Leaders of the pack

Two things to remember at the Priest Lake sled dog races, and neither has anything to do with yellow snow:

The dogs come first, whether it’s eating, getting a drink or catching a little nap. They’re the athletes, after all.

No one says “mush!” except in old movies. To get a team started, it’s either “hike” or “let’s go.”

Dogs and dog racers of all shapes and sizes have been looping through the Kaniksu National Forest trails off Hanna Flats Road and whooshing up the runway of the U.S. Forest Service Airport Saturday and today for the annual race.

That means the parking lot has been filled with dogs tethered to lines attached to all manner of sleds, or hooked to trucks and trailers that have been converted into rolling kennels. With a variety of events, some contestants race with three dogs, some with four, some with six and some with eight. Some race traditional sled dogs, like huskies, malamutes or Samoyeds, while others hook up almost anything with four legs and a lapping tongue, provided they’re purebred.

Donna Daymude came to the races for a recreational run for three of her dogs – Oso, Dawn and Spirit – who were pulling her in a four-dog race because a teammate is injured. She and her husband have been training dogs for about 18 years and keep 10 malamutes on property between Suncrest and Tum Tum, Wash.

Jill Wilson had boots on the six Samoyeds she was hitching to her sled. Dogs sweat through their feet, she said, and with the temperature inching toward 40 degrees, the boots would keep the slushy snow and ice from getting stuck between the pads on their paws.

She and her husband have 10 of the fluffy white Samoyeds, plus five Alaskan huskies, on their property near Athol, Idaho. They brought eight dogs to the race, but one isn’t quite ready for the competition. The other is injured but gets to travel with the team.

Her lead dog is 101/2, and this is probably his last season of competition, she said. “I’m looking to have fun.”

More serious about the competition was Steve Duran of Spirit Lake, Idaho, who finished first in a 20-mile run with a six-dog team, nearly six minutes ahead of his nearest competitor. Times from Saturday are combined with the time from a second run Sunday to determine the winner in each category.

Duran’s secret? “Good-running dogs,” said the former Air Force airplane mechanic who retired about 10 years ago from Fairchild and began pursuing an interest he’d had since growing up in Minnesota.

Now Duran and his girlfriend, Vicky Massey, who was also racing a team Saturday, have 29 dogs – some malamutes, some Alaskan huskies – at Sierra Kennels near Spirit Lake. They traveled to a dog sled event every weekend in January, and the Priest Lake races are very competitive, Duran said.

Pursuing a passion for dog sledding isn’t cheap, he said. They go through 1,360 pounds – that’s a pallet full – of dog food every two months, and they average about $5,000 a year in veterinarian bills.

A sled dog will burn 10,000 calories on a race day, and “the dogs get the best – we just eat hot dogs out of the cooler,” Duran said. The dogs are athletes, and when properly trained and cared for, they can race for a dozen years.

They run 10 or 12 dogs every evening to keep them in shape, and when there’s no snow, they hitch the dogs to an all-terrain vehicle, put it in neutral and let them pull.

The team Duran was running at Priest Lake was young, but he has hopes that in a couple years it will form the basis for a 16-dog team to run in the Super Bowl of dog sled racing: the Iditarod.