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It's been a cold and snowless Turkey Day. We could use a foot of white stuff right now, and I'm not talking about mashed potatoes or whipped cream.

I've been so busy the past week I forgot to put in any diary entries, so I'll have to work extra hard to put everyone to sleep with this one. I keep thinking I'm going to catch up on a lot of things whenever I get a free moment, but I just seem to have more and more to do and the free moments never happen. Saturday and Sunday I had to drive into Anchorage (100 miles each way each day) to finish up one of the classes I have to take so I can renew my teaching certificate next year. Tomorrow I'm heading back into Anchorage for a book signing and I've got another trip into the Big City next Wednesday for another class. All this week I taught middle school at the local junior-senior high, and I'll be teaching next Monday and Tuesday as well. This doesn't leave me a lot of time for the dogs, but at least the teaching helps pay for their food.

We got a couple of inches of snow late last week and I decided to park the four-wheeler and go to the sleds. The trails are just marginally usable but it's way ahead of what's in second place. I did the first run Friday night with only six dogs since the snowpack is very thin. I'm up to eight dogs now, but that will be it until we get some more snow. As it is, I can barely stay on the sled on some sections of the trail, which doesn't stop the dogs from exceeding the speed of light, of course. The brake is only occasionally effective and I can't really get them to stop unless they feel like it, and I can't get a snow hook to hold except out in the swamps where there are some clumps of muskeg.

But it's fun anyway, despite the inevitable moments of frustration, such as when Cutter and Bullwinkle decided to swerve after a snowshoe hare bounding across the trail, followed by a major tangle in which all of the males had to check out all of the females (I've got 8 of them in heat right now). Running small teams is great for the dogs, but it means I've got to make more runs to train the same number of them. In any case, pulling sleds is far better training than the four-wheeler at this stage. We're already onto our 20-mile hill trail, which I usually reserve for my twelve-dog teams, and tonight we stretched it out to about 25 miles. The dogs are having to work harder in the smaller teams, but they're getting some really good training.

All of the dogs I'm focusing on this year are Iditarod veterans or were fully trained last year, so they're snapping back into shape very quickly. For pups or for dogs that haven't gone through a full season's training, the program has to be much longer because they need to fully develop their muscles. This takes months of careful running to pump them up while not burning them out.

A good training program for young dogs builds their attitude as much as their muscles, and it takes a lot of patience to do it right. I'll gradually bring my yearlings and two-year-olds along this winter and then start training them in earnest in late March and April. Then I'll work with them over the summer on the four-wheeler and have them ready to train with the big dogs for the 2000-2001 season. I've got ten younger dogs (not counting Maybelline's pups) and I fully expect a few of them to go to Nome in 2001.

My first priority right now is to have my veterans comfortably making 50-mile runs (or as some mushers put it, "50 miles on a standup") by the first week in January. The first big race of the season (and for me maybe THE big race if I can't run to Nome) is the Copper Basin 300 on the second weekend in January. I'm definitely going to run that one and I'd really like to finish in the top ten, which I can't if the dogs aren't ready.

On the bright side, Barrie arrived Friday night, so I've got some help in the dog yard. She brought 32 of her dogs with her, so we've got plenty of dog music around my place now. She'll be training her dogs for the Copper Basin 300 plus one or two others. She should be able to run my dogs a few times during the week while I'm working, plus help with feeding and other chores.

In the meantime, it's good to be back on sleds, and it's actually fun to run the smaller teams. Saturday night was a magnificent 15-mile run with eight dogs. The moon was nearly full and the northern lights were dancing. I was enjoying it so much I almost wanted to go again, but I had to be up and on the road to Anchorage at 6:30 the next morning. It's obvious the dogs are back in their element. This is the what they've been waiting for since last March and they seem to be immensely enjoying themselves on the trail. (By the way, if you want to see what my sled looks like, take a look at the banner of the Iditarod web site--the sled there is mine, loaded and ready for the trail to Nome.)

I was talking to John Barron and my friend Doug earlier this week about their plans to go down to Minnesota for the John Beargrease race in early February. More than a few mushers think nothing of putting their teams in their dog trucks and driving several thousand miles to get to a race. Dozens of Lower 48 and Canadian mushers drive up to Alaska every year for the Iditarod, and plenty of Alaskan drivers head south for races like the Beargrease and the Wyoming Stage Stop.

Some professional sprint mushers like Ross Saunderson of Fort St. John, British Columbia or the Streeper brothers (one from Fort Nelson, BC and another from Montana) will load 25 or 30 dogs on their trucks at the beginning of the racing season and be on the road hustling from race to race for a couple of months.

A good dog truck is essential for these "mushing gypsies", whether sprinters or distance drivers. Some of their major-league rolling dog palaces cost more than $50,000 and have been custom-built on heavy-duty diesel truck chassis, with lots of room and in a few cases even sleeper cabs. Of course, most mushers make do with much more modest arrangements, but there's no escaping the need for a serviceable dog truck even for going to local races.

While we're on the subject, the sprint race circuit is different from the distance race world, with races almost exclusively on weekends. Sprint dogs are trained to go short distances (less than 50 miles and often under 20) as fast as they can go, sometimes more than 25 miles an hour, pulling small, empty sleds that can weigh less than 20 pounds. Most sprint races have various classes, ranging from four-dog teams running maybe four miles to open class teams screaming around much longer courses with strings of more than 25 dogs.

The biggest sprint races usually run for three days, with a 20-or 30-mile open-class heat each day. The best known sprint races are the World Championships during Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage in February, and the North American Championships in Fairbanks not long after. There are also some excellent sprint races in Canada, including one in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, that has 60-mile heats.

Many local sprint mushing associations hold regular weekend races throughout the winter. I even enter my dogs in the six- or eight-dog classes at the Montana Creek Dog Mushers races once in awhile. Most of these associations or mushing clubs put on one or two big races to cap the season. The Montana Creek Dog Mushers hold the Su Valley Championships in late December (I was the race marshal last year), and dozens of sprint racing associations in Alaska and Canada have similar events. Of course, there are many sprint races in the Lower 48 as well, some of which are quite well regarded.

Some of the villages out in the Alaskan and Canadian Bush put on races as well, and a few of these have come to be quite popular. Some big-name mushers try to get out to some of the village races when they can, as much to look for new dogs as to run the races. Traditionally the remote villages have been the source of new bloodlines for sled dogs, and that's still true in some cases.

Getting to all of these races means a lot of time on the highway (at least where there are highways). Taking a team on the road is an interesting and sometimes time-consuming proposition. The dogs love to ride in their "holes" on the truck, but they can't stay there forever. On average they have to be taken out to take care of business or to eat every six hours or so. All mushers carry drop chains to string along the sides of their trucks for these occasions (and for race starts, of course).

The serious mushers will bring their handlers and maybe even their families with them. Since the average motel or hotel isn't always thrilled to have a couple of dozen dogs in the parking lot, itinerant mushers will often stay at the homes of other mushers when they get somewhere for a race. In fact, there's a sort of "mushing underground railroad" with a whole series of popular stops. Most mushers are more than happy to have other drivers stop by. Sometimes they train together for a day or two and often as not there is some dog swapping or selling as well.

Barrie's trip up from Wyoming is a good example of hitting the road with sled dogs. She took eight days with 32 dogs and stopped to see several mushers on the way up, including Terry Adkins in Montana and Ross Saunderson in Fort St. John. She even ran her team with Ross on his trails while she was waiting out a storm. By the time she made it to my place, she estimated she'd gotten all 32 dogs out of their holes and put them back at least three dozen times. For variety she'd let a couple of them ride up front at times.

The routine on the road is a little different from traveling with kids. At least the dogs aren't pinging off the windows and screaming, "Are we there yet?" The dogs love going there as much as getting there. On the other hand, kids can usually feed themselves and (with luck) don't leave aromatic messes to be cleaned up. Barrie had quite a system worked out for finding a good stopping place, getting the chains rigged, pulling the dogs out, feeding them, cleaning up after them, and once in awhile even getting some sleep and food herself. If nothing else, it's good practice for the Iditarod, where the checkpoint routine becomes so ingrained most mushers can handle it in their sleep (and often do).

Barrie has some fast-looking dogs and she says she's going to run them in the Montana Creek sprint races for practice, provided we ever get enough snow to put the track in. The sprint track needs at least a foot of snow to make a good base and must be carefully packed and groomed. The club keeps a lot of equipment for just that purpose, including a big Alpine snowmachine and a monster sheep's-foot roller and a heavy steel drag.

Putting in and maintaining the trail every year costs a couple thousand dollars to do it right. You don't just launch 25-mile-an-hour rocket teams on the kind of trails we distance mushers commonly use. The carnage would be horrific, not so much for the dogs but for the poor mushers and their featherweight sprint sleds, which would be smashed to splinters after the first mile or two.

The club trail is a definite plus for those of us living around Montana Creek. It provides a reliable place to train both distance and sprint dogs, even after the club season closes in late December after the Su Valley Championships. We're building a sort of musher community centered on the track, and we may have as many as half a dozen dog lots within a mile of my place within a year or two. This will be good for everyone because we can share the work of keeping up the trails. Besides, the occasional company will be welcome on the long training runs in the dead of winter.

The other aspect of more dog drivers in our neighborhood goes back to old-fashioned politics. The more of us there are, the longer we can fight off the constant push by developers and our allegedly elected representatives to close off trails and sell off public lands for subdivisions. Even here on the Last Frontier, the inexorable sprawl of suburbia is encroaching on areas that were almost wilderness ten years ago.

The key, of course, is access via the road system and proximity to Anchorage. Anywhere people can drive or fly to with a short bug-smasher flight or reach on a snowmachine in the winter is suddenly prime real estate. My area is squarely in the path of the main push north from Anchorage and the Mat-Su Borough Core Area and there's no way we can fight everyone off forever. With luck we can keep our trails in and make sure the club track doesn't get subdivided, but we're going to see a lot more traffic and people whether we like it or not.

On the other hand, most of the state is still screamingly empty and will stay that way for a very long time. Eighty years ago there were actually a lot more people living in the Bush proper, at mines and trapping cabins and the like, than there are nowadays. A trip to Nome on the Iditarod (or more properly, on the Seward to Nome Mail Trail) between 1910 and about 1935 would have passed dozens and dozens of isolated cabins and fishing camps and hunting sites. There were also roadhouses every 30 miles or so, plus there were several times as many villages and settlements, both Native and otherwise.

Since World War II, there has been a major consolidation of Alaska's Bush population into a relatively small number of villages and towns. Much of this resulted from the building of central schools, health clinics, power plants, stores, airports, and other facilities. Modern amenities allowed these bigger villages to support more and more people who previously had to scatter out in order to find adequate hunting and fishing to survive. Most of the smaller and more remote villages withered away and eventually disappeared. During the same period, the isolated miners and trappers saw their lifestyles vanish for reasons as varied as fluctuating international precious metals prices and animal rights activism.

Today long stretches of the Iditarod race route are totally empty, and huge swaths of Alaska are now completely uninhabited. Even the old cabins and roadhouses are rotting away and collapsing into the forests, crushed by winter after unrelenting winter. Villagers still go to some of the old fishing and hunting camps, but they can come and go quickly on snowmachines and power boats and even airplanes these days and often don't spend any longer than they have to.

Bush residents have less and less reason to go into the remote wilderness at all, and much of the subsistence hunting and fishing is done relatively close to the villages. Some villagers are just as likely to hop the commuter plane to Anchorage as to get on a boat or snowmachine (much less a dog sled) and head out for a trip in the hinterlands. On the race we generally see local people on the trail only on the main village-to-village routes, and almost never on the isolated stretches, such as from Rainy Pass through Rohn to Nikolai, Ophir to Iditarod, Ophir to Ruby, Iditarod to Shageluk, or heading up the Yukon from Grayling to Kaltag. Most of the snowmachine traffic in these areas is connected with the race, mainly sightseers and thrill-seekers who insist on intruding into what would otherwise be a perfectly enjoyable trip for those of us with dogs (and often tearing up the trail in process).

For many of us, the chance to get out into some truly empty country with our dogs is a main reason we run the race in the first place. We may convoy together for some legs, but we all like to do some traveling on our own when the mood strikes us. There is still no feeling in the world to match journeying with just your dog team and your own thoughts across a beyond-the-end-of-the-earth stretch like the Beaver Flats, or to watch the sun set behind the western hills on the way up the Yukon to Eagle Island, knowing there aren't a dozen other humans within 50 miles. Even the old timers weren't always able to do this. Who says progress is all bad?

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