Sled dog racing season is officially underway in the NWT.
The season kicked off on Dec. 28-29 with the annual Deh Gah Sprint Sled Dog Races in Fort Providence.
There were plenty of familiar faces on the trail, according to organizer Susan Fleck, and some new four-legged participants too.
“The first race [of the season] is always fun because when you’re training dogs it’s often lonely,” she said several days after the event, which is in its 12th year. “There’s not too many other people doing it, so you get a chance to meet each other again, you get a chance to talk dogs, and you get a chance to try out your team for the year. You try new leaders at this early race, and you can try other young dogs to see how they do in a race because they start racing when they’re one-and-a-half years old.”
The event was divided into three races: A single race for the six-dog class on Dec. 28, and a pair of races in the 10-dog class spread over both days. There were nine mushers in the former category, and eight in the latter.
Despite her duties as organizer, Fleck finished first in the six-dog class with a time of 26:40. Her husband, local mayor and racing legend Danny Beaulieu, came in first for the 10-dog class, scoring the fastest time between the two races at 54:41.
“It keeps us active,” Fleck said. “Danny turned 70 this year and I did too. It keeps us young.
“You can have a lot of fun doing it. It’s lots of work, but we’re both retired, so we need things to do.”
There was a good crowd in attendance for the event, Fleck said, with people positioning themselves along the trail to “follow their favorite racers and look to see how things are going.”
For the last few years, Fleck has also invited young volunteers from other countries to come help facilitate the races. This year, she had visitors from France and Germany lending a hand with feeding and cleaning up after the dogs, grooming the racing trail and more.
“We have puppies — they play and help train with puppies,” she said. “We teach them, and they usually get to race.
“They keep in touch with us even after they leave. Some of them have come back a couple of times because they’ve enjoyed it so much,” she added.
With the Deh Gah Sprint Sled Dog Races behind them, Fleck and Beaulieu will soon shift their focus to future racing endeavours. Their next, the Wildfire Defense Race Series in West Yellowstone, Montana, will require a bit of a commute, but the pair plan to participate in the other big races around the NWT this winter too.
Later this year, Fleck will begin planning the next edition of the Deh Gah Sprint Sled Dog Races.
She said she’s motivated to continue running the annual race in keeping with the cultural significance of the practice, particularly among Indigenous people like her husband Beaulieu, who is Chipewyan.
“Danny is from Fort Resolution,” she said. “All the communities up here have a long history of using dogs for work and for trapping, and Christmastime was the traditional time that they would hold a dog race. So it’s really part of a Northern Christmas tradition.
“Without our sponsors, it would be almost impossible to run a race,” she added. “So I just want to do a shout-out to the Hamlet of Fort Providence, Big River Services, Aurora Ford in Hay River, the NWT Dog Racing Association, and we have a few others locally and in Hay River who help us out so that we can run this race and keep the tradition going.”
