Drop what you're doing and try dog sledding! Photo by Kristin Lund
February is the time many Swedes take a winter holiday from school and work. It’s called “sportlov” because many people do something physical such as downhill or cross-country skiing but its origins comes from a 1940′s initiative to save on heating in schools. Thinking about the upcoming holidays got me thinking about one of the best things I’ve ever done–dog sledding in Sweden.
Unlike this year’s mild winter, the temperature several years ago in Sälen, a ski resort on the western side of Sweden, was a frosty 18 degrees below zero Celsius at eleven o’clock in the morning. When we arrived for our 3-hour ride, my throat welled up the moment I heard the dogs howling. The trainers were harnessing them up to pull our group’s three sleds. Their howls were so primal, so wolf-like, that I’m sure if I hadn’t been wearing eight layers of clothing under my loaner parka, as well as a hat, ear warmers and a hood, every hair on my head would have stood up.
My friend, Helen, and her four-year-old son settled themselves under thick reindeer pelts on one sled and I took up the driver’s position at the back. I had no idea what I was doing. The only direction I got from Lasse, the outfit’s head trainer and our guide, was that I should “bore” the dogs when we wanted to stop. I was to say, “Stoppppppppp…” without any excitement, as if I was yawning and on my way to bed. Lasse told us we could make the dogs go faster by saying “Come on” but that generally the dogs knew how to pace themselves and it was unwise to hurry them up or they might run out of energy too early on the trip.
With that, Lasse untied his sled from the post it was anchored to and stepped off the drag brake. An assistant released my sled just in time because when the twelve dogs I was attached to saw their master go, they were determined to follow even if it meant taking the post we were tied to with us. Away we flew, all of the questions I was going to ask about the intricacies of driving the sled lost in the wind.
We shot through the blue-white landscape like ghosts. The low-slung sled bounced along on the track made by the sled in front of us and I could tell that Helen and her son, who were only raised around three inches off the ground, could feel every bump. It looked as though we had left planet Earth and landed on another planet. The landscape was painted in only blues and white. The snow that collected in the trees never fell off so even the very tips of the trees were white.
We made our way up a gentle slope, crossing under a mile-long chairlift that moved skiers across the flat area between a string of ski resorts. The dogs had settled into a gentle, loping rhythm and I had time to hope that I looked like I had been doing this all my life to anyone watching from the chairlift.
The wind bit through my clothing and I risked taking a hand off the sled handles to tug the scarf over my face a little higher. For the first time I understood the benefits of “performance clothing”.
I didn’t have any.
I wore a hand-me-down parka my mother got for free when she went to Antarctica on a boat. I did not blend in as a trendy Swedish skier. Helen was wearing a snow suit, for example, that had special beacons sewn into the sleeves to let rescuers know where she was in the event that she was buried in an avalanche.
We arrived at our half-way point, a little wooden cottage in the middle of a white plain. There was nothing but white trees, dogs, snow, and some cross-country skiis parked outside. As soon as the sled stopped, half the dogs dropped to the ground to rest and eat snow. The other half engaged in a game of “let’s see how tangled we can get our harness lines” with their nearest neighbors.
Lasse talks to his dog teams during our break. Photo by Kristin Lund
A half hour later, we were off again. The dogs didn’t seem to be anxious to get back to our starting point the way horses do when they know they’re heading back to the barn. Rather they seemed to love the fact that we were now going slightly downhill. I gulped as we headed down a steeper section and I saw the two sleds in front of us make a sharp left turn. Whether they were asleep at the switch or just enjoying some canine humor, my pair of lead dogs missed the turn and took ten or so steps off the track and into the deep snow before they realized their mistake. Only then did they swing to the left, belatedly trying to change course as the rest of the team floundered in the deep snow behind them and the sled did a sort of crack-the-whip ninety degree turn. I threw my weight to the left to keep us from overturning, worried that my passengers were sitting ducks under those reindeer pelts.
At last we returned to our starting point and I stopped the dogs. Even though they had caught up with Lasse, I had the distinct feeling that they would have just kept going, crossing the road in front of us, dodging the Volvos, and loping up the other side up the mountain.
What a ride! I loved it. Any time you can experience a dog doing what it was bred to do—herding, retrieving, pulling a sled—it’s so exhilarating because you can feel in your gut how happy the dog is, how much fun he’s having. And by extension you feel connected and alive and like all is right in the universe.
It was super cold and I had every piece of clothing on possible.
