Sorry for the Group Email

It should be stressed that I am not, per se, a natural woodsman. I quaver at the thought of leaves instead of toilet paper, and I once very nearly froze to death camping in Devon. It was Easter, you see, and…

There’s actually no excuse. So I was nervous at the thought of strapping myself to seven dogs and charging over the snow and ice, not least because of all the things we might do in the next year, it’s the only one our insurance doesn’t provide any cover for. I can see the conversation now. “Yes, Mr Stevenson. Gosh. Impaled on a tree, you say? Heavens. The log’s gone straight through your what? Yes, I suppose that does sound like an expensive procedure. And what were you doing? DOG SLEDDING? Sorry. We can’t help. I hope your parents love you.”

I’m sure my parents do love me, but even so, there’s something about dog sledding that seems unnervingly close to the wild. Someone in our group described an episode of Top Gear in which a champion dog sledder told Richard Hammond that she had to beat her dogs. If they weren’t deathly afraid of her there was the chance they’d turn on her mid-race, savaging her to death in the middle of an icy nowhere.

Southern Lake Baikal isn’t particularly known for its dog sledding. The indigenous Siberian cultures further north use it, but down south the dogs are bred for tourists and competitions. The day itself was cold by all standards except those of Siberia, dropping as low as -16 in the sunlight. I was wearing three pairs of socks, most of my t-shirts and enough thermal gear to give Ray Mears a case of the willies. It was so cold my camera started to work in fifteen-shot bursts, after which I had to remove the batteries and massage them in my pockets to get them going again.

After putting things off as long as I could, it was time. A tourist’s dog-sledding goes in two bursts. One extremely fast one, driven by an expert, with you bundled up and sat in the front of the sled. Then a slower one, with you operating the brake and standing on the back.

I was shown how to do it properly. You lean into the corners to help with the steering, and the brake is a spring-loaded set of spikes. Step on it and the spikes dig in, providing enough resistance to let the dogs know you want to stop.

We set off at an entirely sedate pace. We cruised over the thick snow and across a patch of ice that in the summer would be a busy little river. The dogs hardly seemed to be working at all and, as good as being on a dog sled in Siberia was, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Where was the wind in my hair, the icicles in my bristles? After a few minutes we swapped. At this point I should explain the tether.

The tether, we decided over a post-sled beer, is probably so that professionals aren’t abandoned by their dogs and sled if they fall off in the middle of nowhere. It secures around your midriff and hooks on the handlebar of the sled.

We were off at a terrifying pace.

We were going much, much faster than when I had been sat down. I realised my feet weren’t planted nearly firmly enough on the footplates, but realised if I adjusted them I risked upsetting my balance entirely. I gripped the handlebars as hard as I could, squeezing with all my strength and praying that the soft fleece of my gloves provided enough friction to keep me on. If I was thrown off backwards, you see, the tether might keep me on, but I’d be being dragged behind the sled, powerless to do anything but act as an anchor should my head become conveniently lodged in a tree.

We hit bumps and dips in the path, occasionally becoming momentarily airborne. My legs were bent as the instructor had shown me, and I became aware of a muscle in the back of my thigh that I had never used beginning to protest. The bumps kept coming, and my instructor sadistically encouraged the dogs onwards and faster. On every turn the sled would drift dangerously towards the side of the path, the trees coming within inches. As we thundered back the way we came we skittered over the frozen busy little brook at perhaps 25 miles per hour, sliding sideways until the rails of the sled found the snow again.

Apart from the death-defying speed, the most striking thing was the silence. I assumed I would be deafened by the howling of the dogs and the rushing of the rails over the snow. Instead, it was quiet enough to have quite a normal conversation (“I say, Vlad, jolly good fun this, what? Any chance of slowing down a bit so as to reduce to risk of paraplegia?”, and the sound of the rails on the snow and ice was a mere whisper. We returned to the dog’s home over a wide expanse of snow, with the Siberian sun setting behind the hills and turning the sky red. My arms hurt for days afterwards, but I remain convinced that, no matter what the insurance company thinks of it, dog-sledding is a must-do for those who find themselves in Listvyanka. There are a couple of companies that do it, and you can expect to pay around £25 for a twenty-minute excursion.

More pictures in the Flickr set.

Dave is painfully aware that SFTGE’s text alignment is wanky in Firefox. Can someone who knows HTML suggest a modern alternative to hspace=”10″, please?

Tags: camping in devon, competitions, excuse, lake baikal, mr stevenson, pairs, pockets, quaver, ray mears, richard hammond, Russia, shot bursts, siberia, sled, snow and ice, socks, sunlight, toilet paper, top gear, willies, woodsman