Sitting in a classroom and going to the Van Zyles

We had a lot of sitting today.  But even in sitting, there were some highlights.  Like this:

Ella the Famous

Ella is the black lab that belongs to the author/explorer Pam Flowers.  She has written several books, (which I bought... duh.) all based on her own dogs experiences.  A few years ago Pam hiked the entire Apalacian trail (2 THOUSAND miles) with only Ella the doggie for company.  The book is called Ella's Long Walk and is told from Ellas perspective.  Ella even signed the book. (well, marked it with her pawprint anyway.)

We also had a wonderful talk from Stu Nelson, who is THE head veterinarian for the entire Iditarod.  He oversees the 50 volunteer vets who work at all the checkpoints ensuring that the dogs are in top shape - happy and comfortable.  I was kind of excited to take a picture with him since he's the only person I am going to have a chance to take a picture with here who is actually TALLER than I am...

See??  Taller!

Jon and Jonna Van Zyle are Alaskan artists who have turned their house into a studio.  Jon is the official artist for the Iditarod and they live in a paradise of flowers, art and dogs in the woods.  They fed us dinner and opened their home to us.  It was an amazing evening with gracious and lovely hosts.  In addition, Jon is a 2-time Iditarod racer who has been raising Siberian Huskys for decades.  They are no longer racing, and most of their dogs are seniors now living out thier lives in comfort in the beautiful kennel Jon and Jonna have created here. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves...

playing hide and seek (he's also hiding a squeaky toy from the other dogs in there...)

lots of dogs on the play structure

play structure

a very sweet pure white girl

you can see the doggie excercise wheel in the background - SOOOO cool!  A big hamster wheel for dogs! They love it!

Jonna and Lion - a big, very serious male

a shed - I'd live in that shed!

Jonna has an amazing fairy garden - this is just one of her fairy doors with a baby fairy outside of it. (the door is about 3 inches high.)

Tomorrow is the Iditarod volunteer picnic!  Goodnight for now!

Anchorage

Today we got up early to leave for Anchorage - we got the the giant Wells Fargo building at 8:30, which seemed strange, but actually inside the Wells Fargo is an absolutely amazing museum.  I took about 100 pictures in the museum and I won't bore you with all of them, but here's a couple of my favorites...

Fashionable, totally waterproof, and made of Seal intestine! How great is that??  Have some seal intestine laying around??  Now you know what to do with it!!



So intricate and detailed... clothing of the tlinget people (this is the same cultural group as the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.)

And then guess who showed up????????  (I was FREAKING out.)

Okay, we knew she was coming, but I still had a panic-attack when I saw her.  Do you guys recognize who this is??  Maybe not, without all the parkas and hats and gloves and icicles hanging from her face... It's Aliy Zirkle!!  Second place finisher, all-around great person, and my personal favorite musher.  Sitting next to her is her husband Allen Moore, who raced the Yukon Quest last year, and who is planning on running BOTH the Yukon Quest AND the Itidarod in 2013.  They were both amazing and friendly and were infinitly patient with the million requests for pictures and autographs.

Aliy gave a really great presentation, which I video recorded and if I can get it on youtube, I will send you the link.  Her message was so great, and exactly what I always hope to convey to you guys (my students):  work as hard as you can, don't quit when things get hard, and enjoy your successes. 

Aliy, me and Allen

Aliy and Allen - posing for yet another picture

Can I fit this in my suitcase??

In the afternoon, we were off to the Alaskan Native Heritage Museum, where I saw lots more really cool stuff, but nothing more cool than this complete grey whale skeleton. Why can't I find one of these on the beach to pick up?? 

Bedtime!  I'm too tired to keep my eyes open any more - sorry if there are spelling errors, to tired to proofread!  Nite-nite!

Leaving the Kennel :(

Sadly, today was the end of our kennel stay.  I never imagined that living in a kennel for 3 days could be so much fun, but it's time to move on...  I am now in Wasilla at the Grand View hotel where I will be for the next 6 days.  But before we left the kennel at noon today, we had a little more fun with the dogs...  a lot more fun actually.

First we had a group challenge where we had to come up with a winning strategy for running the iditarod, followed by the hands on challenge:  Each of our 5 members had to harness and bootie a dog.  We had an extremely mellow dog, sometimes harnessing and bootieing is like trying to wrestle a greased aligator.  Our dog's name was Ohm, and she had the disposition of a saint. 

First everything goes on....

Then everything comes back off...

And here is our team:  TEAM BLANK STARE. 

The notorious TEAM BLANK STARE with our very forgiving test-dog Ohm, who seems to be camera shy

We got our name because when Vern asked us what our group name was we hadn't thought of something yet and just stared at him.  It was an embarrasing name, but our team totally rocked, and our written plan for running the race was so good that Vern collected it to read it more closely for tips for his 2013 musher. (By the way, his musher this year is a young man from Brazil - he'll be the first Brazilian musher ever in the Iditarod!)

After the challenges, Vern and his wife Susan invited us into their absolutely gorgeous log cabin home, and Vern showed us his belt buckles from the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest (another huge race here in Alaska that happens each February.)

Vern and Susan

Vern's buckles from the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod

And then finally it was time to say goodbye to the 50 amazing huskies, 7 puppies and 1 border collie of Dream a Dream Dog Farm.

And then we were off on another adventure...

He's.... ummmm.... short.

So as we were eating lunch today, one of the women who had joined us - a musher from down the road picks up her phone and I hear her say: "Hi Dallas, do you have any free time today to come talk to the teachers?"  And I think to myself: "How many Dallas's are there in Alaska that she thinks we might want to talk to????"  Later when we arrived at headquarters, who should be there waiting for us but Dallas Seavey!  He was absolutely sweet and friendly and super talkative, and it turns out he's been writing a book and wants all of us teachers and maybe a few of our students to read the manuscript and give him feedback before it goes to press in August! So in the next few weeks, I'll probably be receiving a copy to take a look at.  (Also, I thought Vern's 50 dogs were a lot of dogs - Dallas has 80!)

Day 3 - puppies, more mushing and Talkeetna

On this morning's puppy walk, the puppies were afraid to cross a bridge and needed a little help...Once they were coaxed accross, they needed some help getting down...  Looking on is Jessie, the resident border collie who has her hands full trying to keep 6 puppies in line.  She's not the mother, but she seems to have taken on the job as the actual mother seems to care less about her babies.

This evening we all drove to the nearby village of Talkeetna.  It is a quirky, cute little town with lots of eating and shopping places.  We ate at the Wildflower restaurant, which is run by President Bush's ex-whitehouse chef! The food was amazing, I didn't want dessert, but they gave me some anyway, so I had to eat it.  And now I feel like I'm going to explode.  It rained during dinner, but on the drive back the sun came out and we could see the mountains.  Beautiful!

The patio at the Wildflower Restaurant



The... welcome moose??

This morning, I had the opportunity to try on a real Eskimo (that's the English word I learned - what we call Eskimos are actually 2 distinct groups of people: the Inupiaq and the Yup'ik) parka.  I tried this on strictly for educational purposes.  If you knew exactly how many dead animals I was wearing, you would understand my horror... (I know it looks like amusement, but it's not.)

Me - wearing many formerly living animals.

The ruff is wolf fur, and the entire inside of the parka is lined in beaver fur.  Lots and lots of beavers gave their lives so that someone could be toasty warm in -30 degree weather.  I only had this on for about 1 minute and by the time I got it off, I was seriously overheating.

I'm going to try something new here and include a short video clip... let me know if it works!

Dream a Dream Day 2

Running through water.  Deep water.

Remember yesterday when I said we went on a fast dog ride through the woods???  I lied.  I didn't mean to lie, I just didn't realize the true meaning of the word fast yesterday.  Today I experienced true, dangerous, no-messing-around dog mushing and am covered with bruises to prove it.

These dogs ARE NOT MESSING AROUND.  They mean BUSINESS.

Once all 14 were harnassed up, 5 of us went for the ride of our lives.  We were all bruised, one camera was lost when we plummeted over a steep hill and if flew straight up about 6 feet out of her pocket and everyone had a renewed passion for life when we made it back in one piece. 



The Sled

This is the crazy huge vehicle that the dogs were pulling.  It was hard to get a good picture of it because it flew by me very quickly.  There were only 14 dogs harnassed up today - in the Iditarod the teams start with 16 dogs, with a sled that weighs almost nothing!  I can't even imagine what that feels like!

Me and one of the meat puppies

The meat puppies (Burger, T-bone, Sirloin, Flank, Broil and Brisket) get walked every day and night.  They are unbearably cute little bundles of fuzz.



Pile'o'puppies



Headquarters and Dream a Dream!

At 10:30 at night, after and amazing, amazingly LONG day, I’m mostly wide awake because the sun refuses to go to bed.  I found out last night that even though technically the sun is supposed to set around midnight, it doesn’t set with very much commitment and it remains twighlighty the entire (4 hours!) of supposed night before it pops up again at 4am. 

I arrived at Anchorage at around midnight last night and got to my hotel where I got a few hours of sleep before getting up this morning anxious to begin camp.  I met 2 other teachers who were staying at the same hotel as I was, and we were all picked up by a lovely woman named Jane who was the Teacher on the Trail a few years ago.  She brought us to Iditarod Headquarters in Wasilla, where we met up with the other 23 teachers (from 19 states, plus one teacher from Germany!) Iditarod headquarters is really cool – there is a team of dogs and a cart and they give short (but FAST!) rides through the woods. 

Doggies Ready to go!!

The most amazing thing I was today was… TOGO!!  The actual dog, Togo is here.  Of course he’s not alive, but he’s very well preserved and sits in a glass case looking very majestic.  I had no idea!

Togo - the famous (to those in the know) serum- run lead dog

After spending a few hours at headquarters we headed to Willow where we will be staying for three days at the Dream a Dream Dog Farm.  This place is amazing!  We met the dogs right away and got to take the 6 new puppies for a walk in the woods.  They are adorable and chubby and all named after pieces of meat.  (T-bone, sirloin… being a vegetarian, I’m not super up on my cuts of meat, so I don’t remember the rest.)  Within 10 minutes of being here I was wet, had muddy paw prints all over me, and had about 8 mosquito bites that had swelled up to the size of golf balls.  The mosquitos here are truly terrifying.  They look more like hummingbirds than mosquitos, and they are blood-thirsty monsters.  I will be dousing my entire body with mosquito spray before I go outside tomorrow. 

Airports...

So... I've made it as far as Seattle.  I am sitting in Sea-Tac airport waiting for my connecting flight to Anchorage.  And maybe it's just becsause I'm traveling alone for the first time in a long time, but what I've noticed in the last few hours is how much every person is an island - largely isolated from every other person around them even though they are sharing the same space.  Rarely does anyone venture into somone elses bubble and it's just wierd to see all these countless different lives brushing up against each other without actually touching.  Looked at from a great distance, we would probably resemble single-celled organisms scooting around a petri dish - coming close then veering just before impact - mindlessly fulfilling some primeval need to breath, scoot, swim ... or maybe just to find a restaurant that has both salad AND an open table.

Here is a picture of Amber right after she found out she was not going to Alaska with me.  As you can see from the picture, she was pretty torn up.

But seriously - I'm leaving for Alaska in less than a week!!  I'm flying out on Saturday and camp starts on Sunday at the Dream A Dream dog kennel (http://www.vernhalter.com/) where we get to play and help take care of the dogs and learn everything about how an iditarod kennel runs.  I'll take lots of pictures, and try to update my blog nightly, so check back often!

The boys - Kona and Strauss are sad too. :(

It's orange!  It's swirly!  It's my new blog!!!!