Scapa’s Big Ski

Yesterday I took a couple hours off work at the end of the day so we could take Scapa for a longer ski at the local cross country ski trails. We are always conscious of trying to balance her boundless energy against the advice not to run a young puppy too hard because their bones muscles and ligaments are still growing. Our plan was for a 5 km ski at a sedate pace.

Right out of the parking lot as Christopher hooked up the puppy to her harness and took the brakes off, they were off like greased lightning - uphill through a small crowd of children and other dogs and off into the sunset while I puffed and panted along behind. I eventually caught up with them a couple of kilometres down the trail when the dog had to pull over for a bathroom break. There aren’t a lot of photos because we were both very conscious of this being her first longer ski when there would be people on the trails that we would need to pass with kids and dogs and sleds and I’ll kinds of fun things. It was the people passing us that were the most difficult. Especially the skate skiers who are quite fast. Like our last dog, Scapa thinks she needs faster owners. So she took off after a couple skate skiers when we didn’t have her fully under control. All in all I think it went very well. She was still full of energy by the time we get back to the car so we don’t feel like it was too long of a ski. Conditions were really really fast. After skis at -30, a ski at -3 feels amazing. We were able to ski comfortably with just one pair of longjohns and a sweater on.

This is us stopping at a halfway point. As part of the teaching process trying to get young Scaper to understand that not all dogs need to be greeted.