Huskie high: Dog sledding

The huskies bark and strain at their lines, and Dawn Lanning feathers the brakes until the lines are tight. "Let's go!" she shouts, and the sled lurches forward.

We're going about 20 miles per hour, Lanning says, and snow flies up behind the now quiet dogs. They soon settle into about half that pace as they race through the pines.

"Go gee!" Lanning yells, and lead dogs Diesel and Yukon veer to the right.

"It's slow running on this kind of stuff," she says. The snow on the Byllesby Park trail is sticky in the 40-degree temperatures. Still, though February marks the end of dogsled season, Lanning will get in a couple more events before the season ends, including the upcoming Ritterfest next weekend in Lakeville.

A full-time process engineer at a circuit manufacturer by night, Lanning also runs HHH (Hastings Huskies and Horses) Ranch, a 61-acre spread where she spends summers boarding horses and hosting trail rides and winters dog sledding and educating groups about her huskies.

"Sleep's overrated," she says.

Lanning started with a couple of sled dogs and eventually had a team, so she tried to teach herself to mush.

She hooked up with the southern Minnesota sled dog group, even though it sometimes meant driving two hours south for a 20-minute run. "Just running with a group of people was very helpful," she says. "They knew what they were doing. That helps so much."

Friends and family started asking her to adopt their huskies, and now she has 37. "Their downfall is that they're so pretty," she says. However, she says, they dig, shed like mad, kill cats and are "great escape artists."

Her Siberians don't race. "These guys are way too slow for the racing world," she says, adding that people call them "Slow-berians." (Most racers are Alaskan huskies.)

Still, she's plenty busy. She takes private groups on moonlit rides. She trains Scout troops. She educates school groups about the dogs' winter adaptations, such as how they can work hard in tough conditions with little food, or how they curl up and bury their noses in their tails to stay warm.

And mushing proves ever eventful. Lanning remembers once when a mukluk came untied and, as she stooped to tie it, the team flew off without her. She stuck her thumb out and bummed a ride from a passing snowmobiler. Once they caught up with the team, she had to leap from the snowmobile onto the sled.

When Lanning pulls the dog truck up to a metal building with a sign that reads "Dogsled parking only," the dogs go wild. It is time for nightly chores. Steve Bishop, her "other half," a seasonal truck driver who helps out with the dogs, pulls open a gate.

"Handlers are the forgotten heroes of the mushing world," Lanning says. "I wouldn't be able to do it myself."

Laura Smith, a handler and the barn manager, lives on the ranch. "I came with the intent of helping out with the horses, and I got hooked on the dogs," she says.

Though Smith fell off a sled on her first run ("It's a lot of fun when you can stay on," she jokes), she now loves it and recently went on her first moonlit ride.

"It was nice and dark, but the stars were real bright," she says. "It was really pretty. It's so peaceful."