Tough Dog Sleds

Our dog team was out on the Bowron Chain last weekend...the Chain is actually a canoe route....an incredible canoe route, rated as among the 10 most outstanding canoeing experiences in the world...it is a natually occurring (no dams) quadrangle of lakes connected by streams, a river, marshes and portage trails....total distance about 120 km....when you paddle the Chain you end up where you started. But in the winter, paddling is pretty difficult, especially this winter.

Every year a few small groups of self-propelled (no motors) adventurers travel out on the Chain in the winter, taking advantage of the few well-placed shelter cabins and enjoying an unbeatable experience. Whenever I have been out there in the winter, I feel like I am in the middle of my own private wilderness preserve, the feeling is difficult to describe. There are several websites that talk in detail about the Bowron Chain.

When the team was out there, the sled took a real beating. This was primarily on the portage trails which are twisty, hilly and narrow. Because the canopy above them is open, the snow tends to "crown" on these narrow trails making it difficult to keep the sled on the trail....and there is blowdown, some of the trees quite large and hazardous. Remember there is no motorized traffic on this route so the wonderful packed snowmobile trails that dog mushers love simply don't exist. When others travel in on snowshoes and skis they tend to travel around the trees rather than taking the time to cut them out and remove them from the trail.

Our sled came back with lots of damage....it is a durable Tim White-style toboggan sled...made to take abuse and used primarily for training. The damage included a shattered brush bow, split stanchions, two broken aluminum braces....and it was badly twisted out of shape.....virtually all of the damage was caused by hitting trees. It brought back memories of a trip several years ago when we were only able to complete our trip out when we performed some emergency repairs to the runners (of a different sled) with two 2" x 6" boards that we located next to one of the ranger cabins that are located on the Chain.

This has caused me to think about just what it takes to produce a sled that will be able to withstand the incredible beating that they sometimes are subjected to. No-one will intentionally try to damage their sled, but the fact is that there is often no choice and sometimes the treatment that sleds are subjected to is brutal.

Perhaps the most perfect example of a dog sled that is built to withstand these kinds of conditions....a sled that is truly built for the job....is the Inuit or Eskimo komatik (quammatik)....this is an example of Inuit design and craftmanship that ideally meets the demands of the situation.

The komatik is made of two large runners, now fabricated from oak or other hardwood boards of varying length and 2" x 8" dimensions....when Wil Steger went to the North Pole in the mid 1980's, their expedition constructed komatiks made of sitka spruce, the same wood that was used to manufacture the Mosquito fighter bombers used during WWII....light, flexible and strong.

A komatik is heavy, it essentially looks like a ladder, with cross members lashed (not bolted) to the shaped runners to increase the flexibility of the finished product. It is a combination of heavy-duty materials and a construction technique that allows the wooden parts to flex and move with the terrain, thereby allowing for "give" when the sled hits pieces of ice or rocks, and thereby minimizing the opportunities for breakage. The komatik has evolved over time. We now take the use of large harwood boards for granted, but these only became available after the white man entered the arctic. There are very early examples of komatiks made of bone and it is also theorized that occasionally they would be made of frozen fish and animal hide. This is another discussion.

The komatik is essentially a large flat platform designed to move heavy and bulky loads over very unforgiving terrain...sea ice and rocky tundra. When you think of it however, that is exactly what Inuit hunters needed. Their concept of distance and destination is somewhat different from our own. When I run dogs, I always consider where I want to go and how long it will take me to get there, I always have a destination in mind.

Traditionally, an Inuit hunter carried everything he needed and maybe even everything he owned on his komatik....so the concept of "getting somewhere" took on different meaning. If the weather got bad or if the hunting was good, the hunter would simply set up shop exactly where he was...why not, he had everything he needed with him. This is also the reason why the hunter's dogs were chosen for their stamina and strength rather than their speed...there was no need to travel quickly but there was every need to be able to travel during very adverse conditions.

It is interesting to note that even today, with the regular use of snowmachines in the arctic, the komatik is still the sled-of-choice pulled behind the snowmobiles. This suggests that the design and contruction methods really did work.

So why aren't there any komatiks used in the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod? This would be a great topic to address in a future blog.