Dogsledding in Minnesota

By GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO

updated 3:15 p.m. ET Dec. 27, 2005

ELY, Minn. - The immense vault of cobalt sky shimmered with the thousands of stars you can see only when the closest city is five hours away. Swirls of powdery snow chased one another over the frozen lake, and the lanky spruce trees along the shore turned bluish in the last afterglow of dusk.

Four Canadian Inuit dogs panted as they pulled a sled swooshing in the distance - too much distance, I suddenly realized, shaking myself from my reveries and breaking into a run to catch up.

Those dogs were pulling the sled that I had been on - until I fell through the ice. I was on a dogsledding trip in January in Minnesota's Boundary Waters wilderness on the Ontario border; the temperature was 3 degrees, not counting the wind chill. We'd been getting off the sleds to pull them over beaver dams, then jumping back on, when the sled I jumped on broke through the ice.

A guide and my companion pulled me up, but my boots filled with water. Now I was running behind the sled - as I'd been ordered to - as a way to prevent frostbite in my feet.

Although our excursion with Wintergreen Dogsledding had ended up as a Jack London-style adventure for survival - for my toes, at least - it hadn't started out that way. The company's founder, Paul Schurke, a polar explorer and wilderness activist, says his mushing trips are for anybody "ages 7 to 70."

So a day outing seemed like the perfect way to insert moderate adventure into a typical northern Minnesota vacation. A few friends and I had just spent four days cross-country skiing and snowshoeing by day and, by night, interspersing Finnish saunas with invigorating dips into the square hole neatly cut in the frozen lake in front of our cabin.

A deceptively summery sun sparkled on the unbroken whiteness of the landscape as my friend Alessandro and I drove to Wintergreen Lodge the day of our dogsledding trip. The snow-covered roads crackled as we drove the last few miles past the small town of Ely.

Any qualms we had about mushing our own team of wildly howling dogs dissipated when we met them - four tail-wagging beauties moored with their sled on long White Iron Lake. Thule, the team leader, would be pulling alongside her puppy.

The five dozen dogs at Wintergreen are all pure-bred Inuit, the original breed of arctic dog. (The breed, recognized by the Canadian Kennel Club, is also called the Canadian Eskimo dog.) Shunned by most commercial outfitters, they are the choice of both polar indigenous peoples and explorers, the "Sherman tanks" of the mushing world, said our guide, Mike Anderson. They can pull more than double their average weight of 80 pounds and are built for distance rather than speed, doing about 6-8 mph on compact snow.

Standing on a small platform on the back of the sleek sled, we'd lead them with our voices - "hike" to move, "whoa" to stop, "slow" or a gentle foot down on the brake behind us if they were speeding.

"Just make sure they don't run me over" was Anderson's last instruction before he set out on skis and our team rushed after him, snaking along the lake's rocky shores.

For a couple of uneventful hours, our only care was to soak in the silent beauty of fir branches frosted like gingerbread and the snow dunes constantly reshaped by a low wind.

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