If you’ve been following the Dog Log for a while, you are probably well aware that dog care is the number one priority at SP Kennel. This is always true, but it is especially true when the teams are “on the road” or away at races. Dog care comes before human care.
No matter how long you’ve been driving or how much coffee you’ve had to drink, you “drop” the dogs from the truck for their “comfort break” before you take yours. No matter how bad the weather is — even if you’re driving through a blizzard like we did yesterday — you stop along the way. No matter how little sleep you’ve gotten, you get up every four hours for the dogs.
So, it’s probably no surprise that the first thing we did after our 11 hour drive yesterday was to drop the dogs in the hotel parking lot, then do it again a few hours later after the banquet. I grabbed this footage of both drops to show you a little of the process. As you watch the video, keep in mind that you are seeing only a couple of minutes of an hour long process.
Please also keep in mind that our fantastic SP Kennel dog handlers will repeat this process every four hours until the Iditarod starts. Sled dog racing is a team sport on many, many levels.
