The TypeTwoFun Club

“Your life is positively charmed.”

*Author’s note: I apologize, I’m going to have to split this into installments or I will literally never finish it. I’m writing about Hot Sled Dog Summer and It’s already snowing up in Grafton Notch again. Check back for Part 2, and probably 3, coming soon…I swear.

In February, 2024, I had hopped on a one way ticket to Alaska and was living in a Yurt.

I was working remotely and training for the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a ten-day, 350 mile winter ultramarathon that I’d cleverly decided to ski–sometime referred to as “the truly crazy ones” because skiing it is seen as the hardest discipline. I was in a rhythm of logging in at 4:28 (east coast 8:28), clocking a workday in work-from-yurt, then hitting the trails for hours. I was singularly focused on my final mental and physical prep after a year of effort. Somewhere small and quiet in the back of my mind, I knew that I had no big plans set yet for after the race. More critically, I had no expendable income left to execute any big adventures. While hiking and skiing are theoretically free activities, the gear, travel, and logistics involved to pursue big goals definitely add up. I had gone all in for the previous year between an aggressive hiking season and all the travel and training for ITI. It was going to be a quiet, boring, hot summer.

In the lead up to the race, I’d spent a lot of time explaining to folks that ‘no, I was not running a dog sled race; dogs weren’t involved at all; no, its the ‘people-powered’ Iditarod; zero dogs; no, no, you’re thinking of the OTHER Iditarod race, mine is just skis; For this race, I’m the dog…’. It had become a joke with my WhatsApp group thread of other racers. Why do our friends think we are dogsledding the Iditarod, when we haven’t been training with any dogs? Do they think the race would just let newbies walk onto the course, hop on the runners, and take off to Nome? Seriously. I’m not a musher.

Then on one of those bleary, 4am wakeups…a surprise on my phone. I got an out-of-the-blue DM from a musher. [Not my first, actually…but that’s a whole different story.] No, I wasn’t needed as a pinch-musher for the better-known Iditarod race. This message came from a casual online acquaintance from back home. We followed each other on social media and had chatted a couple of times on offhand topics. But now…Sally was alllll business.

After a few confused blinks and about 90 seconds of self-reflection, I tapped out a reflexive reply that opened with “Hi!! Um…yes I would absolutely be interested??” What I lack in grammar precision, I make up for in enthusiasm. I wasn’t exactly in the headspace to be locking in new long-ish-term plans, but I could immediately see the benefits:

• Sled dogs
• Regular escape to the mountains
• Regular escape FROM that Boston Heat
• Help out someone who seemingly is pretty cool (later very much confirmed!)
• Free dog-friendly accommodations
• lots of sled dogs
• Training and growth opportunity for Wylie
• Heal a tempestuous relationship with the Pine Tree State, which had attempted to kill me several times the previous year.
• Sled dogs

We hopped on a zoom call and sussed out a rough plan to move things forward. Sally needed help for very cool and understandable reasons–travel and on-site commitments for her work in land conservation, while her partner, Chuck, and kennel teammate, Brianna, were both tied up with commitments through the summer. My kennel-sitting would bring some flexibility to everyone’s schedules. When I got back to New England, after that whole “ski across Alaska” thing, I would come up for an overnight to her Kennel, Shady Pines Sled Dogs. The quick trip up to the Grafton Notch area of Maine would give me a test run, to see if I felt comfortable keeping a dog team fed and happy and the setup was something I was ready to commit to. I’d spent a week on a dog yard larger than Sally’s, but never as the sole human keeping the dog ship sailing smoothly. I also wanted to test how Wylie would react. He can get overwhelmed pretty easily and is selectively dog reactive, so making sure I could keep him and the Shady Pines dogs comfortable and happy in a roommate situation needed proving.

There was very little snow in New England last winter, outside of the 15 mile radius in New Hampshire where we’d lived and trained for ITI in January. So of course the day I planned to head up to the kennel, Maine saw fit to dump 2+ feet of snow in an epic blizzard. Pine Tree State getting another crack at me, I suppose. Well, fuck you, Maine–my snow tires are still on and I love a challenge. The drive took me up past the trailhead where I’d finished my very first Maine AT hike–the one that had us traversing the infamous Mahoosuc Notch in sleety, sloppy drizzle, climbing the Arm while it did its best impression of a waterfall, and arriving to my car pre-hypothermic (colorfully described by my friend Newfound in her blog, linked here). Good memories, (fuckin’) Maine!!

The drive up to Maine near the NH border through 12+” of snowfall was beautiful, if slow, and The Chariot^TM even made it up the steep gravel drive to the driveway. It kept snowing all day and all night–a big ole’ early spring dumping that nearly buried the dog houses of Shady Pines.

On our “nice to meet you” sleepover, which is a mildly hilarious but kind of nice way to meet someone in person for the first time, much was accomplished.

1. I got to meet and get to know Sally a bit, which was delightful. There’s only so much outside time hanging around the dog yard in a blizzard, so an evening of dinner, wine and chatting was a great way to kill a few hours.
2. I got to see how the house was set up and how we could live and work remotely from there a couple of days per week through the dogs’ ‘off season’.
3. I got to meet the dogs! Sally showed me how they were fed and cared for, their schedule, medications, unique personalities and particularities, who got seconds and who is “too easy of a keeper”, and the location of the all-important pile of poo.
4. We got to go for a couple of skis (though we cut our day two ski very short as Wylie was struggling in the deep drifts), and see Sally off on a training run before we hit the road back home.

The (two most important) dogs

**I’m intentionally saving the introduction of all our new friends for a “Part 2”

So…how did the dogs do?

Wylie passed his test meeting his new ‘friends’ (all who know Wylie read the sarcasm in that term), in a controlled capacity. That first overnight we tested him with Gemma, a borderline retiree and a more dominant personality on the team, and they did well. With supervision. In terms of the dog yard generally, where all these ‘friends’ came from, and what we were doing there, Wylie was completely mystified.

**Jumping ahead in the narrative: Wylie’s utter mystification remains true to this day, even after an entire spring and summer of weekly trips. I am very proud of Wylie and how well he did one-on-one with dogs inside, walking through the dog yard on-leash, and having small group playtime with some of the older and calmer dogs up by the house throughout the summer. It really did stretch his capacity to be up there, in helpful ways.

Wolfy pretended to be a cool girl who was not at all stressed out with all the new things, smells, dogs, and circumstances. So pretty quickly…she wasn’t. Wolfy lived the first seven years of her life in a distance kennel dog yard in Alaska, so she did sort of fall right in and understand the situation-at-hand.

**Jumping ahead in the narrative: On our first trip up solo in May, Wolfy was off to the races, running around to meet all the dogs, picking her favorites (and, ahem, two boyfriends), and wildly romping about during off-leash playtime as if she were a yearling and not a 9 year old retiree. When it would start raining while we were out in the dog yard, she’d pick her favorite house to crawl into, even if a dog (ahem, her boyfriend Jax or her boyfriend Cobalt) was already in his own house himself. She did have preferences and certain dogs that it took her longer to find a level of comfort interacting with–I saw her making more and more friends, week over week. On Friday afternoons when I’d pack up to head home, Wolfy would bolt down to the dog yard (ahem, to Jax’s house) and need to be fairly dragged to the car for departure.

It was really enjoyable to see both dogs’ individual reactions and how they coped in this new environment. It offered both of them an opportunity to grow and expand their comfort levels. It definitely shook things up for them both!

“So, you in?”

Shortly before she took off on the back of a sled on that snowy March morning, Sally gave me a playful but pointed look and said something to the effect of “So…what do you think? Are you IN?”

I absolutely was…but I suspect she already knew my answer when she asked.

“Oh, and there’s going to be puppies.”