Last post

I've made the leap and integrated all of Lucy and Walter's blogs into one single blog. So from now on, updates on Lucy and Walter's skijoring fun will be at www.muttsandaklutz.blogspot.com. Hope to see you there.

Hello spring

Our skijoring season has been officially over for several weeks now. Seems the snow melted a lot sooner (and/or there was just less of it) than last year. We only got out maybe five times this year, but that's ok. The dogs aren't getting any older, and I'm not getting any less paranoid about their health, so best not to overdo it with a rigorous activity like skijoring.

See you next year!

Larose

Conditions were great for doing more joring than actual skiing, so I took the opportunity to just hold on tight and film this video. Long and boring, yes, but the song is great so I didn't want to cut it short. The most exciting part of the video (ok, the only exciting part) is where Lucy and Walter have polar opposite reactions to passing some people on the trail. Heh.

Not our most skijorful winter!

Wow, since that last post the dogs and I have been out skijoring a grand total of once! I attended Mush Larose's skate skiing / skijoring clinic on January 10th, got some good tips on skate skiing but as usual was terrible at implementing them, and took the dogs out for a skijor during the lunch break.

Between Walter's stitches (finally healed), ridiculously long stretches of COLD weather (-20 to -30), our other activities, and a recent bout of rain which I imagine made the trails rather unpleasant, well, the skis haven't gotten much use.

March will be pretty busy with agility events, but hopefully we'll manage to get out a couple more times this season.

No skijoring for a while

Walter had a benign lump removed from his forearm last week so we won't be skijoring until it has fully healed over. Oh well. Not quite ideal skijoring weather this weekend anyway.

Larose - First skijor of the season

20-30cms of snow dumped on us in a big storm this week (which in conjunction with a transit strike and the closure of one of the interprovincial bridges left traffic in quite a mess), so there was lots of snow for skiing this weekend.

Our first outing of the year went amazingly smoothly -- no falls or big tangles. One of my goals this year is to get better at staying on my feet during the first minute of the run. That's when the dogs take off like bats out of hell and, of course, when I'm most likely to think not so great thoughts like "Oh - dear - oh - no - oh!" SPLAT! (so eloquently phrased in an old Mushing magazine article). It was only toward the end of last season that I discovered the trick of holding onto the line when greater stability is needed, and it really helps at times like that.

To Lucy's dismay, we didn't come across any fresh deer tracks, or, even better, actual deer. Still, she's quite a happy, carefree skijor dog, enjoying the forest and the chance of coming across interesting smells. Walter on the other hand is more serious and somewhat concerned about what's going on behind him. Neither one, however, needs any encouragement to pull!

Here's a short video from today. This is the main drag up the middle of the area. A bunch of smaller, more interesting trails branch off from this trail and that's where we often come across the deer/rabbit/etc. tracks.



Conditions: Nice and fluffy but with a bit of a crunch underneath.
Weather: Cloudy, -6
Falls: 0
Kms: ~4.3

Soon...

A year ago tomorrow was our first skijoring outing of the 2007/2008 season.

This seasons's first skijor won't be quite so early. We've had a fair bit of snow recently, but also a few warmish days that partially melted some of it away. A few more cms this weekend, and some more called for this week, so maybe next weekend? Hmmm, except for possible rain on Wednesday.

We'll have to wait and see!