Yes We Do Have Snow Here!

Beautiful day on the trail

Well, despite all of the doom and gloom in the news with regard to the "winter" weather this season we have had decent conditions here in Lake Elmore. We certainly haven't had the type of winter we have in the past here and there have been many dramatic temperature swings but I have been able to make due with what we have received. I typically start grooming as soon as we have an inch of snow on the ground. This may seem silly but I find that it does begin to smooth things out and fill in the dips and ruts on the trail. My groomer does take a bit of a beating but luckily it's a pretty rugged piece of equipment and so far with the exception of a few broken sheer pins it has held up well. I have had to groom more this winter than in any winter past to create a safe surface for sledding. We have received most of our snow fall in one inch increments and with rain/sleet/snow every seven or eight days it's a real challenge keeping a nice surface. We have finally gotten to where we have about five inches of hard packed base on the trail though and that should be able to hold up to pretty much anything Mother Nature throws at us; for the time being at least. If things continue the way they have been I suspect we will have an early spring here in Vermont. As warm as it has been this winter I won't be surprised if it's 70 degrees at the end of March.

Sled view, beautiful snow!

Pax on a hike this fall

On other fronts; all of the dogs are doing very well this winter. We are feeding a combination of raw and a new kibble this year. The kibble is called Inukshuk and the dogs seem to be doing very well on it. It's a 35% protein, 35% fat food and the love the taste so there have been no problems with them eating. I'm also feeding them chicken every other night as well as their usual moose or venison stew for breakfast every day. We have the same group of dogs there that we had all of last winter so everyone is well settled in at this point. That makes things much more enjoyable for me. The only new addition is our latest puppy Pax who came here this fall. Pax is just over eight months now and has already been out for a few runs with the team. He loves running with the big dogs but won't get many miles in this year. We will wait until next year when he is going on two before we let him run each day. I'm very excited to see how much he enjoys running and look forward to many years of enjoying his company out there!

Birthdays And Bucket Lists

One of the unanticipated joys of working with Peace Pups has been sharing in special moments and occasions in people’s lives. When I started Peace Pups Dogsledding I knew that I wanted to spend more time with my dogs, spend more time outside and that I wanted the business to be socially responsible and sustainable. I never imagined that I would be given the gift of sharing in so many special moments with others.


Many visitors plan their dogsledding visit in order to celebrate a special time in their life. We have had numerous “big” birthday tours; the “big” 50, “big” 60 or even the momentous “big” 80. Christmas presents, anniversaries and family reunions are a few other celebrations that have taken place with the teams.

I have even been honored to have had guests who knew their time on earth was growing short and that dogsledding was something they truly wanted to experience before moving on. I’ve had guests who wanted to propose to the special person in their life while being out with our dogs in the Vermont hillsides. There has even been discussion of having an actual wedding take place out on the trail with the dog teams.

Having moved on from my previous career as a custom furniture builder and having left a good paying job in order to find something more rewarding to do with my life all of this has been a truly unexpected bonus for me. It’s not that woodworking wasn’t enjoyable for many years; I think I had just done it for too many years. I had gotten to the point where the paycheck I was receiving for my work was not enough motivation for me to continue what I was doing. I was not finding any personal satisfaction in my daily work life. With Peace Pups every single day I get to watch the joy on people’s faces as they interact with our Siberian Huskies. I can take no credit for the dogs loving nature but I do feel privileged to be able to bring them together with people from near and far.

With an admittedly short attention span and very low tolerance for tedium I wasn’t sure if the dogsled tour business would keep me satisfied over the long haul. As with anything in life there is repetition in dogsledding but these unanticipated rewards make me quite sure that I have found something that I can spend the rest of my active life participating in. It’s certainly not a business I would recommend for making a lot of money but the lifestyle and joy it has brought into my life and others makes it well worth the effort. I would like to extend my thanks to past guests, future guests and most of all the dogs for bringing this joy into my life.

We Survived The Holidays!

This week has been one of rest and refueling for all of us. As usual the two weeks around Christmas and New Years are extremely busy for me and the pups. We "only" run three tours a day but six days in a row of that takes it's toll. Sometimes I suspect it is harder on me than the dogs. I figure I do about a four to one ratio of work compared to the dogs; meaning for every hour they run I do four hours of work to keep things flowing. All of the dogs have been more amazing than ever this season. I believe it is a combination of the new food we are feeding and the fact that we have two teams of honest working dogs this year.



The snow conditions this winter have been fantastic here in Lake Elmore. Apparently you don't have to drop too far into the valleys to find very thin snow cover but our trails have been well covered since early December. In fact for the past two weeks they have been as good as I have ever seen them with a nice solid base covered by a inch or two of packed powder. The nice consistent cold has kept things from becoming icy even when we have gone for five or six days without fresh snow. This week I have once again been busy shoveling, snow blowing and packing trails as we received another six to eight inches of fresh snow.

I have been enjoying cross country skiing this year with my partner Lise. I don't think we got out together more than twice all of last winter. I tend to become so wrapped up in the business of working with the dogs that in the blink of an eye the winter is gone. This year we purchased a season pass for the Craftsbury Outdoor Center and our goal is to ski every Monday. It is my one day off each week and often times last year I just felt too tired to go out again and preferred to hang out at home and rest. So far this season we have gone skiing the past two Mondays and I have really been enjoying it. I had forgotten how much fun it is to glide through the woods on beautifully groomed trails. I have also found that it does my head a world of good to get away even if it is only for a few hours. Even if things are amazing where you are it never hurts to have a little change of perspective now and again!

I wish you all a Happy New Year. There seems to be a sense of renewal and hope in the air for 2009. Let's hope things do move in a positive direction and do our part to see that they do.

Good Weather For Ducks

It has certainly been a good summer to have our new covered doggy condos in place. Since I put them up it seems like it has rained just about every day here in Lake Elmore. The news last week said it was a record for Montpelier where they received 8.25 inches of rain in July. Montpelier is about 25 minutes south of us so we have probably had a similar amount of rain here.

All of the rain hasn't caused much damage here at our place. We did have some damage on the class four road which leads to our cabin but the town brought in some gravel a few days ago and patched it up. Other towns near by have lost entire roads due to the rain and have applied for disaster relief.

I had one exciting evening a couple of weeks ago when we had a heavy downpour. I was sitting upstairs on a Sunday afternoon playing my guitar and happened to look out to check on the dogs and there was a river running right down the center of the dog yard! The dogs were all sitting on their deck watching the river flow. I jumped up and into my rain gear and ran out to the yard in a panic. I had visions of all of the sand which I had moved into the yard by wheel barrow washing down the river. All that work gone in the matter of a few minutes... What had happened was the curtain drain which I had dug at the top of the dog yard had over flowed. The spring on the hillside above which usually only runs in the spring with the heavy snow melt had begun to flow and filled the foot and a half deep ditch. When I dug the ditch with the excavator I hadn't quite gotten through the bank to the stream so it wasn't draining like it should. I spent the next half hour digging with the pick ax until I had cut another five feet through the bank and then the water began to drain and run away from the dog yard. Once I got the water out it wasn't as bad as I had thought. Only a little of the sand actually left the dog yard. Much of it was just moved around and with some raking it was almost as good as new. I suppose it was a good test for my ditch. If we made it through that heavy rain it will probably be fine next spring with the normal run off.

That was the big excitement since my last post. Otherwise things seem to drain pretty well on our hillside. The garden is growing like crazy and we've got tons of cucumber, squash, peas and greens. There are plenty of green tomatoes but we'll have to wait and see if we get enough warm weather for them to ripen.

As August quickly slips by my thoughts are quickly turning to fall dog training. Last year we started running with the carts around mid September. That's only a few weeks away! I've really missed not running the dogs this summer.

Until next time.

Summer 2008 Dog Yard Renovations

As I wrap up my dog yard project for the season I’ve decided to do a brief (?) write up. Peace Pups had a great 2007-2008 season with great snow conditions and plenty of great guests joining us for tours. I promised the dogs that I would fancy their lodging up in return for all of their hard work over the winter. With out them there would be no Peace Pups.

As the temperatures began to warm in April my thoughts turned to what I would do to improve the yard. One thing that was fresh in my mind was all of the shoveling I had to do in the yard this past winter due to the large amount of snow. It got to the point where the entrance to each dog house looked like the entrance to an igloo with a small tunnel at each. There was a point when you could not even see half of the houses and could walk right other the top of them. That’s fine for insulation and wind protection but every time we received another couple of inches of snow or the wind blew I had to go out and shovel those tunnels out again. It became a almost daily occurrence and my back was not especially happy about it. Another ongoing issue with our dog yard has been water and mud in the fall and spring. We are on a slight hill side and there are a couple of small springs above the yard. In the spring when there was lot of water in the ground we would have a small stream running right through the middle of the yard. This could also happen in the fall when we have November rains and the ground becomes saturated. Last summer I created a ditch through the middle of the yard to pull some of the water away but it wasn’t great having a ditch in the center of the yard.

My first thought was to build a dog barn. This would provide a nice dry space for the dogs. Having grown up and then worked on a farm as a teen I was familiar with the set up for dairy cows. Why not dogs? I began to look into scour some of the fantastic resources available on line for information on dog barns. They are being used in some areas such a Alaska where the weather is much colder and many mushers are running shorter coated dogs. I believe the main goal for these barns is to keep the dogs warmer in the winter. I also posted questions in regard to what I was planning and began to receive some feed back.

The first issue I ran into was tethering versus pens. Initially I was going to build eight pens to house two dogs each. The meant a very large barn and many gates to work through. I have had two kennel pens as well as tether set ups and came to the conclusion that I really prefer the tethers. To me it feels like the dogs are a more open environment and easier to interact with when I’m walking through the yard. They also have their own private space where they can be away from any other dog. I find that many of them enjoy this and are much more relaxed if they don’t have to be “on” all of the time. I also find it easier for me to do my chores. Feeding, clean up, watering, shots etc. seem to go much more quickly as I walk from dog to do without having to open and close gates and worry about anyone getting out.

It became obvious to me that staying with tethers would work better for us. That decided I revisited the barn idea. Was there a way to build a barn that would work with tethers? The only thing I could envision was a large twenty four foot by eighty foot roof covering the entire yard. One problem I foresaw with that was snow load. With roof that big in order to have it shed snow it would have to have some kind of amazing height. Another consideration was smell. I had read of others that had fully covered runs and issues with odor and dust due to lack of rain. I read about one person installing sprinklers to flush the runs out from time to time.

What about flooring? If one of my main goals was for the dogs to be drier it seemed like I really wanted a space for them to get off of the ground. As I went round and round with this there were days where I was ready to bag the whole barn idea but I didn’t.

What all of this evolved into was what we have taken to calling the doggie condos. The condos have a six foot by six foot deck for each dog. Their houses sit on top of these decks and each has a six foot by nine foot thirty degree pitch roof over it. These are light enough that they are able to be moved if need be. They provide a dry space for each dog to hang out. They provide great shade. They are very open so they don’t block the breeze in the summer and they will keep the snow off of their houses in the winter. I have them set up so it will allow me to drive my snow blower through the center of the yard to clear the snow if we have another heavy snow season like the past one.

A bonus to this set up is that for our town a building permit is not required for structures under eight foot square. The doggie condos are basically glorified dog houses.

Next is a brief photo essay of the project as it progressed over the last month.

Step one: Preparing the actual yard and improving the drainage issues. I rented a mini excavator to level the yard out so the doggie condos would sit flatter and along the same plane. We had four or five stumps in the yard which had always made it difficult to place tether posts. The excavator made short work of those! I also dug a four foot deep curtain drain across the back side of the yard to pull away and water that might come down the slope. I then had thirty five yards of sand delivered which I spread through the newly leveled side of the yard. I had filled another section of the yard with sand last summer and was very happy with the drainage and lack of mud. This is a picture of the yard leveled; evenly spaced tethers and new layer of sand.

Step two: Building the decks. I put together a lumber order and had it delivered and unloaded in our driveway which would become the doggie condo construction shop for the next two weeks. I built the units so the roof could be separate making them much easier to move. Here we are framing the decks in the driveway.

Moving the decks into the dog yard so that cars can once again pass through the driveway. The deck seem to be a immediate hit with the dogs!

The decks in place in the dog yard.

Step three: The driveway becomes a roof assembly line. These projects always seem to take on a life of their own. When I put the first metal roof on I had the bright idea of painting it to see how it would look. Well with one painted they all would need to be painted in order to match. Some of the metal had rust on it so of course that needed to be wire brushed off before painting. Before I knew it we had another two hours of labor per roof. I think the final result was worth the time though and it should help the metal last longer.

Now we are almost done. All of the roofs are on, my wife says she thinks it looks like a state park... I still need to buy 50 cinder blocks to block the corners of the decks up off the ground then do the final leveling and I think that will be it for this summer. The doggy condos seem to be working out very well. We had a rainy day this past week and we had multiple places to stay dry while hanging out with the dogs. I can’t wait for winter to see how they work with snow!

Did I Say Spring?

Well; it seems like I have been referring to spring for weeks now and according to my calendar it is "officially" but if I look out the window it sure doesn't look like it. We still have a LOT of snow for the end of March and it's snowing again this morning. What a long winter; good thing I'm into dogsledding. I'm sure there are some raging cases of cabin fever around this year. It will be a long time before our flower bed is seeing the sunshine here in Lake Elmore. In the photo below the snow pile on the left is right on top of our spring flower bed. I think it's going to take a while for that one to melt away!

In the mean time as long as the trails are good we continue to run the dogs. It could make for a short off season this year if we run through April. That will leave May, June, July and August before we begin our fall cart training again in September; not bad..

Thoughts of cycling are starting to creep into my mind as we've had a few days with sunshine and temps in the 40s. It's always hard to believe it will be warm enough for riding in shorts at this time of year but it will happen. Last year on this day I went for a road bike ride and it was 50 degrees and sunny. I don't think I'll be getting out on the bike today; in fact I have a dogsled tour this afternoon.

Back to The Drawing Board

Given that I had exhausted all of my options in regard to getting the side bridge to work I had no choice but to start thinking about a way to make a bridge straight across the stream where the old logging bridge had once been. This was a 32 foot span; how was I going to get a bridge across that? I started making phone calls to get information on steel beams, laminated beams, anything I could use to span this stream. Steel was going to cost over $1,000.00 and the beams would weight around 1000 pounds. Without the ability to get some sort of a crane up there I would have no way of moving anything like that. I decided to ask about dropping some trees to build a wooden bridge and was given permission to do that. I then got on the phone and tried to gather as many people as I could to help out. I bought more lumber and was able to pull it all to the bridge site with my Skandic snowmobile. With everything in place we arrived at the day for the project to begin. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with five or six people in a day. We had a 35 foot by five foot wide bridge 90% complete by 5:00 in the evening. It was a full day and I was so tired I could hardly see straight but we had a bridge with no corners to make; just a straight shot across!

I could hardly wait to try it out with a dog team. I didn’t have to wait long; we had some more snow a few days later and after packing the trail again we hooked up some eight dog teams and gave it a go. The bridge worked perfectly and it offers a great view of the waterfall and gorge below. With that out of the way I was pretty well set up for running there for the winter. We have had a few other minor projects such as ongoing brush work to keep the trail clear and some shoveling to fill in some washed out spots after a rainy spell we had. I hope to do some drainage work on the road bed next summer to eliminate some of those wet areas. Over all it has been a fantastic location for running this winter.

The tours have been going great and I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of really great people this winter. Besides getting to spend so much time with my dogs meeting new people from all over the world is one of the things I like most about this endeavor. I do tend to get a little cynical from listening to the news and reading about all of the discouraging things that are happening in the world and all of the wonderful people I meet through dogsledding really helps restore my faith in humanity. The pups are a amazing bridge across cultures and lifestyles. We’ve had families from the Bahrain, Columbia, South Africa as well as just down the road from here. The business has kind of taken on a life of its own and I sometimes feel like I’m just along for the ride. Where will it take me? I really can’t say but time will tell.