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Manitou Crossing Kennels Blog - 2007 Journal
Merry Christmas All!! A beautiful new blanket of snow fell over the weekend, and Phil, Blake, and I just returned from a wonderful 24-mile Christmas Eve moonlit cruise with three teams. We were just loosening up the dogs after they had a few days of vacation this weekend. Blake and I were able to leave for a couple days and visit our family near Heron Lake, MN. We brought a small team down with us and gave about a dozen little nieces and nephews sled rides. They all seemed to have a great time despite the relentless winds in the flat, treeless farmland! I am sure they have the perfect conditions for training for the Bering Sea Coast down there I had a great time at Jamie Nelson's 200-mile Moccasin Run Iditarod qualifier. I brought a nice group of young dogs with very little experience, and they did an excellent job! I was very happy with their performance and loved watching them learn. Jodi was the only leader I brought, thus he led with a young leader each leg of the event. Jodi, Muski, Coho, Oscar, Domita, Lorne, Taku, Frog, Mongo, Roland, Tagish and Steer completed the event. With the rookie meeting over and my second Iditarod qualifier complete, we now look ahead to a very busy first month of 2008! We will be covering many, many miles of trails with the teams, getting drop bags organized, and racing four teams in the Beagrease the last weekend of the month. It can be overwhelming to look at the big picture of all that needs to be done! We wish everyone a Peaceful and Snowy Christmas and a Happy New Year!! Jen
December 2007 Happy Holidays! It is hard to believe how quickly time is flying by these days! Thankfully, a good amount of snow has arrived and the trails are beginning to set up. We have been able to stretch out the mileage of our runs and the dogs are running really nicely. p> There is a lot of logging traffic in our area this year, so we are working hard to avoid problems with the many trucks. Clearly, we will need to load the dogs up and truck the teams out of the yard and down to where our trail system isn't plowed most of the season. On the bright side the dogs are going to well-adjusted to our trailer by the time we are heading to Alaska in February. The whole handler crew has now arrived to Manitou Crossing Kennels. Shilo Brazzi has been the most recent to arrive just a few days ago from California. With no previous experience with sled dogs and joining us in December, she is getting a crash course of how to harness and bootie dogs and stay warm for many hours in the sled. She is learning very quickly! Phil Morrison arrived from Northern Ireland just over a week ago and has logged in many sled miles already. Arja's first time on the sled runners in Minnesota was behind 14 dogs last week! (With Jen in the sled) Jen flew to Alaska to the Iditarod Rookie Meeting last week. There the 41 rookies attended a weekend packed with informative meetings focusing on dog care and the logistics of running the Iditarod and a field trip to Martin Buser's Happy Trails Kennels for more great information on training and race preparations. She also had the pleasure to visit Natalie Norris and JP and Kari Norris in Willow, Alaska on Sunday evening. JP Norris is training a great looking group of Siberians for the Open Sprint races! It had been nearly 8 years since Jen had been to Alaska, so it was amazing to see all the changes and development that had occurred since then. Training is keeping us on the trail more and more these days as we begin logging in some serious miles and camping trips.
October 2007 Rain and Mud! Ironically, after beginning training over two months ago in the driest, dustiest conditions we have ever seen, we now find ourselves soaked to the bone with water overflowing our trails! Our lakes are overflowing, water is over our roads, and many roads have literally been washed out. I guess our rain dances worked! Let’s hope the snow dances are effective as well. The dogs are running beautifully and our training is further along than any other season. All the dogs are working hard and eager to train every day. In addition to our 20 seasoned lead dogs, we have at least 14 new leaders in training. These young dogs are co-leading with an experienced leader on some runs and running in point or swing on other days to gain knowledge and experience running in front of the team. Right now, our experienced leaders are doing the majority of the training for us. Later, we will fine tune their skills and test them on their own to make sure they are making the connection between our commands and the direction, speed, etc of the team rather than just following the body language of the experienced dog next to them. Currently, these up and coming leaders include Apollo, Aries, Domita, Coho, Muski, Nemo, Oscar, Lira, Kyat, Peso, Roland, Wat, Karhu, and Scotty. Naturally, the three year olds in this group are spending more time in lead than the just coming 2-years-olds, but all of these youngsters are showing excellent drive and focus in front of a 22-dog-team. Our handler crew is beginning arriving in just 10 days! It has been a good season so far, but we are really looking forward to getting the crew together for the winter. Arja, who will be racing one of our teams in the Beargrease 150, will be arriving from Finland the end of October. Then Shilo, a wildland firefighter from California who worked with Blake this summer, is coming in mid-November. Last, but not least, our good friend Phil Morrison will be arriving from Northern Ireland a month from now. Although we have a lot of projects to wrap up before freeze-up, we are hoping to have at least a few inches of snow by mid-November to cover our mostly gravel trails by the time we are looking to do longer runs. It sure feels like a great season ahead!
September 2007
Fall is here! Happy Trails!
August 2007
Hello everyone, This is the time of the year that we don’t sleep very much. It should be great training for the Iditarod! On the weekends, we spend entire day in the kennel, working with the dogs and the many projects we have going on. On the weekdays, Blake and I have about 2 hours in the morning to get out and train the dogs, water, and clean the yards before we head to work around 7am. We both ride the ATV while training since it is much safer with two people. (Most of you probably don’t know of the time I dislocated my shoulder, broke my tibia, and rupture my anterior cruciate ligament in my right knee training dogs in 2001!) However, you can see that that we have a lot to get done in a short amount of time. Our daily schedules are very unpredictable, as Blake may be out fighting fires on any given day, and I may be dealing with veterinary emergencies. Whatever time we get home, the huskies ready and waiting for love and attention. Let’s just say it is very easy to fall asleep at night! Here is an introduction to the dogs in training for our teams.
We have 22 older, very experienced race dogs training for our races this winter. This includes dogs 3.5 years of age up to 9 years of age. We expect some of these guys won't make it to Anchorage since they are nearing retirement to puppy training, but don’t be surprised if some of them are their leading the teams! They include:
Our younger dogs with one season of serious training and experience at a couple small races are ready to fine tune their skills. They include:
The youngest dogs we are training for the Iditarod will be 2 years old by December. They will be trained mostly together usually with some of our good leaders who are nearing retirement, and if they show is they are ready, you will see some of them in Alaska as well. They will certainly be on some of our Beargease teams.
Of course, we must not forget the few Alaskan Huskies that also call Manitou Crossing Kennels home. All the non-pure breeds are descendants of a little female leader named Spring who Blake bought from Martin Buser in 2001. Spring led and finished the Iditarod for Buser several times including his 1997 victory. Blake purchased Spring because we wanted to work with a dog who was proven to be competitive in the Iditarod in order to give us an idea of whether our Siberians are capable of performing at that level as well. Our experience indicates that our Siberians are equally as talented is harness as their Alaskan counterparts, and we hope to continue to demonstrate that with our race results. These dogs will be split into three 18 dog teams for the fall. This may seem like a lot of dogs, and it is going to be an amazing project to train this many. However there are not a lot of “spares” since about 40 dogs will be heading to Alaska with us. When you consider that we rather not push the 9 youngest dogs, and there are likely 6 dogs on the upper age range that may not be up to heading for Nome. Let’s just hope we train smartly and don’t have many injuries.
The yearlings that won’t be joining the main race team until the following season are the late summer 2006 litters:
We have a full time handler position available which includes traveling to Alaska with us for the Iditarod! Happy Trails
Manitou Crossing Kennels has entered two teams in the 2008 Iditarod!
We are looking forward to a great training season and some awesome racing. It was certainly a stretch considering that the Iditarod entry was raised to $3000 per team, but the teams are at the right age, and we will probably never again be able to run the race with nearly equal teams. We’ll just call it an expensive date… At this point in our planning I (Blake) will be running the all Siberian team and Jen will be running a team of mostly Siberians and a few Alaskans. I will be gunning for 12d 00h 08m 04s which is the purebred record set by Shawn Sidelinger in 1998. I hope Shawn doesn’t mind me setting my sights on his record, but I feel the breed deserves a faster record and it gives me a goal to work toward. I worked with Shawn at Howling Dog Farm when he was training for the 1999 race. I learned a lot from Shawn, Earl and Natalie back when I was quite green to the sport. In fact Shawn helped me hook up my first actual sled team; a momentous occasion indeed, I never would have guessed where it would have taken me... We have had a great spring at MCK and summer is already here. I am back at work with the Forest Service. We were off to a crazy wildfire season this spring but we have received some moisture since then slowing things a bit. Jen has had a busy spring at work, often working at all hours of the day with farm calls and emergencies. We have had one litter this year also from Noor and Deuce. Noor had two pups that are 4 weeks old and just getting scrappy. We were hoping to have more litters, but it looks like it will just be the two little ones this year! We don’t have summer kennel help, but Karl has been coming up on the weekends helping me with our puppy/retirement pen improvements and other projects. We’ll have photos of the pups and kennel improvements soon. Jen and I began training for triathlon earlier this spring although we have not entered anything yet. We really just want to learn how the body feels throughout the training process and get in shape for the winter racing season. We are running several miles a day, plus biking or swimming. Although we aren’t running the dogs right now, one or two huskies join us everyday on our runs and bike trips. We have been delighted to find that our dogs are happy to stick with us on these excursions and it gives us a chance to work with the dogs one-on-one outside of the kennel. In addition, the dogs get to fee run in within the kennel daily giving them a lot of time to play and run with each other. At least 50% of our dogs enjoy playing fetch! They are an awesome group of dogs. Bonnie Lundberg has helped up put together a yahoo group email list. Be sure to join up for discussions on dog care, training, Iditarod and Beargrease prep and anything else that may come up. You can join at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MCK_News/join Happy Trails HAPPY SPRING! At least, it is supposed to be spring! We were just dumped on with 18" of fresh snow! Where was all this snow in January? It was a great training year for us, but not the race season we were looking forward to. With the Beargrease being canceled and not getting into the Can-AM 250 race despite having sent in our enties Aug 10, 2006, it left us with only the UP 200 to race in. We were very pleased with our team's performance in the UP 200! The team had not run in deep snow for nearly a year before running the race. Our training conditions had been extremely hard, fast, icey trails all season, so the dogs were suddenly using muscles that hadn't been worked for a long time. They ran very steady and strong throughout the race and were always screaming to go. The race to the finish line in the 2007 UP 200 was amazingly close with many teams within minutes and seconds of each other! Blake finished 10th, just about 2 hours after the winner, Tim Calhoun and under a minute behind 9th place musher, Micheal Bestgen. We considered traveling further away to other events, however our hearts are set on racing two Iditarod teams in 2008, and decided we would rather save money and focus on training for the Iditarod. We are Iditarod Bound in 2008!! Our plan is to run two teams to Nome in 2008 focused on letting the dogs learn the trail and have a great time, then return with our best team in 2009. With all the promising young dogs coming up, we are very excited! Happy Trails!
Hello! Blake is off and running in the 2007 UP 200! It has been a crazy week for us, but at long last, we are at a race! There is a great field of mushers racing in the UP 200, with many teams who were focused on competing in the Beargrease having quickly changed plans and headed to the UP 200 after the 25th running of the Beargrease Marathon was postponed until 2008. It is going to be really interesting to see how the field of mushers spread out on the trail. Blake's team consists of our veteran race dogs: Duece, Trouble, Trekkie, Gonzo, Kimber, Telly, Mac, Altoid, Remi, Chester, Bodo, and Punto. I am going to be doing my best at handling for Blake. It is really strange to send the team off, then head back to our host family's to shower and go to bed! The first checkpoint is unassisted, so I won't see Blake and the team until around noon tomorrow at the Grand Marais checkpoint. We were planning on running two teams, but with the last minute changes of plans, we knew it would be better to just focus on one team and keep it simple. My team would have had many of the dogs who are under two years old, and they may be more surprised by the deep snow conditions over here than the experienced dogs. Our trails at home have been hard packed, fast, and icey all season, so suddenly they are going to be "swimming" in deep snow. The weather looks like quite a bit more snow is on its way during the race as well! After leaving the start in with bib # 30, Blake arrived at the first checkpoint 13th with the 10th fastest time at about 2:27 am. That's a lot of passing! I probably won't have a chance to write any more until after the race, so watch up200.org for updates! Happy Trails!
Happy New Year!
Despite having driven through heavy snow and white out conditions to get to
the race, there wasn't too much snow on the race trail, but that was probaby
good since our dogs haven't seen deep snow all season. The trails were
beautiful winding, wooded trails with nice rolling hills. Beargrease was post-poned to Feb. 25th due to lack of snow. It's still not
looking too good! Everybody better get out and do a Snow Dance!! Check out our new "Downloads" page where you can download free desktop wallpapers and a
Windows Theme featuring the MCK Racing Siberians! Now you can enjoy the huskies on your desktop. :) -Jen
Introducing "Joker" and "Jackie"! 
Watch for Jen in the Celebrating American Women documentary airing on The Learning Channel on Mother's Day 2007! May 13th at 10pm & May 14th at 1am Celebrating the American Woman TV-G Follow in the day-in-the-life of fourteen extraordinary women, from singer/songwriter Jewel to the most powerful woman in government, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Musher/Veterinarian Jennifer Freking as they takes us on an intimate journey through the struggles and triumphs they face each day.
2007 Beargrease Marathon canceled due to lack of snow.
Check out the new Windows Desktop Theme featuring the MCK Racing Siberians
for finishing Nelson's Championship! UK Champion Jedeye Mandella at Sassicaia!!
Happy New Year!
Despite having driven through heavy snow and white out conditions to get to
the race, there wasn't too much snow on the race trail, but that was probaby
good since our dogs haven't seen deep snow all season. The trails were
beautiful winding, wooded trails with nice rolling hills. Beargrease was post-poned to Feb. 25th due to lack of snow. It's still not
looking too good! Everybody better get out and do a Snow Dance!! Check out our new "Downloads" page where you can download free desktop wallpapers and a
Windows Theme featuring the MCK Racing Siberians! Now you can enjoy the huskies on your desktop. :) -Jen View other journal entries: |
Phil and I ran the yearlings at their first race in the 8-dog, 43 mile 2007
Tahquamenon Country Sled Dog Race. The pups did great, and they learned a
lot about traveling in the dog truck on their first road trip. We were
there to have a good time, let them see the race scene, and get a lot of
experience. We gave them several rest stops along the trail and they all
performed very well. Phil ran Jodi, Capri, Twister, Oscar, Takhini, Aries,
Wat, and Roland. I ran Duece, Fiona, Kyat, Muski, Peso, Frog, Tagish, and
Taku. I finished 19th and Phil 36th.
