Skijor Trip

With spring quickly approaching, so is our skijor trip! Full disclosure- I haven’t been training as much as I probably should. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of a kennel and not make time for more overnight trips. I don’t have a good reason really. The kennel and business could function just fine without me for 48 hours. But here we are, less than a week away from the trip, and I’ve only ventured out with a heavy sled for one overnight this season. What could go wrong?

I haven’t been too vocal about our trip because there’s still a chance it won’t happen. We’re going to be choosy with the weather. If the stars align, we plan to go to Unalakleet and skijor back down the Iditarod trail towards Kaltag as well as farther along the Iditarod trail towards Shaktoolik. It’s not uncommon for this region to have low snow (or stretches of no snow), ground blizzards, or coastal storms. Just yesterday, winds were blowing 40 mph in Unalakleet with gusts up to 60 mph. While conditions like that sound exciting, I don’t feel inclined to be blown out to sea, so if the weather looks tumultuous, we have other fun adventures lined up for Plan B and Plan C.

Weather aside, the logistics for traveling to a remote community as two humans (Tucker and myself) and three dogs (probably Cooke, Muenster, and Wingman though this roster hasn’t been finalized) plus our gear has been quite the puzzle. Our original plan was to fly to Kaltag on the mail plane from Fairbanks then ski to Unalakleet and fly out of Unalakleet back home. Seems easy enough; however, we can’t reserve space for the dogs on the Kaltag mail plane until the day of the flight. If there isn’t room, then we’d get pushed to a future day. Not ideal. We’d also need to coordinate shipping the dog crates back to Fairbanks and arranging their pickup. On the other end in Unalakleet, our only flight option is Ravn Air. Ravn can only take two dogs at a time, has only one flight per day only certain days a week, and only flies to Anchorage. All three dogs could fly Northern Air Cargo; however, there are only two days a week NAC flies to Unalakleet, and only one of those days lines up with Ravn Air’s schedule. We’d also need to arrange separate crates to be sent to Unalakleet. And we still have the question of how to get back to Fairbanks once we arrive in Anchorage. As we gained more information, we’ve been piecing together the puzzle. Currently, the itinerary looks something along the lines of: drive to Anchorage, fly Ravn for humans and NAC for dogs to Unalakleet, explore up and down the Iditarod trail as weather and conditions allow, then fly back to Anchorage a week later and drive back to Fairbanks. If I’ve learned anything from remote travel in Alaska, it’s to be flexible and have a long list of backups and contingency plans. And who knows, we might just get lucky!

The below video is a silly clip I made of different lessons learned during my first failed overnight camping trip.

Here are some clips from my 2016 Iditarod outside of Unalakleet and in the Blueberry Hills. You might recognize some retired faces in the team! There wasn’t much snow around Unalakleet that year, but I still absolutely loved it. At the moment, it sounds like there’s a bit more snow! (Which is good, because skis don’t glide over frozen tundra quite like sled runners).