Sitting down with Mitch Seavey is always interesting. He is carrying dogs in the sled this year, voluntary that is. More and more mushers are doing that. Each times I pass one of those teams, I try to get a count of the number of dogs they have loaded up. Dallas often had 4 dogs in his caboose, Mitch sometimes 3 or 4.  I was curious about their system.

Normally as a musher you try to stop as little as possible on the trail and do everything with as little moves as possible fixing a dog on the wrong side, putting a few lost booties on, snacking dogs or what ever else might be necessary and then pulling the hook quickly. Now loading and unloading dogs is nothing quick. Specially 3 or 4 of them. Mitch said that he carried a total of 9 dogs between Nikolai and McGrath. That meant leaving the checkpoint with 3 in the basket and stopping 2 times on the trail unloading 3 dogs, hooking them to the gang line and loading 3 new dogs up. For sure the dogs must be used to that, or they would not ride in the sled too happily. Mitch said he had over 4000 miles on his team, all race style miles meaning not runs back to the yard. There he trained the system. Still dealing with frozen snaps, or dogs almost getting loose, takes some time. So it is even more amazing when you take a close look at the runtimes. Dallas has been doing the same thing with 4 dogs. ” He is working really hard out there ” Mitch said. ” Dallas is sick and he is not his usual happy self, instead he has this grim determination. He is dangerous “. 

It took Mitch 5hrs 21 minutes and Dallas 5 hrs 26 minutes to go to McGrath. Are those 5 minutes the difference in number of dogs loaded? 9 dogs for Mitch, versus 12 dogs for Dallas? How much does the benefit of resting dogs gets eaten up by stopped time? Then looking at other mushers runtimes, like Aliy Zirkle or Jessie Royer, they are not any faster, matter of fact a little slower. The only team I could find a tiny bit faster, 3 minutes, was Nicolas Petit, and he also has the capacity to load dogs. It is very impressive, when you think about the fact that those teams carrying dogs still pull off the same runtimes than their counterparts, running a traditional sled with all dogs on the towline. 

With the faster pace and push to Cripple by some mushers, I might not be around the internet too long and travel with a group of the Insider video guys on snow machines. Trail reports are coming in of it getting a bit rougher towards Cripple and specially around Poorman ( past Cripple ) so travelling in numbers might be a good idea