Siberian husky, and owner, pay visit to students at Pond Road Middle School in Washington
By: Frank C. D’Amico
WASHINGTON Diesel is an animal perfectly designed for a cold, wintry environment.
He has black fur around its eyes, to prevent snow blindness.
He has a double coat of fur to stay warm and dry.
Perhaps his most unique feature is his webbed feet, which act like snowshoes as he tramps through snowy forests.
Diesel is a Siberian husky, a purebred trained to work as a sled dog.
Jan Haring, Diesel’s owner, brought him to the Pond Road Middle School March 1 to talk about her passion: competing in sled dog races.
Ms. Haring, who lives in Jackson, has been involved in sled dog racing for 15 years.
She has been taking her dogs to local schools for presentations for six years. Additionally, Ms. Haring routinely gives talks to Kiwanis groups, Boy Scout troops and senior citizen organizations.
Recently, she completed a race in Vermont. At Pond Road, she showed the audience of fourth-graders a videotape of one of her race exploits: a 1995 competition held in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
"It was between 50 and 80 degrees below zero there," she told the students.
Ms. Haring owns nine dogs, all of them Siberian huskies. One is retired and lives in her house. The others live in a kennel on her property.
She said she rotates "home-time" assignments with the other eight dogs. They all take turns spending time in the Haring house.
When she feels a dog is no longer interested in or capable of racing, she retires it and it moves into her house.
In the summer, when she’s not racing, Ms. Haring runs a boarding kennel.
Ms. Haring and her husband, Len, were involved in breeding show dogs before she took up sled dog racing. Ms. Haring’s brother in Colorado sent her a young Siberian husky and since that time she’s been hooked.
Now she does 10 to 15 races a year across the country.
"I’ve won a couple and I’ve lost more than I’ve won," she said. "But every race I finish, I felt like I was a winner."
Ms. Haring races teams of three or five dogs. The races are usually four or six miles long.
Diesel, who is 18 months old, is the team’s "wheel dog." The wheel dog is in the back of the team, nearest to the sled. Ms. Haring stands on the back of the sled during the races.
"The wheel dog has a pretty important job," Ms. Haring told the audience. "He keeps me from running into trees when we take sharp turns."
Some of the competitions draw a large group of participants. There were 83 teams competing in Vermont, her most recent event.
The number of dogs on a team went up to 14, she said.
During the race, sled drivers, or "mushers," have a whole language for telling the dogs which direction to take.
Ms. Haring said "gee" means right turn, "haw" means left turn, "hike" means start, "on-by" means pass another team and "whoa" means stop.
Mushers never use the term "mush" to tell the dogs to start. That is only seen in movies and cartoons, she said.
"In order to do this right, you have to go where the snow is," Ms. Haring said. However, if there isn’t snow, mushers still can compete, she said.
In New Jersey, she competes in "gig" races. A gig is an aluminum sled pulled by the dogs on a dirt track.
Ms. Haring said she now is concentrating on some mid-level races that cover between 20 and 60 miles. She said she would never attempt the ultimate sled dog race, the epic Iditarod.
The Iditarod, named after a legendary trail in Alaska used during its Gold Rush, stretches almost 1,100 miles from Nome to Seward.
"It’s incredibly grueling," she said. "People who train for it, it takes up their whole lives."
Fourth-grader Kevin Bruns has been studying the Iditarod and sled dogs for two weeks with his class.
"The Iditarod is so cold and it takes three weeks to finish," he said.
Even if Ms. Haring never enters the Iditarod, she does, at least, have a tangential connection to the famous race.
Diesel’s brother, Chiller, is now part of a team that will enter the next Iditarod.