Wintermoon Summersun

There was a time — both not all that long ago and simultaneously several lifetimes past — where the wilderness was crucial to my soul. When I spent weeks at a time in the northwoods in the summer, and weekends in the winter, and where the peace of that place brought a tranquility and balance to my soul. When I was confident in my outdoor skills, and when I had a number of awesome, kind of hippie, feminist role models to teach me about being true to myself.

And I grew up, and moved away from that, though it was always inside of me.

SO when I tell you that my weekend dogsledding at WintermoonSummersun was transformative, that’s what I mean.

It’s true that dogsledding has not always been a “bucket list” item, and that when we pulled into the dog yard and saw the thirty-some dogs, each with their own house and name and area, that I was immediately smitten with all of it. When we learned how to take care of them, and when the dogs got to know us, it was an incredible sense of partnership and acceptance. 

And the dogsledding itself was amazing and fantastic and I want to do it all the time. Not just for the joy of the actual run, but for the chaos of setting it up, of working out the team dynamics, and harnessing the dogs and bringing them to the sled, and the incredible joy of them running.

But really, the dogs were only one part of the whole thing.

As important — and maybe even more so — was the environment. An off-the-grid cabin with wood stove heat and a 2-seater outhouse and a pitcher of water to wash your hands and a fantastic sauna for cleaning off. Delicious, flavorful vegetarian meals with long discussions about the world and personal journeys (maybe too long sometimes for the girls, but….). Stories. A retired sled dog and a new puppy and a feeder full of birds and two deer who came right up to the house. The house itself, moved down the road and stripped to its log interior. An abandoned barn in the woods built by Finnish immigrants a hundred years ago.

And those hikes out onto the woods, through the bog, past the beaver dam, both continuing the talks and experiencing the solitude. The joy of seeing my girl experiencing the outdoors and growing more confident, minute by minute, in it.

The people — more on that later.

The smell of wood fires and dog that permeates my clothes and I don’t want to wash them.