New Blog Site

I have now upgraded the www.undervegs.no website and moved the blog to this site.

For future updates please visit http://www.undervegs.no/UNDERVEGS/News/News.html

New Year

Normally we feed the dogs on their chains or harnessed in the team, but when they stay in the dog room in the barn I have fed them loose all 17. It is interesting to see how they behave in this situation. No one is allowed to touch the meet in the bucket and Vosko is making sure it does not happen...

Tuva got her first sled for christmas and is now taking her share in the training.

After long distances on relatively hard surface before christmas we are now having some days of workout with steep hills and soft snow. It does not go fast, but the dogs have to work hard and it gives good lead dog training. On the cold days it is also much warmer up in the mountains than here down in the valley. We started home at 80 meter above sea level and climbed a peak of 1200m. On the way we went trough several mountains passes and some interesting places, specially when my brake broke...

Training in the mountains

Finally we have started the trips into the mountain areas of Indre Troms. This last week we have had good trips to Dærta and Altevatn. It was not plenty of snow, but acceptable, to Derta. At Altevatn the snow and trail conditions were really good. All the dogs seems happy after this hard training week, and no major injuries so far is also a good sign. In the barn we have re established the dog-room in the old stable, so that they can get maximum recovery after training on cold days.

Hard November soon over

Ideally a hard November should mean hard training for the dogs, but not this year. November has been hard of solid ice on roads and everywhere else making the training difficult. We have almost managed to do the planned training, but it has involved a lot of traveling to Kiruna, Skibotn, Dividalen and Øvre Sopero. Finally the snow has arrived again making doglife a little lighter... But we have also had some really good trips the last weeks. Cart training in the mountains of Skibotn and sledding in Soppero with expert mushers imported all the way from Australia. In Soppero we did long runs during the day and warmed up in the sauna afterwards.

Training updates

Snow has come and left us again, but we reached some good trips with the sled. I had one grate trip when I took the dogs moose hunting and we managed to get as close as 70 m to a moose. Only problem was that It was 200 m into the neighbour territory...
At the moment we are back on the atv training. I did a 32 km run with all 17 dogs this afternoon and they all seamed to do it easily.
Coming weekend we go to Nordreisa to train together with other teams from Tromsø, Norreisa and Alta and we look forward to this. Our goal is to manage 500 km of training in October, we will see if we get that far.... Most important is that the dogs seems healthy and eager to go on with the training.

Training starts

Even with a warm start of August we have managed to get started at the training and is almost on our schedule... The thing that I am most happy with is that the culture in the dogyard seems relaxed and good. All dogs behave well when they are running loose and the new, chaos style, line system is working good. The 17 dogs run on a line that is as long as a normal 10 dog string, without neck lines and with shorter pulling lines.  This gives good control of the team and the dogs must learn to behave in the harnessing/starting situation.