Some 100 husky mixes really like to please the guests
By Eileen Ogintz
What’s with all the yapping? They aren’t gossiping or complaining. They’re just in a big hurry to get going.
Welcome to Arctic Dog Sledding. The temperature is in the single digits and the wind is biting. The light is a winter polar gloaming (we are at 69 degrees north latitude). But like the noisy dogs, we are just excited, not complaining.
We are in the village of Breivekeidet, about 45 miles west of Tromso, the major Norwegian hub above the Arctic Circle, with about 75,000 people happily living here, though until mid-January there is no sunrise or sunset at all. It is completely dark before 3 p.m. The city is famous for viewing the Northern Lights – what virtually everyone on our Hurtigruten ship MS Trollfjord is hoping for.
“I wanted to experience the north and, of course, the highlight will be the northern lights,” said Bebe Gregory, from Melbourne Australia. She’s so enthusiastic about Norway that she’d like to return in summer for the Midnight Sun.
“This is something I really wanted to do,” said Dr. Laura Stump, a physician in her thirties from Montana who is traveling with her parents who live in Virginia, adding they “came along for the ride.”
“I love seeing animals happy,” said Pam Stump, who lives in Charlottesville, VA and, her daughter noted, hasn’t had much experience with these cold-weather activities. “This is different from their usual style of travel,” she concedes. Her parents, in their sixties and seventies, are troopers, enjoying this experience as well as last night’s strenuous evening snowshoeing through the woods.
Norwegian Travel, which runs the dogsledding excursion on a golf course about 35 miles from Tromso, has about 100 dogs here, Alaskan Huskies that are a mix of Alaskan and Siberian huskies and Malamutes.
“Our dogs need to be intelligent, friendly and strong,” said Kira Caurp, one of our Aurora Alps guides, noting that often the female dogs are the leaders. She added that the guides can tell from the time the dogs are pups if they are destined to lead, to be the “swing” dogs behind the leader, or bring up the rear.
They are yapping like crazy because they want to get going. Our three-mile sled trip is nothing for them—and they can do as many as eight such tours a day. “They don’t like rest days,” said Caurp. In summer, they play in the forest. (This camp morphs into a golf course.)
Today, it’s a course covered in snow and our seven-dog team, driven by Xabt Belio, takes us through trees with fantastic views of the Lyngen Alp Range. Who cares if we can’t feel our fingers in our gloves? The ride is exhilarating in the blue light. Our lead doggo is Nala, an eight-year-old female, and the youngest is MaiTai, who is five.
And just like humans, Belio noted, some work harder than others, pointing out one of the team who isn’t exactly pulling his weight. “He’s just pretending to be pulling,” he laughed.
We have fun petting the super-friendly pups before and after our sled ride until the cold forces us inside for a hot drink.
Hurtigruten offers many guaranteed to be memorable excursions, but Norwegian Travel also caters to those staying in Tromso. (Perhaps you want to learn to drive a dogsled or have an experience with the Sami people driving a reindeer-driven sled.)
Sometimes, though, you can choose wrong, as I did on the evening snowshoe which proved too strenuous for me as I’m still rehabbing from multiple knee surgeries. I had to turn back, accompanied by Kvetik Paulsen, one of the Adventure4Life guides. My husband Andy and our traveling companions reported that the trek in the dark was a good workout but that they couldn’t see much. LOL.
“You aren’t the first to want to turn back,” he reassured me, as we drank tea in the Galleri Uver, operated by glass artist and children’s book author Siv Johansen. She explained that her dad had built this cabin some 50 years ago as a family getaway.
“The snowshoe was a really amazing experience, the snow blowing in your face,” said Emiliono Garcia Villoa,” here with his parents and younger sister from Mexico City. The 18-Now all we need are the Northern Lights to make their appearance.