As the clock continues to count down, preparations for Iditarod are accelerating here at SP Kennel.
The most obvious aspect of this preparation, of course, is the pace of training dogs. Because fielding two Iditarod teams requires 32 fully trained dogs — and you never know which dogs might have last-minute “issues” that might prevent them from competing — we are currently “working up” about 40 dogs. That’s just about every “adult racing dog” in the Kennel, and it requires taking 3 or 4 teams out every day for 4-8 hours. Aliy and Allen go out on sleds at least once every day, and on some days I have been pitching in by following them with a team on the 4-wheeler. You can pretty easily “do the math” and figure out that the current dog training schedule is a huge time and effort requirement.
The pace of “logistical” preparation is accelerating around here as well. For example, in the next few days we will be packing all of the checkpoint “drop bags” and delivering them to Iditarod headquarters so that they can be sent out on the trail well in advance of the race. Before you can pack the bags, of course, you have need to have all the “stuff” ready to pack. So, we recently spent another entire day cutting fish, fat and meat snacks for the dogs, totaling almost 1,000 pounds of tasty treats for our canine competitors. Also, Aliy and Allen have been assembling large quantities of everything else that must be packed: Human food and snacks, hand and foot warmers, booties, batteries, etc.
Of the nearly two tons of gear that will be shipped out in drop bags for the SP Kennel teams, however, the largest portion of the weight — by far — will be in dog food. More than a ton of it! So, yesterday was “Dog Food Delivery Day” and I thought it merited a little special mention:
The guys from 49er Feed — the local distributor for Eagle Pack — arrived in their big truck and backed right up to the feed shed. Now, the dogs know very well what goes on in the feed shed and you can see that a few of them — especially Teddy — were quite keen to supervise the proceedings. What they got to see was the off-loading of four tons of food! That’s 200 bags at 40 pounds apiece!
The next step is to take about a ton of it, re-pack it into smaller “team meal size” 12 pound bags and add them to the heaping piles of supplies that we’ve been accumulating in preparation for the actual drop bag packing process. Stay tuned for more on that!
