Dogsledding in the Yukon by Andrew Bain

Canada’s Yukon Territory is canine country. Home to the Yukon Quest, an event billed as the toughest dogsled race on earth, it’s the kind of place where even the capital city, Whitehorse, offers courses on doggie massage and physiotherapy. If you’re in the Yukon, quite simply, you mush. It’s the reason I’m here, skimming across the top of frozen Lake Laberge, towed by eight Alaskan huskies.

“You shouldn’t get too cold today,” Jeninne Cathers promises. “It’s only minus five degrees…a nice spring day.” Warming news indeed. We are heading for Cathers’ home, a 30-minute sled journey across the lake ice. Though little more than 50 kilometres from Whitehorse, the isolation is almost absolute. There are no roads to the house, and in winter it can be reached only by sled, which seems fitting given the family’s commitment to mushing.

Between them, Jeninne and her father Ned have competed 16 times in the Yukon Quest (Jeninne holds the record as the event’s youngest competitor) the 1600-kilometre dogsled race that is as much about survival as speed, sledding through mountainous terrain in temperatures that can plunge below minus 50 degrees. Is it any wonder she feels warm at minus five?

Turning Mushy Tourists Into Mushers

The Cathers family is also the Yukon’s longest-running operator of dogsled tours, turning mushy tourists into mushers for 25 years. Visitors have come for up to six weeks of dogsledding at a time. I’ll be here for three days, a stay that begins with ‘sled school’ over the Cathers’ kitchen table.

With various sauces and condiments acting as dogs and trees, Jeninne guides me through the techniques of dogsledding: steering by weight distribution, keeping a tight line, helping the dogs uphill and the one I’m currently thinking might be most useful. Falling.

When the time comes to hitch up our teams, there is canine pandemonium in the kennels. Every dog here wants to run, but there are more than 80 huskies in the Cathers’ yards and we are hitching up just two sleds. We’ll hear the howls of disappointment echoing through the hills long after we depart.

For my first run as a musher, Jeninne has selected just four dogs so that I can learn to control a team without my engine at full power. Conversely, it also means I must work harder to help the dogs up the slopes. With the home surrounded by hills, we’ve gone little distance before I’m off the sled, pushing it and the four dogs up the hill, rising to a view across Lake Laberge that’s only spoiled slightly by my frenetic pulse.

At first I feel as though I’ve grasped the mushing basics – leaning, braking, flying downhill and pushing the dogs uphill – but there’s still the final descent to come, a writhing set of S-bends that contains the track’s toughest two turns. On both corners I’m thrown from the sled, committing dogsledding’s cardinal sin – never let go of the sled – on the second corner as my face is buried into the snow. The dogs and the sled run on down the hill without me.

“That first corner,” Jeninne says later. “There used to be a tree there that was called Jeninne’s tree because when I learned to drive I hit it every day for the first week.” It’s some comfort; perhaps one day I too will race in six Yukon Quests?

Blisters and Burns

That night over dinner I meet the two other guests who are to be my fellow mushers over the coming days. Imke is 10 days into a three-week stay, and is on first-name basis with most of the dogs while I still see 80 barking bits of fur. She is a true dog person, having just completed her university studies in Germany by spending a year living in a tower observing a pack of wolves.

English tourist Steve arrived the day before me, and has already endured a luckless stay. Thrown from the sled four times on his first run, tonight he burned and blistered his fingers when he plunged them into boiling water in his cabin. It’s some achievement, burning your fingers when it’s minus 10 degrees outside.

We’re joined at dinner by Ned, a softly spoken, Canadian-style Crocodile Dundee who recounts boy’s-own Yukon Quest stories with a matter-of-factness that belies their incredible content – tales of sleeping atop his sled at minus 30 degrees without a sleeping bag, and laying down in the snow for a few hours’ rest at minus 45. It gives me confidence that I may, after all, survive tomorrow’s planned camping trip.

I’m woken the next morning by the most appropriate of alarms: the sound of the dogs calling for their breakfast. By the time we’ve lazed through our own breakfast, packed the sleds and harnessed 26 dogs it’s almost midday before we’re away, mushing back out into the spruce and poplar forest on a day that is all blue, white and green – sky, snow and spruce.

This day we will sled 16 kilometres out from the house to make camp at the edge of an unnamed lake. I have progressed to a team of six dogs, and at first the extra power is disconcerting. At about the third corner my sled slips off the track, tipping me off into the deep snow. But then the dogs and I adjust to each other and we are away, sledding coolly through the forest.

“I can tell by your team’s behaviour that they’re happy with the way you’re going,” Jeninne says at our first stop, explaining that the dogs are the true gauge of a musher’s skills. If they’re glancing over their shoulders at the driver as they run, it means they’re nervous. On the first day I’d been relentlessly eyeballed by one of my team, but today I’m being happily ignored. I have become part of the team.

Camping in Minus Twenty

From the slopes behind the Cathers’ home, we mush through a chain of frozen lakes, their surfaces crissed and crossed and crissed again by moose tracks, though there is no moose in sight – what animal is going to show itself to 26 excitable dogs?

From lake to lake we progress, reaching camp in the late afternoon, where we unhitch and unharness our dogs before feeding and watering them. Only then is it our turn to eat, with dinner over the coals before we roll out our sleeping mats on the snow inside the floorless tent.

When we wake at dawn it is minus 23 degrees, a temperature at which the cold is more a pain than a sensation. If I want consolation, there are 26 of them outside the tent door, where the dogs have slept in the snow.

“So, is this also a nice spring day?” I ask Jeninne, who disappears behind the vapour of my breath.

“Oh yeah, this is quite warm,” she says. “Minus 20 is about the optimal condition for the dogs and for camping comfort.” I look for a smirk but she is serious.

The Final Tumbles

My fall of the previous day had been our first of the trip but it won’t be the last or the most spectacular. That honour is reserved for the hapless Steve. As we leave camp, charging down a short, steep slope, Steve’s sled tips over and as he ploughs into the snow, his pants are pulled down to his knees, filling them with snow. His legs will be wet for the rest of the day.

Jeninne herself will be next to tumble. As we cross the open expanse of a lake, she turns to photograph the sleds behind her. What she has failed to notice is a small bend ahead – as her dogs round it, the sled glides slowly off the track, where it and Jeninne sink into both snow and embarrassment. Maybe I could do that Yukon Quest…
We return back along the chain of lakes, veering away for a sweeping descent to the home over the final 10 kilometers. At the end of the run we come to the S-bends, the scene of my first canine indignity, a pair of corners Jeninne describes as about the most difficult we can expect to find on a nature trail.

Imke curls through the bends untroubled, while Steve and I both make a mess of the first corner. I brake too hard and pull the dogs into the trees on the inside bend, while Steve overshoots the bend, icing himself in snow once again.

The second corner, a left-hander that loops around a large tree, is the more difficult of the pair, but I’m determined to beat it. I glide gently up to the tree, then release the brake, throwing my weight onto my left leg while dragging my right leg out wide in the snow as a brace. The sled turns and bumps against the tree but I hold my position. Together we rocket away down the hill. Finally, I have mushed the corner rather than mashed it.