Life as a sled dog guide is sometimes full of surprises. You sometimes have to face unplanned situations that will shake you up and rise your adrenaline levels to the maximum...
Today, I had what we call an airport transfer. We take guests on a big sled, from the airport to the Ice Hotel. It is about an hour journey, sometimes with a stop for lunch. I had never done that particular trip and had never been on the trails at the beginning and the end of this trip. My boss had showed me the trails I had to follow on Google Earth. I knew theoretically where to go, but when you've never seen the trail before, you don't know which corners are tricky or which parts are bumpy so you have to be extra careful when driving the sled.
Anyway, I felt a little nervous about this trip but was confident that I would manage to find my way around the trails. My guests' plane was an hour late which meant that the last part of the journey would happen in the darkness. The nervous, super organised person that I am took 3 headlamps for that trip as my super expensive and hopefully very efficient headlamp had not arrived yet. So, amongst those 3 headlamps, I should be able to find one that could lighten up my way enough so I don't miss a junction. I was prepared...
My guests finally arrived and we started our journey. The most tricky junctions were in the first half of the trip and all went well. My lead dog responded very well to me and we were heading the right way. Then we stopped for a short lunch and we finally headed for the Ice Hotel. We had to cross the river, with an other important junction where I had to go right to make sure that I was going through a tunnel. Going the wrong way would have forced me to cross a fairly busy road leading to the Ice Hotel, so it was quite important for me not to miss that junction. After a few minutes, that seemed endless to me, I finally saw the junction and told my lead dog to turn right as planned. She executed herself perfectly and my heart felt relieved as I came out of the tunnel. Most of the journey was over and we probably only had 10 minutes left before reaching the Ice Hotel.
But, all of a sudden, in a very sharp corner, my sled went over a stone and tipped on the right side. Although we were going at a fairly slow speed, it happened so fast that I was unable to do anything to avoid it. My guests fell on the right side too in front of me and I was unable to hold on to the sled which is THE RULE NUMBER 1 for any musher. I got up in a blink of an eye and started running after the team which kept running away. I screamed my lead dog's name with the command to stop but no voice command can really stop 10 dogs on the loose. I ran and ran and screamed and screamed but quickly, the sled disappeared in the forest, leaving my guests and I behind. Then I rang my boss and told him what happened. The call was brief and after hanging up, I knew that a rescue operation was already underway. Lots of things can happen to a loose dog team but I knew that they were running towards the Ice Hotel and that if someone was there in time, they could try to catch them and stop them.
As thoughts were rushing through my head on how things happened and how things could turn bad, I checked if my guests were ok. Most of the time, people falling off a sled are just a little bruised and a little shocked. They were both unhurt and in a fairly good spirit. I apologised to them for what just happened and offered them either to wait for a rescue car or try to walk to the Ice Hotel which was about 2 km away. They chose to walk to stay warm.
As we were walking on the trail by the side of a road, I heard a car beeping. It was my boss. We walked up the ditch separating the trail from the road and jumped into his car. After confirming where I lost the team, he called my colleague who was supposed to be waiting for me on the river by the Ice Hotel and told her that my lose team was heading towards her. As they spoke, my colleague confirmed that she could see a team running towards her and she hanged up the phone to be able to catch it.
A couple of minutes later, she called back to confirm that she had managed to stop the team! We arrived just a couple of minutes later and we drove on the river. I jumped off the car and ran to help her as the team had tangled up around the sled. After a few minutes, everything was back in order, my guests had been taken care of as I was busy with the dogs, the dogs got untangled and loaded back into the truck and as we were driving back to the kennel, I felt my whole body melting with relief...
No comments:
Post a Comment