, and you can just press pause and play from your head. It’s a great piece of mushing gear.”
Her favorite song right now is called “Wolfsong” by Camp and she highly recommends the book, This Much Country by Kristin Knight-Pace.
Socials: Waylons Way
The Iditraod, one day, maybe 2030.
I really want to explore Wrangell St. Elias National Park. Okay, and this is your backyard, so it’s definitely a cool place you can explore probably for a lifetime right here.
My biggest pet peeve is when stacking dishes. I like to have the forks and the other silverware in a bowl. And I hate it when they are just lying in the bottom of the sink.
Music.
It’s hard to reach your dreams, but you shouldn’t stop. It’s going to be hard.
It’s a Dog Paddle Dystem sled. Brent Sass’s old sled. I really like it. It’s very flexible.
I can easily hang on when I crash. That’s a big plus. It can fit a lot of stuff in the sled bag as well.
It is not switching out my leaders soon enough.
I learned that, you know, at the first sign, if a leader is losing confidence or is maybe a little too confident to switch them out with somebody who will be more trustworthy in that moment.
Facing fear. I grew up in Arizona. I really get nervous with frozen water because, being from Arizona, frozen water means death, probably. So I’m extremely cautious about that. And a lot of the exploring we do here in the park it’s a lot of river running. It’s a lot of river crossings, and you’re out in the wilderness. So it can be really anxiety-inducing. And what I love about mushing is you kind of don’t have a choice. You have to face your fears. And I think that is the hardest thing for me to overcome.
You know, mushing can be pretty hard. The chores can be a lot. I think it’s really important to focus on your connection with the dogs and that’ll help you get through anything together.
A sunny February day where it’s 15 below.
I would say it was my first race, the T-Dog 200.
We left from Minto, it was a mass start, and there was so much passing, and anytime somebody stopped, we would all pass each other, and it was very frustrating. And then, towards the end of the race, my dogs were sure that they knew we were going to this boat launch instead of the finish line. And they took a lot of convincing to get back on the trail. That was…pretty challenging for me mentally.
What scares me the most is that you talked about the open water, frozen water. did talk about the water that does scare me.
I think a bigger fear is losing the team. Okay. All right. That is the fear of a lot.
Peanut butter and oat balls with chocolate chips in them.
The feeling of being free.
We have trails that lead to public use cabins, and I went out on a 40-mile run one night, and there was a crazy amount of overflow, and I forgot my in-reach, and there’s no service out there.
And I just crashed a lot. It was not a fun run. So I don’t think I would run that trail there and back again in one go.
