Anyway, the dogs are all good and we are having a more "laid back" year because there is no Serum Run this year, we don't have a handler and Paul is planning only one race this year.  We have one, Maize, that it seems that her Cushing's Disease and liver cancer is starting to get the best of her, but she is still a trooper. 

Have a safe and Happy New Year!

All the four-legged kids are doing great and are ahead of schedule for our kennel.  However, we have had some sad moments.  Our main lead dog, Licorice unexpedately passed away back in November and the second to last of our very first core group of dogs, Bubba passed away in December.  Both are missed dearly, however will never be forgotten.

Several of Licroice's offspring have stepped up to the plate to fill his void in lead, but it's hard to completely replace crazy Licorice.

The "pups" are almost seven months old and are doing 8+ mile free runs.  The race dogs are doing 5+ hour runs consistently now and come back fresh as daisies.  So, hitting the race trail soon shouldn't be to hard for them. 

Joe and Lisa have been working really hard and Joe is getting ready for his first 200-mile race this weekend.  However, he has the flu and we hope he feels better here in the next day or two. 

I will do my best to keep things updated during the race season here this next month.

Happy New Year to all!

We started four wheeler training about a month ago and the dogs are starting to get stronger.  We lost quite a bit of fall training trails this summer, so our fall training has been limited.  That's okay because to be honest I (Erin) don't really care for fall training, but it's necessary.

All the dogs and cats are healthy.  We did have to have old man Jose's eye removed due to a lens luxation, but he was blind anyway.  He actually seems happier.

Joe and Lisa, our new handlers moved in a few days ago and will be back full-time in late October after visiting family and celebrating their engagement.  They are going to be just great!

I have added some new photos to the site, but this crazy program doesn't do a great a job of it.

Past News:

On June 7th, Bird had a healthy litter of 8 pups.  The pups are 1/4 hound and just crazy!  Six of the eight are light colored and two are black and white.  It's funny to see the light colored dogs because most dogs in our kennel are dark colored.  It's been fun having the pups around this summer.

Speaking of summer, we really didn't have one.  This summer was the third coldest on record for Alaska.  We didn't have one day this summer where we wore shorts.  We usually have a few 70-80 degree days where we even go to the lake in bikini's, but not this year - burrrrrrrrrrr!  We probably only had a total of 14 sunny days since May.

We didn't take a vacation outside the state this summer, but did have several visitors from both sides of the family.  It's always fun to play tourist in your own state.

Well, I better wrap this up.  It's snowing like crazy and I need to go and find winter tires for the new car (I was in an accident that totaled our car back in February).

I will do my best to keep the site up to date.

Training has been a little slow due to the excessive rain we've received the last couple of months, but the dogs seem to be stonger than they've ever been.  Who knows.

We hired our very first handler - Matt Wagner.  Paul and I have been taking of and training the dogs by ourselves for 10 years and this is still a very new concept for us.  Matt is doing a great job for us and the dogs adore him.  So, I think it was definately the right thing to do.

Paul has been back out in Ilimana working on fisheries stuff again for work.  Hopefully, this is his last trip for the year.  It will be nice to have him back at home because Kayla, Mattie and Ollie become even bigger bed hogs when he is away - ha!  Just kidding, we miss him being around.