Dog-sledding!

For Stephen's Christmas present I bought us a half-day dog sledding tour, and the big day was Wednesday.  The dog sledding place was about 250km north, so we hired a car through our car sharing service and left at 9am from Toronto, aiming to get there well ahead of our 1:30pm booking.  Unfortunately for us, it snowed overnight...

... so we arrived to this.

Hooray, all fixed!  Unfortunately, the roads were covered in snow, and the ploughs hadn't been yet - it took us two hours to get to the freeway, which was around 6km away.  Ouch.  We eventually made it to the sled place at 1:45pm, and being as we were the only people booked that afternoon, all was good!  Lucky!

We had a quick tutorial in the basics of sledding - how to get them to move, how to get them to stop, the golden rule of sledding (never let go of your sled), and when to brake.  They harnessed up the dogs while we held the lead dogs in place - unfortunately for me, the lead dog of the other team decided that my leg resembled a tree, so my introduction to sledding involved being peed on.  Lovely.  (I imagine that Jax was really unhappy when we arrived home, smelling like other dogs and with dog pee on my leg.)

With that, we were away!  And it was incredibly cool!  We drove our own sled the entire time - one of us driving and one sitting on the sled as a passenger.

Here's a video of us sledding across a frozen lake:

Apparently they check for the ice to be 20cm thick, and then it's fine to drive a sled on.

Break time!  It was freezing cold out there - my fingers and toes were going numb - but every time we stopped, the dogs would roll around in the snow to cool down.

We had plenty of interaction with the dogs - they were absolutely beautiful :)

Here's the sled - it's basically just a couple of bits of wood with a thin mattress to sit on.  There's a brake at the back that you step on to slow the sled down, and it basically just digs into the ground.  The only problem was, sometimes we would put our entire weight on it and the sled would keep moving - those dogs have some serious pulling power.

Posing for photos with our team :)

On the trail with our team, heading home.  The dogs seriously loved to run - like I said above, sometimes the brake didn't work to stop them.  When we stopped for breaks, and they'd finished rolling in the snow, they'd jump up into the air and throw themselves forward into their harnesses, trying to get us to move again.

Run over!  Time for some water :)

We had a much faster drive back to Toronto, making it back in 3 hours.  It was a fantastic day, and we had great fun :)