(Story By Brandon Barrett)
On Thursday, Andrew and I and Ralph Thomadsen and Barbara Barrett (along with the rest of our crew)
flew to Minnesota. We drove to Northern Tier on Friday for our Okpik dog trek. We met our interpreter Lucy. We got our cold weather gear including boots rated to -100 degrees. On Saturday we drove to the White Wilderness kennel to start our dog trek. We got more gear and learned how to harness the dogs and drive a sled. We harnessed our dogs and off we went. The dogs go really fast and we had 6 dogs to a sled. We mushed 16 miles and returned to our campsite. To sleep we had a tarp, two pads, our personal sleeping bag that we put inside a warmer sleeping bag. We dug trenches in the snow so that we would not get as much wind at night. We had a fire and dinner and then went to bed with the tarp wrapped around us to protect us from the wind.
On Saturday, we had breakfast, harnessed our dogs and spent the day mushing. We went over 40 miles.
We went over a couple of frozen lakes and stopped for lunch on a lake. We used an auger to drill a hole
in the ice and there was close to 2 feet of ice. After more mushing, we helped to put away and feed the
dogs. We then returned to our campsite. Another fire and dinner and off to bed in the snow. It got down to -33 degrees while we slept. In the morning, we cleaned up our campsite and had breakfast. We then got ready to return home but first had to have our car jumped as it would not start. On the drive back to Minneapolis we stopped along the side of the road to see a Snow Owl which was appropriate as Okpik means snowy owl in Inuit.
Troop 344 