Mushing Club at Michigan Tech Vice President Brynn Santi having fun with the Alaskan Husky Storm while caring for the dogs at Otter River Sled Dog Training Center and Wilderness Adventures. (Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette)

HOUGHTON — The various clubs and interest groups at Michigan Tech have begun their debut events to invite new and interested students into their folds, and the Mushing Club at Michigan Tech started with their canine athletes pulling new students on wheels. On Friday evening, the club hosted their opening event of the school year, the Dryland Dog Demo at the Michigan Tech Trails. The event was put on to get people interested in the dogsled sports and to teach simple and beginner mushing information with an introduction to dryland dog sports before the winter brings dogsled racing.

“What I try to teach people is that we don’t have to own a kennel to mush,” President of the Mushing Club at Michigan Tech Ben Amat said. “We have some club members that own their own dogs and they mush them individually. But we’re just trying to be accessible to other people and teach this really unique way of life that’s been going on for 2,000 years.”

The Dryland Dog Demo took place in warmer weather than what is preferred, so the club had brought extra dogs to continuously rotate so none of the dogs would become overheated. After Amat had given a demonstration of how to place a harness on a dog, he went over basic mushing terms utilized during a mush and then gave a demonstration of bikejoring. Amat had attached a strap from the dog harness to his mountain bike, and then after giving the dog Triton the command to go, Triton began pulling Amat. They rode up and down a path on the Tech Trails for 10 or so yards then came back to offer new students to try it themselves.  

All the new students were given the opportunity to try it for a short distance at first, and then once everyone had been pulled for the first time the club expanded the distance for the newcomers and their canine athletes. Dryland events use less dogs which are are usually one or two compared to the winter events which use at least six dogs on a sled. Typically these events are for sprinting where dogs will usually run at 20 miles an hour where as the winter sled events run the dogs at an average of 10 miles per hour. At the demo, the students were having the dogs run around 5 miles per hour due to the temperature and inexperience of the students. Some students tried out bikejoring, while others gave scooterjoring a shot on a scooter. After some time during the demo, Amat demonstrated canicross to the students which is running cross country with a dog while attached to the canine athlete at the hip with a similar strap used in bikejoring and scooterjoring.

One of the new club members, Sarah Pratt, is from Colorado and breeds Alaskan Malamutes. She had joined the club to continue training while away from home and studying at Michigan Tech. She selected the college due to the cold climate of the Keweenaw Peninsula and the ability to join the club. While Pratt has never competed in dogsled sports, she is looking forward to seeing what the Mushing Club at Michigan Tech can teach her and Friday’s event excited her after bikejoring and scooterjoring with her partnered canine athlete Runty.

“It was amazing and a thrill,” she said. “I biked dogs lots of times but never on a scooter.”

Since most college students cannot afford an entire dogsled team and do not have the resources to care for a pet while pursuing academics, the club has partnered with a kennel. The dogs that were brought to the event were members of Tom Bauer’s Otter River Sled Dog Training Center and Wilderness Adventures kennel. Bauer’s canine athletes are Alaskan Huskies, which are dogs that were being bred about 300 years ago to become ideal for dogsledding. They are leaner than Siberian Huskies and have shorter and more abrasive fur coats with a passion for athletic activities. While what much of the Alaskan Huskies do is from instinct, the bond a musher and dogs form can enhance the performance in the sport. This is why club members often volunteer their time to help Bauer care for the dogs at his kennel.

The next day, the new club members went to the kennel to clean up after the dogs and to spend time playing with them. The new members learned more about how to care for canine athletes when not on the trails.

“Regularly caring for the dogs is a really important feature of the mushing club,” Bauer said. “They have instituted a policy where they earn the right to run sled dogs by taking care of them first which is an important facet of mushers because the people who take care of their dogs the best do the best in the field of dogsled racing, touring or anything. So it’s very important to me for them to take that up as their first and most important initiative is caring for the dogs.”

Bauer has been partnered with the club since it was first founded in the mid 2010s and has been impressed with the care and love that the club has shown towards his animals. He is very happy to introduce his canine athletes to newcomers and is always happy to see the new faces at the beginning of each school year for Michigan Tech.

Amat has said that he believes that this club is very important to the local area due to it being the only colligate mushing club in the country after the disbandment of Northern Michigan University’s club.

“This makes it unique to Tech and it’s pretty cultured up here in the U.P. as well,” Amat said. “I’d say just try it out. You don’t get a whole lot of opportunities to do this kind of stuff especially if you’re a college student when you have all this free time.”

The next major event the Mushing Club at Michigan Tech will participate in is the UP200 Dryland Dash at Negaunee Township Park on Oct. 12 and 13 at 9 a.m. The competition will consist of races for wheeled rigs, scooters, bikes and canicross with dog teams on a two mile loop.