Well we did it! It all seems like a dream now but the reality was both breathtaking and stunning. Norway is a really lovely country although we did the major part of the trek in Sweden which was majestic its own way - vast white spaces with far horizons. The weather was kind to us, mainly dropping to -20 degrees at night although the coldest night was below -30!
The days were divided into looking after the dogs, trekking and looking after ourselves. Thank Goodness I did a course last year which made me brush up on camping skills. The dogs were fabulously well-trained and entirely people-friendly although I caught one of mine giving me a baleful glance from time to time as if to say I should have dieted more assiduously before attempting the trip. The looking-after of the dogs consisted of feeding them twice a day according to the instructions of their owner, one of our Norwegian guides Tove. She gauged how much work they had done, how much food we were still carrying and issued instructions about how much dry food (served in bowls under a scoop of water) and how much meat ( a frozen lump of protein which did not bear too much investigation into its ingredients). Then we had to take them, one at a time from the tether wire to which they were connected to the traces on the sleds. Then came the task of putting on the harnesses - in three different sizes according to the size of the dog. Each dog had its place in the team. Alaska and Gypsy were my lead dogs, intelligent and lively and slighter than I had imagined they would need to be. Gypsy was particularly affectionate and over a week after returning home I put on my sunglasses to discover they were still covered in 'dog-lick'. My swing dogs were Unseth (she of the reproachful glare) and Sophie, both immensely pretty but still rather slight creatures. Of course the dog teams were selected for the participants by their owners, having to balance the pulling power of the dog with the braking ability of the sledder. I think my dogs had an unfair burden put on them therefore. My power dogs at the back of the team nearest the sled were Ken and Roger. They were bigger than the four bitches and quite affable. Ken in particular was always raring to go when put into harness and jerked the whole outfit forward as he pulled and tugged impatiently. The sleds have three methods of braking including a snow anchor which was described as the 'handbrake'. When we stopped for lunch, we also connected the front dogs in each team to the sled in front so that they could not move without moving the whole train - twenty sleds in our case. At the end of the day we had to reverse the whole process, not forgetting to get out the tether wire and either tie it securely between two trees (or what passes for trees up in the arctic) or- as we had to do twice- wrap the ropes at the ends of the wires around planks and bury the planks horizontally about 1.25 m down in the deep, powdery snow. The last thing we needed to be doing was to be getting up in the middle of the night to capture escaped dogs. The tether wires each were long enough to hold fourteen or so dogs attached to specific places along the wire. It had to be wire or chain as they chewed through anything less solid. A couple of people, including my sister, ruefully found they lost gloves or other items left within teeth distance. In total there were about 125 dogs on the trek.
