So here I am in Bridger-Teton National Forest with six feet of snow on the ground. I’m on the back of a 60-pound sled behind eight Alaskan huskies. And these dogs love to run.
I start off my morning the toughest way possible – rolling out of 400-thread-count sheets in my room at the Four Seasons Resort Jackson Hole, flicking on the gas-burning fireplace and drawing back the shutters to look out on the mountain. Below my private terrace, there is steam rising off the heated swimming pool. The snow obscures the landscape enough for me to suspect that it has been coming down all night.
An hour later, Tim, the seasoned mountaineer who’s driving our van out to the base camp of Jackson Hole Iditarod Sled Dog Tours, is telling me about Frank Teasley, the eight-time Iditarod veteran who co-owns the operation. Teasley has competed all over the world with his team, and runs tours into the 3.4 million-acre Bridger-Teton National Forest. It’s a “pension plan” for his older dogs and a training program for the younger ones. As we wind along the Snake River out of town on Highway 191.
I clomp my way over the top of the small ridge leading up to the kennel – the last couple hundred of feet of driveway are steep and have too much snow cover for our van to make it up safely – and see a small, cedar-shingled building with smoke coming out of a tin chimney. Behind it are neat rows of wooden telephone-wire spools tipped on their sides. Each spool has a little door cut out of it, and a little dog attached by a chain. There are 187 dogs, and all of them are barking.
When I say little dogs, I’m not joking. Whether it came from Hollywood or Jack London, the idea of the sled dog as a hulking, wolf-like creature couldn’t be further from the type of dog that makes up teams like Teasley’s. Most of his weigh about 40 pounds. These dogs are Alaskan huskies, the kind that used to roam around Inuit villages. “In other words, they’re mutts,” she says.
She and the other guides are obviously fond of their charges, mutts or not – each guide works with about 20 dogs – but she does ask that we not pet the dogs outside, at least until they get sorted out into teams and we’re assigned to a specific guide. The dogs get very, very wound up, which is immediately obvious from the howl and then total chaos that erupts outside when the first sled gets dragged out.
Our destination, Granite Hot Springs, is 11 miles out, and we take off with a start. I’m kind of surprised by how tippy the sled is – particularly if I’m not supposed to fall off/let go under any circumstances, a guideline Mike vigorously confirms. There isn’t that much steering involved; instead, the dogs respond to verbal commands: “alright” to get going, “on up” to keep up the pace, “whoa” to stop. They know the trail pretty well, but you can tell them to “gee over” to move to the right or “haw” to go left.
In a few minutes we’ve left the kennel behind and the dogs have pretty much stopped goofing around like naughty kindergarteners. I’m balancing like a ballerina on a 3-by-12-inch slat of wood, with powder kicking up on either side of me and nothing but the sound of dogs panting and the slight squeak of the sled moving through the snow.
Granite Hot Springs has been gushing up from the earth for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that the Civilian Conservation Corps built a small concrete pool to capture the 104-degree water.
It doesn’t take that long to untangle our teams and get them pointed for home again, but I’m feeling sleepy from the hot springs and the warm food, so I decide to ride back wrapped in blankets in the sled basket. Mike has added some of his horse blankets, which makes it super toasty. Knowing they’re going home – and going to get dinner, most likely some of the raw, red meat that was sitting in vats around the kennel – the dogs roar off like they’re running for their lives.