The Trip

Pictures at the bottom :)

Man, what a crazy two months in Norway! It was equal parts totally wild and super boring, oddly enough. While on the one hand it was totally crazy that I got to spend two months in the remote, Norwegian mountains training a team of sled dogs for an upcoming race, I was also stuck in the remote, Norwegian mountains with no means of transportation for two months.
Overall, I'm super pleased with how it turned out and it was an incredibly valuable experience.

Firstly, the boring parts were quite pleasantly boring! My mushing friend, Eef, lives in total cabin-town Norway. Many city slickers from Oslo own mountain cabins to escape to during the weekends or in the summer when they're taking vacation, and she lives smack where loads of people have those cabins. Except that's where she lives all the time. Norwegians appreciate their space and their nature, so our nearest neighbors were quite far away, not around often, and apparently somewhat grouchy anyway.
So, I was on my own with the dogs whenever Eef was at work, which was quite often.
I occupied my vast amounts of spare time by walking Bull, a retired sled dog who doesn't train anymore (he makes several appearances in the pictures!), reading a crap ton of books, fussing around with Advent of Code 2024 until it was an unfun level of hard, and most importantly learning to make salve from foraged freaking spruce resin!!
Hot dawg learning to make salve was so fun. During summer 2024, I made the pleasant silver lining discovery that accidentally getting pine sap on your hands, while making them quite sticky, also makes them smell absolutely divine. From then on, whenever that happened to me, I'd become that weirdo who keeps smelling his fingers (because they smell great, though). I knew it was possible to make stuff from resin that would probably make you smell like a tree, but I'd always felt like I had too much going on to give it a fair shake so I never tried. Then, when I found myself bored as hell in the woods, I figured that would be the perfect time to get into it rather than immerse myself in a world of YouTube shorts, Facebook, Reddit, Netflix, and/or Instagram!
It turned out to be the perfect time too. Since temperatures were typically below freezing, any exposed resin on the trees was frozen and glassy, making it extremely easy to harvest by just scraping it off the tree into a jar held against the bark below the resin!
So, I often found myself wandering aimlessly through the forest of seemingly infinite spruce trees walking from tree to tree collecting resin.
It took some trial and error to get the process and mix right, but I pulled it off and made some awesome smelling salve that also helps to hydrate and heal wounds to boot! I made some for my friends and for personal use, then collected several jars worth of resin to make some bigger runs back in the states. I've caught the bug!
I'm hoping to keep it up enough to collect significant amounts from various species of pine and spruce trees in the states to see how the salves differ from tree to tree.
I'm sure more on that is to come in future posts!

Secondly, the part that I'm sure folks will be more interested in: The mushing and the training!
Conditions were flat out horrible for mushers in pretty much all of Norway this winter. There wasn't much snow to be had, and when there was it didn't get a chance to build up much before temperatures went above freezing for a few days, melted the snow, then dipped back down to below zero and froze it all into ice. Rough.
To put down sleds and actually mush, the sled trails need to have plenty of snow in order for braking to be possible. With some snow it might be technically possible to scoot around on a sled under dog power, but it would be the mushing version of free soloing because there would be no way to stop!
And the dogs REALLY want to run so that would be pretty damn risky.
So, for the majority of the two months I was there, we trained by hooking up the dogs to a line attached to Eef's van, then drive super slowly while the dogs pulled and ran ahead of the van.
Imagine a 2-4 hour road trip where you're driving at about 6 miles an hour and you end up exactly where you started. 3 or so times a week. And on weekends we'd often have big training days where it's an all day road trip like that! Oh, and it's usually in the dark because the days are so short in Norway in winter.
Those were preeeetty boring, but Eef is great company, we got to share our music with each other and gossip about people in our lives neither of us is likely to ever meet, so it wasn't so bad!
It was still quite fun to get the sled dog experience even without the mushing. I'd help harness up all the dogs, hook them onto the line to run, water them during training (when there wasn't enough snow for them to drink while on the run), feed them during the day, and hang with them in the dog yard during non-training days so they can stretch their legs!
They're a wonderful bunch and it was SO fun getting to know their dynamics and meeting all the puppies from last year.

An interesting occurrence started going down just before Eef left me there on my own for the holidays so she could visit her folks:

Doggie Bachelorette!

Bubbles, one of the older hats of the crew, went into heat just as Eef was getting ready to leave. She had to be separated from literally everyone else because she would seduce any males and tear apart any females! I'd also have to strategically let them out in certain groups because certain males would fight certain others for the favor of the bachelorette.
Even while they weren't out in the yard, there was still bachelorette stuff going down!
Bubbles, our lead in this show, was sequestered to a kennel on the end of a line of three kennels. In the middle kennel were two males, Slush and Baloo, then in the last kennel in the row there was a female, Lotsa, and a male, Indie. Those three kennels were like a micro doggie version of an episode of The Bachelorette, I swear. Slush was constantly flirting with Bubbles against the wall of the kennel, he wasn't there for any drama and just wanted to focus on his relationship with Bubbles! Good man.
Baloo, however, was CONVINCED that Indie was there for the WRONG REASONS and was constantly beefing with Indie on the other side of the kennel from Bubbles. Rookie mistake, Baloo, you'll never get with Bubbles like that!! I guess Lotsa was part of the crew of the show or something, but she definitely had a crush on Indie (she'd hump him all the time).

Anyway, the doggie bachelorette didn't stop us from actually getting on sleds in literally the last couple days of my visit! We finally got enough snow such that the sled trails a little deeper in the mountains were runnable, and we took advantage of it to sneak in three days of actual mushing (one of which was guiding a short loop for multiple groups of clients, but whatever)!
Man, mushing is a lot of work, especially when you can't sled out of your front yard. You have to load all the equipment into your transport, load all the dogs into their little trailer, set everything up a the site, get all the dogs ready without a dog yard, and then you finally get to go mushing!
And the transition from getting ready to zooming along in a sled is almost faster than you can anticipate. One minute you have a group of dogs hooked up to your sled barking like mad, as they have been for the last 20 minutes, the next they're dead silent as you whip along on your sled! You have to be super careful to keep track of the sled and what's going on because the dogs can and will take off without you.
Mushing is such a delight after all the prep though! You get to effortlessly glide over the snow on this sled, and once you get the hang of keeping your balance and how to fuss with the breaks to keep a safe speed, you can even have snack, water, and picture breaks pretty much anytime!
I also got much more adept at handling the cold on this entire trip, but especially while mushing. It can be pretty breezy while zooming along by dog power, and it's pretty cold out there to begin with! I got a lot better about proper layering and proper techniques to warm up numb toes and fingers, but I also got better at just dealing with numb toes and fingers.

I was also incredibly lucky to have my trip bookended by the aurora borealis!! I'd never seen it before in my life, and literally my first couple nights in the mountains we had stunningly beautiful aurora. Then, my last couple nights in the mountains, it happened again, and even more beautiful this time!! I hope I'll always be able to picture the sight of bluegreen aurora beams dancing directly overhead as Eef and I returned to the trailer with the dogs and started putting dogs and gear away...

A bittersweet occurrence occurred though: I wasn't able to make it to Spain to spend the holidays with my two friends who were there! Eef and I had a miscommunication that meant there would be no one to take care of the dogs for several days, so I took the L and stayed back. I was bummed to miss out on seeing my friends in Spain, but on the other hand, if I had gone I would have completely missed the weather window to get on the sleds! All-in-all I'm happy with how things ended up, and I left from Norway to Brazil in high spirits and nursing slightly less sensitive toes ;)

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