A warm welcome to Petra & Gabriel! They were here already last summer, together with their 8 dogs, and now they left Austria for a while and moved up here to be part of the team. Their dogs Akira, Diego, Cyclon, Terence, Paxson, Zassi, Yogi and Beanie settle in the Old kennels at the moment and already train regularly with the B-Dogs. Looking forward to a long cooperation with those 10!
The first ice and a tiny layer of snow is with us since a few days. Last night it reachhed almost the 2-digits minus. Hopefully a bright start to an early winter! First it should freeze, then we take more snow! All the rainfalls from the days before made the ground so wet that we really appreciate a few cold days, what makes everything dry out and much nicer to train on. The dogs are so much more motivated in cold dry weather, training them is really fun now!
Less fun is actually seeing how much trees are logged in the area around us. The forest government seems to take out as much as they can, truck after truck, before the forest roads are covered with snow again. Some trail parts look completely different when they move further, covered wth branches or broken soil because of the bagger prints. We will have to remake some trails before using them in winter with sleds! Really sad to see, but that's how it goes. One of those huge cuttng-machines needs only 48 seconds to cut a tree of 30 - 40 years age, take off the branches and cut the tree in 3m pieces to lay it on the ground for the next machine. The next one collects all those tree parts and brings them to the road to prepare the piles for the truck. They work from 6am to 23pm!
We found a new house, facing the river, which we can use for our dog tours. We will test it first time in week 47, when we have 5 guests for the Workshop here - if they agree! The beautiful location facing the river Jongunjoki, lonely, nice sauna and a lot of space for the dogs, makes it ideal to be used later on also for the week programs. Curious to see and hear, how our guests like it!