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We're down to less than 10 hours of daylight now and we're losing itat a rapid rate, almost 6 minutes a day. When we go off daylight savings time later this month, it will suddenly become very dark in the middle of the afternoon, which is our surest sign that winter is finally here.

The weather has also cooled off somewhat. Our string of frosty mornings continued until today. Yesterday all of my thermometers registered right at 5 degrees Fahrenheit above zero (-15 C). By the way, this winter in the diary I'm going to give temperatures in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and many distances in both English and metric. I'm also using the 24-hourclock, or what some people call "military time," which is actually the normal way to tell time in most of the world.

Anyway, this morning the clouds moved in and snow started to fall. By early afternoon, though, the snow had changed mostly to rain and things got really messy. The ground is still largely frozen underneath, so the water is puddling on the surface rather than sinking in. It's way too messy to do anything with the dogs, so they're moping around in their houses waiting for me to come out to the dog yard. Then they get super-excited and bounce around in the water and mud and expect me to come play with them. Nice try, guys.

Thursday I got to do something I haven't done before--work on a Hollywood film crew. The crew of about 20 people was in Talkeetna to do a Burger King commercial that's due to come out around Christmas. There were also about 15 people from Alaska, including a friend of mine who runs a dog-tour business down at Girdwood, south of Anchorage near the big Alyeska ski resort. His team was part of the commercial, and he asked me to help him as a handler.

As chief pilot for Hudson Air Service in Talkeetna every summer, I've worked on a lot of film shoots before, but always as a pilot flying our Cessnas and not actually as part of the crew. This was a new experience for me. We all met at the Talkeetna airport behind the Hudson hangar at7 a.m. Thursday morning and loaded ten dogs into airline kennels and then onto a Bell 212 helicopter (the kind that makes the loud wop-wop-wop sound).The pilot let me fly the helicopter for part of the way up, which was also something new for me, since I don't have a helicopter rating. (It flies a lot like the C-130s I used to fly in the Air Force, only not quite as fast.)

We landed on top of a snow-covered ridge 4,000 feet high in the Talkeetna Mountains about 15 miles southeast of Talkeetna. On top of the ridge was a big camp with a couple of large tents, a handful of snowmachines, electric generators putting away, and lights and cables and cameras everywhere. The view to the west back out over the Susitna Valley was stunning. I could see all the way to my place about 10 miles due west. To the east, we could see right into the heart of the Talkeetna Mountains, more than 9,000 feet high. To the south we could see all the way down to Cook Inlet and Anchorage, 60 miles away. It was quite a place to go to work.

As near as I could figure it out, the commercial will eventually show a dog team heading across the wilderness with a boy in the sled carrying a Burger King Big Kids Meal bag (I think that's all trademarked, by the way). There will be a close-up shot and a far-away shot or two, and maybe one of just the sled and musher. Finally the team will pull up to a log cabin and the kid will jump out and run up to the front porch (prominently carrying the Burger King bag, of course) and then knock on the door while the team jumps and howls in the background and the musher acts like he's very cold. I don't know what happens after that because it will be done on a sound stage somewhere back in California.

Musher with actor in sled holding fake
hamburger bag before a shot.

The schedule for the day called for half a dozen different shots. The dogs were in most of them. For each one the rest of the film crew set up props and sets and lights and incredibly expensive movie cameras. There were also a couple of generators going all the time, plus several snowmachines zooming around taking people and gear to the various locations, which were all within a half mile along the flat top of the ridge.

One interesting thing about all of these film shoots is that film people speak a different language. This is really evident because everyone hasa radio to talk back and forth. All of the people on the "location" (the place where the filming is going on) are called on the radio by their jobs--for instance, "makeup", "wardrobe", and "camera". There are also "grips" and" gaffers" and "safety" and "crafts" and "transportation" and (in our case)"dogs", meaning the musher.

The actors are called "talent" and the lead actors (in this case the boy) are called the "heroes". The special Burger King bags carried by the boy in this commercial were called "hero bags". Anybody from the advertising agency is called "agency", and anybody from the company doing the advertising(which means paying for everything) is called "client". A typical radio call might be something like, "Will somebody find transportation and get a snowmobile over to the craft tent to bring the hero and some hero bags over to wardrobe!" All of this is usually said in a highly agitated voice, often by the director or his assistant. It all gets to be quite the madhouse after awhile.

My friend and I got the dogs out of their kennels and tied them out on a long chain while we got everything ready. After an hour of so the director was ready and we started to harness them and hook them up to the sled. For the first shot, my friend had to load the boy actor into the sled (he looks a lot like Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone") and drive the team around a trail that leads in a big circle to the front of the "cabin", which was actually a couple of logs that looked like one corner of a front porch with the camera looking out from behind them.

After a couple of rehearsals the director yelled "Ready aaannnnddd ACTION!" into the radio and everybody suddenly looked very busy. The dogs went where they were supposed to, pulling up perfectly in front of the "cabin", and the boy jumped out and ran through the snow (about a foot deep) up to the cabin, like he was supposed to. The director screamed "CUT!!!" and everybody clapped because the shot had actually gone right the first time, which was very unusual.

Then the dogs had to wait in the background, with the musher rubbing his arms and acting very cold, while the boy did a close-up shot and pretended to be knocking on a door (which wasn't there, of course). Unfortunately, this took more than half an hour and ten or more "takes", and the dogs had to look excited and the musher had to act cold for every one of them. The team couldn't move from its place or it would be out of the camera's view. The dogs kept thinking it was time to go, but all they got to do was stay there. This isn't very good on dogs because sooner or later they're going to say, "We've had enough of this!" and lie down for awhile. But they did great. In fact, everybody agreed they were the best actors of all and everyone wanted to come play with them and pet them.

After that shot we disconnected the dogs from the sled, which was then hooked up to one of the snowmobiles. The adult actor who was supposed to be the musher (but who couldn't actually drive the dog team) then got into the musher costume and climbed onto the sled. The camera people got on the back of the snowmachine and then the snowmachine pulled off with everyone yelling "Action!" and "Go faster!" and "Slow down!" and other movie-type things. While this was going on we put in snow hooks at each end of the gangline and gave the dogs some soup and chicken snacks and let them rest. Eventually we got a break for lunch, which was in the "crafts tent" back down the ridge. I'll say one thing for film crews--they eat well. We had huge sandwiches and salads and all the munchies and soft drinks and coffee we could stand.

We spent most of the afternoon setting up for various shots with the dogs, some of which went well and some of which didn't. The director kept insisting on getting shots of the dogs running across open snow, sometimes with a snowmachine running right alongside them. Needless to say, the dogs weren't too thrilled about this, since no dog likes to go across open snow in the first place, and to do it with a snowmachine snarling along close by is almost too much. But we finally got it all done to the director's apparent satisfaction.

It was almost seven p.m. before we finally got the dogs back in their airline kennels and into the helicopter for the ten-minute ride back to Talkeetna. The sunset was beautiful out to the west but I was so tired I could barely stand up. I'd been on my feet and climbing up and down hills and working with the dogs for almost 12 hours straight. I think it was actually harder work than a day on the Iditarod.

I don't know how much money the entire commercial will cost, but it's got to be in the millions. Just the part we worked on will certainly cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of the people on the set were being paid "scale", or union wages, which are pretty eye-opening. I guess Burger King expects to sell a lot of Whoppers to pay for everything. Of course, I was at the very bottom of the food chain and only got enough for maybe a week's worth of dog food, but it was interesting nonetheless. I'll certainly be interested to see how it finally comes out.

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