Don’t tell me to get lost.

I don’t often get lost.  In fact, I don’t think I can say I’ve ever been well and truly lost – not even ‘powerful turned around’ as one old-timer put it.  Nevertheless, I like to carry a GPS unit with me or, at the very least, a compass.  But, now that distance and speed matter (after all, we are training racing dogs.  [insert author's snort of laughter]) I especially like the GPS.  Not only does it show me where I’ve been and help me get to where I want to go, but it also shows me how far we went and how fast we got there.

A few years ago, I bought a Garmin Etrex Legend on the advice of some of my mushing friends and up until recently, I’ve been really happy with it.   I plotted waypoints with it, I measured the size of our field with it, I entered routes into it and I used it’s ‘goto’ function, where coordinates are entered into the unit and it then displays the direction of travel and the distance required to reach those coordinates.  A handy little rig to be sure.  Yet, when fall training rolled around and I tried to use it to measure our trails and our speed, the GPS unit would quit working.  I was left with a vertical line on the screen and no way of removing it except taking out the batteries and replacing them.  At first, I thought it was just an issue with the batteries, so I bought ‘good ones’ and replaced them.  Same result.  Then, I thought it was maybe the cold, but I’d been trying to use it in -3C and surely these units were made tougher than that.  So, I figured that I’d somehow screwed it up and I was not looking forward to telling Jenn: I’d spent several hundred dollars on it and it’s practically brand new.  I didn’t want her to think I’d wasted the money. 

As it turns out, through the magic that is the internet, an answer to my problem was found.  I just had to download an update for the GPS unit, which I did, directly from the Garmin site..  It was free and it worked.  Now, I have my handy-dandy GPS back and I can say with all the certainty that the ability to navigate to within nine feet of a target gives “we ran 15.7 miles at an average speed of 13.4 miles per hour.”

I took this image from the Garmin website. Hope they don’t mind.

Now, about that run: we were supposed to be out looking for a Christmas tree.  Jenn, Hunter and I drove to my newly-found training spot, parked the truck and unloaded the gear, the sled and ten dogs.   Pretty soon, we were on our way. 

Our trail that day was a little-used road leading to nowhere, really.  Actually, it led to a guy’s hunt camp, but we didn’t know that when we started.  According to my maps, the road had several branches, forks and loops on it, which seemed ideal for what we were doing until we reached a dead end.  The dogs, however, were ready to keep on going, barriade be damned, and were half over a bank and through the brush before I could get them stopped.  With Jenn’s help, the team was turned around and we were going back the way we came. 

Since I had been having trouble with one of our leaders in previous runs, we thought we’d try running her with no neckline to see if it made a difference.  I don’t know if it was the no neckline or not, but she was great this time.  However, I don’t like having lead dogs that spread out as wide as they did on this run, so I think that I will use a neckline attached to the tugline snaps to keep them closer together.

I was really surprised at how well the dogs did.  It was our first sixteen mile run of the season and we’d jumped up to the sixteen miles after doing two runs of eight miles the previous week.  Before that, it was three mile runs on our property.  I think that hauling around the fourwheeler all fall did them well, though, because the dogs didn’t seem tired at the end of the run and we could have continued farther, I think, but Hunter’s feet were getting cold.  We had taken off her boots and put my big fleece mitts on her feet to see if that helped; and it did, but only for a little while.  Next time, I’m going to bring those chemical warmer packs for her.  She loves to go on the sled, but because she doesn’t move around very much she gets cold faster.  That, and she won’t keep the sleeping bag on her.

We never actually found a tree, though.  That had to wait for the following day.

Here’s another video.  Thanks to Jamiroquai for the music (“Canned Heat”).  I do apologise for the recent spate of videos set to music, but I run the dogs a lot of the time with an MP3 player in my pocket and the added soundtrack is fun.  I’m still trying to find really good mushing songs, ones that ‘fit’ with the rhythm of the dogs and the pace of travel, and it isn’t always obvious which songs would be best suited.  Anyway, here’s the video: