Mush or ... something...

We had a really great opportunity to go dog sledding. One of the men in the church heard that we didn't get to go dog sledding while we were in Ilulissat. He says "you haven't been to Greenland unless you have been dog sledding." So he arranged for someone to take us out. The day of the trip was absolutely perfect. No wind and absolutely crisp. It is the kind of clarity the you can only find at high altitude or in an arctic environment. Every detail of the landscape is razor sharp. As we waited for our driver some of my friends engaged in extreme disking to keep warm. This involves taking a snow saucer down a hill so steep that the slope its self is not visible until you are on the edge. You defiantly don't need a saucer but they used them. They even went off a cornice with a 15 foot drop on to a slope like that.
Our diver eventually showed up (wearing polar bear pants as all respectable drivers do) with a team of 12 dogs. They came running up with slobber-sickles hanging off their jowls super excited to be pulling a sled. Going downhill I thought we were going to overtake the dogs and going uphill the driver jumped off and the dogs chugged along. If there was a dog that was slacking the driver used his long whip to give the dog a tap on the butt. Occasionally a dog would glance back as if to ask "am I doing ok?" Sliding across the snow in near silence it seemed a very practical way to go out hunting in the old days.