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Symposium looks at evolution of mushing

May 25, 2015 | 5:49 PM

The first International Mushing Symposium in 15 years brought out people who have seen a lifetime worth of change in the sport.

Stefaan De Marie, member of the Canadian Challenge and Ma-Mow-We-Tak as well as co-owner of Akela’s Den Sled Dog Supplies, decided it was about time they put on a “proper symposium” in Western Canada.

“I felt it was time and money was available to bring, you know, a couple of speakers out,” he said.

The three-day event in Prince Albert saw around 40 mushers from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta in attendance.

“It was a little bit of a challenge.  We combined it with our Ma-Mow-We-Tak AGM, that’s usually always happening somewhere in May, so I thought that would work good. You know, later at looking at it I think it would have been better … if it would have been September,” he said.  “After the racing season they just want to have a little break and have nothing to do really with the mushing.”

Two speakers were brought in to share their knowledge—Ed Hopkins and Tim White.

Hopkins, who came in from just outside Whitehorse, has run the Yukon Quest several times. He came in third in 2015.  He has picked up various awards along the way including the Percy De Wolfe Sportsmanship Award, the Humane Society Award, and the Vet’s Choice Award.

White, who’s been in the mushing world since about 1970, recalled sled dog racing around Prince Albert around 40 years ago.

“One of the sponsors, Molson, they’d have a dinner and a draw before the race at the brewery here and they’d load us up with cases of free beer.  [They’d] come by during the weekend with a pickup truck filled up with cases of beer and they’d drive around to motels in town and stop off when they’d see a dog truck and said ‘here do you need anymore?’”

He said racing has changed in various ways since then.  White remembered he used to be able to get 100 free frozen fish when he raced.

 “I was probably one of the last mushers to ask for it and the fisheries guy said ‘well we didn’t think mushers wanted fish anymore.’  I said ‘well you still offer it and I’m still feeding fish, so I want some.’”

“You can say differences of degrees,” he said.

“We’re still running dogs, we still have sleds.  The sleds are much more high-tech plastic and aluminum and the dogs really have improved a huge amount.  I think since the mid-70s there have been a lot of better breeding that probably came down and started in Alaska where they have been more competitive in certain styles of racing.”

White said he has always loved winter sports—something he would do with his dad often growing up.

However it was the radio program Challenge of the Yukon with Sgt. Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his wonder sled dog King that hooked him into sled dog race.  The program followed the two as they worked to bring law and order to the Gold Rush country of the 1890s Yukon Territory.

“At age five or six I would listen to that and I think a lot of people had similar experiences of dreaming about the gold rush, reading Jack London and Robert Service and Call of the Wild and that was one of the most exciting parts about it to a kid,” he said.

White stopped racing around 2005.

“But I still have a few sled dogs.   I wish I could still race them, but there was a period when I had some health problems and then one my dogs tripped me and I fell and broke my hip and I was stiff then I couldn’t very well stand on a sled or train a team,” he said.

White makes contributions to sled dog racing

Throughout White’s lifetime he has witnessed and been a part of technological changes in sled dog racing.

He said in In the 1970s sleds were made of wood and rawhide—something he said was inefficient in certain conditions.

“When I run the Iditarod in 1974 I saw problems with sleds breaking and smashing and in some snow conditions the sleds dragged so bad you might as well have put chains around the runners.  So in the next few years I started experimenting with things and came up with some better sled designs that use plastic and aluminum,” he explained.

In the early 1980s he said he developed and patented a system for a Quick Change Runner (QCR), so that mushers could slide the plastic on and off the runner in a couple of minutes.

He said the drive behind the invention for him was to give the mushers more time to spend on their dogs during a race as opposed to fixing up their sleds.

Hopkins, who also spoke at the event said it was “really cool to meet” White.

“His name is often mentioned in every sled dog book but just the knowledge and what he invented,” Hopkins said, using the QCR as an example.

“A lot of people do not realize what he’s done for the sport.”

In addition, White was the first musher to use the modern-day toboggan sled, which has low runners and plastic bottom.

sstone@panow.com

On Twitter: @sarahstone84