Man's Best Friend

The last gasp of winter is a wonderful time to get outdoors and play. It’s also a great time to get yourself to do something you’ve always wanted to try, but haven’t.

My son Justin and I had a chance to get up to Eden Mountain Lodge and try skijoring, a sport I’d had my eye on all year.

Skijoring connects a Nordic skier with a sled dog (or dogs). Popular in Scandanavia and Alaska for years, the sport is now reaching the northeast.

In order to skijor, you should be able to skate ski at least a little. It takes a few minutes, longer if you haven’t already spent most of the winter on skis of one sort or another. Once you get the hang of really leaning forward and committing to the edge of the skis, you can get a lot more power into each push than you can into a traditional kick-and-glide. It’s a whole lot faster (and a whole lot more aerobic) than traditional cross-country skiing. More like running than walking. And you just float across the packed surface of the snow.

Of course for beginners, this means skating right to the edge of control. We both fell. A lot. That’s a very good reason for trying something like this in the spring when the snow is soft and forgiving.

Anyway, once we’d gotten more or less comfortable with the skate skis, we got a chance to try skijoring behind some of Jim Blair’s champion sled dogs. We harnessed ourselves up and jumped in.

Now dogs, even well-trained ones, don’t always do exactly what they are supposed to. Neither do humans, for that matter. Learning to skijor requires more than a bit of patience and good humor on the part of both man and dog.

Justin and Maple bonded instantly and had few problems. Peaberry and I, however, didn’t do quite as well. On the flat track where we first tried it, no problem. The dog pulls, you skate, and you fly. I loved it.

Then we decided to do a three-mile circuit through the woods. The trail starts out uphill. A lot of work, but no problem. Then it twists and turns its way downhill. Problem.

The crux of cross-country skiing for me is to control my speed and direction going downhill.

Difficult on regular cross-country gear.

Doubly difficult on new and unfamiliar, short, very skinny skate skis.

Impossible with a dog happily running along pulling you for all he’s worth.

Still, I survived numerous (and, admittedly, comical) falls. I left totally hooked on both skate skiing and skijoring and wishing winter would last another few months.