Dog Driver is for anyone interested in sled dog training for recreational sledding, racing, or working. Based on personal sled dog experience in both racing and working sled dog teams, Miki and Julie Collins explain everything you need to know to select, raise, train and care for sled dogs, dog sledding equipment and even clothing. Learn to read and understand your dogs, as well as how to take care of injuries on and off the trail. You won't be stranded out on the trail if you study their advice on repairing harnesses and sleds. Plus, in Dog Driver, you'll get all the latest sled dog facts, know what it is really like to own mushing dogs and just what it takes to be among the top Iditarod dogs. Follow Miki and Julie through thousands of wilderness miles as they run their working sled dog teams to check on trap lines and deliver freight during the winter in the heart of Alaska.

The Iditarod may be the only race that awards a prize for last place. But then how many people can even complete a course that ranges across 1,000 miles of Alaska's ice fields, mountains, and canyons at temperatures that sometimes plunges to 100 degrees below zero? In conditions like these, anything can go wrong. For Brian Patrick O'Donoghue, nearly everything did. In My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian, his reporter and intrepid novice musher tells what happened when he entered the 1991 Iditarod, along with seventeen sled dogs with names like Harley, Screech, and Rainy, his sexually confused lead dog. O'Donoghue braved snowstorms and sickening wipeouts, endured the contempt of more experienced racers (one of whom was daft enough to use poodles), and rode herd of four-legged companions who would rather be fighting or having sex. It's all here, narrated with self-deprecating wit, in a true story of heroism, cussedness and astonishing dumb luck.

"Way up North, in the vast, frozen, and pristine Wilderness, a small town called Portage Falls adopts a world class dogsled race in an effort to pull itself away from the edge of bankdruptcy. William McClarty, a genial used car lot owner, blessed with a generous gift of blarney, wins valuable mining claims in a poker game. The luck of the Irish deserts McClarty in his efforts to parley his poker winnings into millions. Instead, he is caught up in a web of intrigue that makes him a murder suspect. The grand finale plays out during the last stretch of the dogsled race in extremely challenging winter conditions in the breathtaking beauty of the unspoiled Northern Wilderness. "

Jim Lanier had a good life going: a great family, a successful pathologist, a sometimes singer. Then he went to the dogs, ran the Iditarod in 1979, and has never recovered. With that ‘79 race as the book’s backbone, Jim tells its tale—entertaining, exciting, occasionally informative, and mostly the truth. From the bustle of metropolitan Anchorage to Front Street in Nome, it’s no how to do. If anything, it’s a how not to—how not to prepare, how not to train, how not to run. On the other hand, it’s how not to give in to the urge to quit when the going gets tough, in life and in this metaphorical Iditarod.

A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman reclaiming her courage in the stark landscapes of the north. By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen, she had left her home in California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a “tough girl”—a young woman who confronts danger without apology—she slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Braverman’s adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings, Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled, or be attacked by a polar bear, or get lost on the tundra. Above all, she worried that, unlike the other, gutsier people alongside her, she wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt, one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood, Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define her—and so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Assured, honest, and lyrical, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube paints a powerful portrait of self-reliance in the face of extraordinary circumstance. Braverman endures physical exhaustion, survives being buried alive in an ice cave, and drives her dogs through a whiteout blizzard to escape crooked police. Through it all, she grapples with love and violence—navigating a grievous relationship with a fellow musher, and adapting to the expectations of her Norwegian neighbors—as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land. Weaving fast-paced adventure writing and ethnographic journalism with elegantly wrought reflections on identity, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of Braverman’s journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.

This book was published many years ago in Germany. With more than 10000 sold copies it was unexpected succesful. Now for the first time in English. Fully coloured, with lots of illustrations and up to date. It is not only the novice musher, who wants to learn more, it is the sleddog tourist as well, who wants to know more about this complex sport with its canine athletes.Whirling snow between gliding runners, powered forward by a relentless urge. Panting they lope along the sinuous trail, the deeply snow-covered scenery passes by. A feeling like flying, ecstasy - the fascination of the sleddog sport!The sleddogsport is not always percieved this way, but it holds a geat fascination: the unity of human and animal. Anyone, who has ever experienced this feeling, will never forget it. You may say this sport is not for you, because I live in the wrong region of the world. But it is not only Alaska, Greenland and Siberia where you can practice this sport. You can do it everywhere in the world. If you can not find snow, then take the cart. It does not matter riding on snow or mud, the fascination remains, being on the road with the team of human and dog.In many places it is certainly not easy to keep more than one dog, but often there is another musher close by. You need nothing except the love for animals to start practicing this sport.This booklet cannot cover all aspects of this sport, as it is much too complex. Instead I want to give an overview of sleddog breeding, the techniques of working with an enthusiastic sleddogteam and how to take care of these fascinating animals.It is not the intention of this book to show you how to make a sleddog out of any dog. It is remarkable, that 99% of all sleddogbreedings run and pull without ever having done it before.But every Musher (french: march�r - to run) should know more about this sport than just standing on the runners. You should know how to steer a sled, how to feed the dogs, how to take care of their health and how to solve problems on the trail. This book will begin to teach you the basics, I hope.

Perform this script about a family who moves from Maine to Alaska to fulfill its dream of participating in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race