HAPPY NEW YEAR 2011 !!

So, Christmas is over and the calender shows Jan. 11 - 2011.

Christmas is normally a very busy period for us and the dogs. This year though it wasn`t so busy and we where able to really enjoy having family visits from Denmark/Finland. Christmas, as all of november and december, was a COLD experience. The temperature where seldom rising above -20C and the normal was -25 to -30. The dogs easily handles theese temperatures. Naturally there bodies uses more energy, and we make sure that they are provided with plenty of dry warm straw in there doghouses. All through the year Our dogs are fed minimum two times a day. In wintertime it is not rare that we feed them 6-7 times a day. The food they get would give a normal house dog huge digestion problems. The huskies though has an amazing ability to cope with ultrahighenergy foods as pure fat, meat, fish, intestrins and so on. The dogs never siezes to amaze us!

November and December also will be remembered for the lack of snowdays. Northern winds brought the extreme cold but almost no snow. We had about 15 cm until last week. Just enough so we could arrange the trips without problems.

This last week brought us plenty of snow, and now we are back to normal. At this point I guess we have about 70 cm of snow and of course we love it. The dogs also seems to enjoy the harder workout it brings to break trail, awaiting the next comand from the Boss =)

Five groups has allready been out on 3-Day expeditions. Three groups with dogsleds and two with backcoyntry skiis. We have slept in cabins most nights. Only one night in tents.

In November and December the cold weather gave us problems in the dogyard. The small, almost nonexistent stream outside the yard, froze in the pipe under the road, and water/ice started flowing into the dogyard. In the beginning we worked hard to keep it open with all sorts of methods. Later the stream froze above the dogyard and water/ice started to flow into the premises from all around. At that point we descided to "evacuate" and build a seasonal dogyard by the lake on flat land. That was also a big prosess that took us some weeks, but now everythinh runs smoothly in the new place. Again a HUGE thanks to ØSIL for borrowing fences to us so we could manage the move without total financial disaster!

I, Niklas, will be entering two dog sledding races this season. I will be running the dogs of Gorm Engen and Erle Frantzen. Theese dogs are specialized long distance racing dogs. It is the excact same breed as my own dogs, however my dogs are specialized touring dogs and not as fast running as Gorm and Erles team.

The first race is the "Hallingenløpet" 21-22nd of January. 160 km.

After Hallingen we prepare for World Championsship race "Femundløpet" 2-5 of February. 400 km.

I look forward to theese races, but I also enter with a clear head, that it is not my own dogs, and I will probably not be able to race them to the max. So I expect a beatiful nature adventure with focus to come through the races with happy and healthy dogs. My farther will come to be my hadler through the race. I doubt that he has realized how tough that job is, but he is still young, tough and dangerous (66) so there should be no problems =)

As snow falls outside we look forward to next weekend wich will be one of the busiest of the winter!