Dog Sleds, or perhaps Dogsleds, or Dog-sleds

We went to Listvianka yesterday, and Middlebury paid vast sums of money for each of us to dog sled for 5 km, which was about 15 minutes. The whole thing was not really remotely adventurous but just completely touristy, but it was still very fun.

It was a pretty, sunny day, and Listvianka was abuzz with activity: cars driving all over the lake, ice-fishing, ice-skating, a hover-craft scooting about, a bunch of dog-sleds on the ice, and a huge walled ice-palace thing with ice-slides and an ice-rink and several ice-castles and sculptures. When we drove in on the marshrutka we had a brilliant view out the window of the mouth of the Angara, never frozen, but a very cold stripe of bright-blue between two endless expanses of ice, with the Shaman Rock sticking up in ice-covered whiteness against the blue too.

The dog-sledding center was far back from the lake up on a hill dotted with dozens of dog-houses with the owners’ little wooden house in the middle. We had to wait around for a long time for a sled to be ready, because it is Russia, and nothing ever works out the way you’ve arraigned it. While we waited, a very quiet woman showed us video clips of a big race in Kamchatka that they enter, and of the fall training they do with the kids from the village, in which dogs pull kids on scooters. They did a 3-day race over Olkhon on such scooters, one dog to each scooter (not razor scooters, but bicycle-size). Meanwhile, a preternaturally serious baby stood by the door and observed us with concern.

The sled-dogs are raised to be completely free of aggression toward people, and they were indeed very friendly. They even had to get a guard-dog at the sledding-center, since the sled-dogs would let anyone come take them away. They aren’t huskies, but some other, smaller breed, in various shades of white and brown. They certainly loved to run; the second the break was let off the sleds they would shoot off down the trail. I think there were 8 dogs pulling the sled, in 4 pairs. The second pair from the back was especially energetic, and when they were all supposed to be resting between runs would object to the lack of activity by leaping as high into the air as their harnesses would allow. Though it was a nice day for us, it was hot for the poor dogs, who did a lot of rolling around in the snow between runs. What else? Oh, my favorite part of my run was when the dogs tried to run off the track to chase some horses. What kind of dogs chase horses? If I were not already fairly used to Russian live-stock practices, my other question would be, why were there horses wandering around Listvianka by themselves?

I have pictures. Maybe if I ever finish posting pictures from break I will put them up on the picture site.