A Dog Sledding Adventure in Norway

The noise builds slowly.

It starts at the rudimentary doghouses lined up, more or less, in an open field of snow as far as the eye can see. Shelters for each canine are constructed with simple plywood sides and shingled roofs, side by side. I stopped counting at 50.

The Sami, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, have eight different words for snow, and there are at least five times as many sounds currently emanating from the huskies. Whines, yips, chirps, some sound like petulant humans while others make you think someone’s pulling their toenails out.

A Dog Sledding Virgin

In early March, I went dog sledding for the first time with BIRK Husky, where we were so far north in Norway that we could see the Russian border: 69° north 30° east, to be precise.

The dogs were all huskies, but the Norwegian breed is different from its American counterpart. For one, they’re pretty scrawny. I was skeptical. Do six of these furballs actually have enough collective strength to pull two inexperienced humans?

Turns out they do, and then some. In fact, they run so much that they’re not bulked up like their couch-potato relatives back in the States. And novices shouldn’t worry. The dogs know what they're doing; after all, it's in their bones. All you have to do is occasionally steer, brake, and enjoy the ride, whether you’re wrapped in reindeer skin reclining in the sleigh or standing atop the runners and watching the show.

Aural Chaos

Before we headed out on trails through the Arctic forest assisted by the faintest glimmer of moonlight, there was that noise. Guests and instructors pitched in to link 36 dogs to six sleighs and once the canines saw the first harness come out, there was a nervous yip or two. A few more dogs were chosen as the instructors assessed the relative strengths and weaknesses of each dog — including determining which male dogs were too alpha and which females happened to be in heat — and the scene soon morphed into the opposite of every unathletic junior-high student’s gym nightmare:

Pick me! Pick me!

Dogs — hitched and non-hitched — were in constant motion: jumping, twirling, biting their harnesses and the dog next to them, yanking, straining, impatient to do what they were born to do:

Run.

Before the last dog was hitched up, things got so crazy and loud that I forgot about my numb fingers and feet that had already turned into blocks of ice despite the insulated boots and two pairs of socks: the commotion of dogs eager to just RUN drowned out all conscious thought. The cacophony reached its apex when 35 dogs were hitched to sleighs and one spot was left.

Then, once the final dog was chosen, a curious thing happened: with the first step, all noise ceased.

I mean, complete and utter silence, save for the squeak of the sleigh’s wooden frame, the swish of the runners, the rustle of the pines, and the occasional grunt of the human in the sled as the dogs’ determination to just move — oblivious to the occasional bump and sudden drop-offs on the trail — resulted in sleds being in midair every minute or so. These sleds don’t come with shock absorbers. Woe be to the passenger with back problems or weak kidneys.

And, We’re Off!

Once we got our bearings, things turned peaceful, almost like a meditation. Since we were mushing (translation: sledding) at night, all the drivers wore headlamps. At each stop, it was eerie to look back at the team of dogs behind me and see six pairs of glowing eyes, each a slightly different color: some white, some green, some blue.

We spent a half-hour driving or sitting before switching off with our partners. The irony is that being a driver made for fewer shivers than riding in the sled. At least your feet moved to hit one of two brakes: a soft brake between the runners that often proved futile and an emergency brake that did the trick if the dogs caught a scent off the trail.

This being March, the icing on the cake was that as we headed back to the lodge, the Northern Lights came out to play. A guide told us that the dogs were inured to the phenomenon of greenish lights dancing in the sky like a curtain rippling in the wind, but for the humans who had never experienced it, well, what can I say? We acted like a bunch of dogs, jumping off the sleds and pitching onto our backs in the snow to get a better view.

After we tore ourselves away from the Lights, we trooped into an authentically reconstructed Viking longhouse on the property, where Trine Elisabeth Danielsen Beddari, the owner of BIRK Husky as well as a Sami, served dinner. Norwegian cuisine relies on hearty seafood and reindeer dishes, often accompanied by seasoned cream sauces, and you absolutely need to clean your plate at every meal to keep the shivers at bay this far north. We dined on hot red king crab soup, reindeer stew and cloudberry cream, a parfait with these native tart berries in front of an open fire pit.

After dinner, the Lights entertained us for the rest of the evening.

Dogsledding 101

Here are a few places to get you started:

Photo by billadler via Flickr, photo by Hurtigruten USA, photo by Hurtigruten USA.