by John Pann - John is a senior writing student and will graduating in May this year. After graduation, he plans to move to San Francisco and begin the slow climb towards becoming a magazine editor-in-chief. Good luck to all the mushers in this year's UP 200.
Laura Holmberg has decided that she doesn’t like racing her dog sled
team at night anymore. It’s not because she’s afraid of the dark or the
boogeyman, but rather because of an association problem. She associates
night racing with her spill at last year’s Midnight Run, the night that
her lead dog, Audrey, decided to make her own decision, taking a left
towards a giant tree instead of the right Holmberg had intended.
“It nearly wiped out all of my dogs on the left side and sent me and
the sled sliding right up the side of an old Beech tree and into half a
barrel roll in midair,” said Holmberg, a Marquette, Mich. area musher.
“All I remember as I was coming back down to earth was that I was
going to lose my grip and I yelled to my dogs, almost in slow motion‘Nooooooo!’ I landed in a big belly flop with my feet higher than my
head and a face full of snow.”
Holmberg chased her team down by riding on the runners of a fellow
mushers sled.
“When I did catch up to my team at the bottom of the hill, they were
lined out just as pretty as could be, Audrey licking her chops like
nothing had happened,” said Holmberg.
Local U.P. 200 musher Darlene Walch had a similar experience with
naughty dogs. Walch and her neighbor both run dog teams and one day
decided to go out and practice passing on the trails. They agreed to
meet at a 4-way stop.
“Everything was going according to plan, except when his team got
there they turned around and faced my team,” said Walch. “We were
facing each other, trying to do hand signals over the dogs barking
because we couldn’t hear each other when we yelled.” They concluded
that a head-on pass was the only solution.
The lead dogs from each team went by each other, and Walch said that
they almost made it. But then one of her second dogs jumped over the
gangline of his dogs and before either team knew what was happening,
the dogs were jumping and barking amongst each other, a tangle of lines
and fur.
“Dogs being what they are they start playing around, messing around,
checking each other out getting more tangled all the time,” said Walch.
“The real kicker came when we found this dog in the middle of a pile of
dogs, and neither of us could figure out whose team it belonged to. It
took us about a half hour to get them untangled.”
These stories might cast an unfavorable light on the sport of sled dog
racing. In a sport that is commonly known to be expensive and time
consuming, it’s a wonder these loyal and devoted mushers keep coming
back for more.
“It’s really addictive. I try to imagine what it would be like not to
have them and that’s really hard,” said Walch. “When it works, it’s
great. When the dogs are working well together as a team, it’s an
amazing thing to watch. They are absolute athletes and it’s incredible
to watch them work.”