The first part of our Christmas-Week was dominated by massive amounts of fresh snow. Every day our lead-dogs were doing a great job to re-open the trails for the sleds behind. And all the guests had to help a lot and were definitely not cold. On top of that, the temperatures were on a mild-winter-level, what made it even harder for everybody. Cabins had to be digged out, snow taken down from the roofs, scooters were in troubles. Caused by those huge amounts of new snow and because some of the ditches and swamps are not yet properly frozen, we cannot access our new cabin Aittokoski yet, but are hoping to get it ready for week 2.
The 2nd part of the week was then mostly dark... Caused by the heavy snowload on the trees, many of them were cracking and fell on electricity lines, putting big parts of North-Karelia on no-power. So we were getting water from the lake, warmed it up for the dog-feedings, the wood-sauna was used as shower-room for guests, we cooked on fire for 25 persons and dinner was served by candle light. Sadly our christmas-tree was dark as well... On our yard many trees fell as well, into the kennels and elsewhere. Luckily we had only small damages in material and no scared or even injured dogs. A great job done by the whole team and very understanding clients (some of them even loved the rare experience) made us survive those about 48 hours without problems, the longest ever power-cut in our history.
By now the electricity is back in our area, our NewYears-Guests are enjoying their day-trip and hopefully looking foreward to our evening-program and also the kitchen-crew is happy to have everything back to normal, preparing the 6-course-dinner for tonight.
Our Siberian-Girls Goa and Nella have done now their first sled-training-trips and are doing a good job at the age of only 10 months. At the beginning they were a bit too excited, then they moved into good pulling and concentrated work.
Happy New Year to Everybody!