Flashback: Wasilla

I was in Alaska only a few years after Sarah Palin had been the Republican nominee for Vice President, so we'd all heard of Wasilla, where she'd been mayor before becoming governor of Alaska. I seem to remember we saw her house across the water.

But we weren't in Wasilla to look up the Palins, we were there to visit Iditarod headquarters. We got to see lots of sled dogs and hold puppies, and go on a short training ride with one of the dog teams. There wasn't any snow yet, obviously, so the dogs pulled a wagon instead of a sled, which conveniently had room for four extra riders. It was tremendous fun; I'm not sure I've ever wanted to do anything as much as those dogs wanted to RUN.

Happiness is a warm puppy

To get the full effect of how we responded to encountering the puppies, you should read this out loud in a singsongy baby talk voice:

There were PUPPEEZ! And we got to hold them! And smell their wittle puppy breath! And they were so soft and so sleepy and so…so…they were PUPPEEZ!

Honestly, the little girl in the pink was the most dignified person present. The rest of us just cuddled the little fur balls and crooned baby talk. The puppies handled it with quiet tolerance.

Ernie

This is Ernie, who was hanging out in his kennel while his friends were pulling the tourists around the woods.

PLEASE let me pull you somewhere!

The dogs bark and howl and jump in the traces, ready to, begging to, dying to RUN! They rotate head dog duties, which seem to consist of barking the loudest.

Iditarod

The dogs who run the Iditarod start training as soon as the weather cools off, even though there isn't any snow on the ground yet. They pull a wagon instead of a sled, and the dogs at headquarters, no doubt by coincidence, pull a wagon that has four extra seats, one of which can be yours for a mere ten dollars.

Obviously it's tourist bait, and just as obviously, I bit. We bounced along a wooded trail behind a train of barking dogs for a few minutes, and it had no business being as much fun as it was. But the dogs are so beautiful, so intense, and so joyful at getting to run, to be part of the team, that it was impossible not to catch their enthusiasm and I laughed (interspersed with coughing) during the entire ride.

(The picture is a tree decorated with the booties the dogs wear when they're actually racing.)

Wasilla

Yes, Virginia, there is a Wasilla. It's a suburb of Anchorage, and we took our first bathroom break at a convenience store there. After days in the wilderness, where there was seldom anything manmade between the road and the horizon, it was jarring to be back in the land of chain stores and strip malls.

Before we left, our peerless expedition leader, Moffatt (on the left) called a team meeting to propose a change in schedule. Jason (on the right) who, in addition to being an expert on bears and other Alaskan wildlife, raises sled dogs, had been discussing dogs with the group in his van, and several people had said they would have liked to see sled dogs while we were in Alaska. As it turned out, there was such a place, right there in Wasilla.

Going there would mean getting to our next hotel late, and cutting short our planned afternoon hike, but the vote -- no surprise -- was unanimous for the dogs. (Moffatt joked that this meant we wouldn't be able to drive by Sarah Palin's house, but we picked the dogs anyway.)