Summertime in Alaska

Howdy all. Summertime is here is Alaska and we are just as busy as ever. Sue is taking on more time at the vet clinic and I've been balancing a couple building projects with some trips to the Brooks Range doing remote camp set-up for a mining operation. Ya gotta make hay while the sun shines!

Sue and I are loving our first summer here under the midnight sun. I am looking forward to seeing some stars again, but I guess that's still at least a month away... Good thing Sue made those really dark curtains for our bedroom-

Exciting news from the dog yard here is that two dogs have joined our team for the year to come. We have taken on Jay and Ivy, from our friends Loranne and Rich, back in New Hampshire. They run Snowstar Siberians and owned Jack, who is the father of our great dogs bred by Moe Boksa, Stump, Mugs, Hawkeye, Gila, and Gecko. Jay and Ivy are out of a litter Jack produced after he went to Snowstar. We hope they will fall in to the team here and be able to run in the Quest pool next year. (Ivy also has a date with Stump when she comes in to heat.) Ohh, well there's some other news too, I guess. We definitely are trying to make it to the Yukon Quest start line again this year! It's an expensive proposition to continue to do this, but we are so deeply attached to this race, we can't really imagine not running it at this point. It's time to make the next step forward!

Our team just took a big financial blow as the distributor for our former food sponsor decided it was too much trouble to handle 8 bags of dogfood a month for us. So Alaska Feed here in Fairbanks has cost us our sponsorship because Loyall won't stand up to a big customer, like Alaska Feed. The good news is that we really needed to be feeding a better food and we hope we can find some sponsorship through a company that is interested in mushing and knows the demands of distance racing. We will never walk through the doors of Alaska Feed again and hope others will avoid this very musher-UN-friendly store. We do thank the folks that helped us back east to get the sponsorship (Mitch Ingerson, Peter Burhans, and Brian Fitch), and are grateful for the help we recieved for the last two years, but now it's time to move forward to better things. Onward!!

Here's a little video I took in the kennel this morning after being away for a week of work a couple hundred miles north of here-